And Then Steve Said, Let There Be an iPhone

Its hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone something Apple had never made before he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldnt go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldnt play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called the golden path, a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked. But even when Jobs stayed on the golden path, all manner of last-minute workarounds were required to make the iPhone functional. On announcement day, the software that ran Grignons radios still had bugs. So, too, did the software that managed the iPhones memory. And no one knew whether the extra electronics Jobs demanded the demo phones include would make these problems worse.