iPhone Design: Documents From the Samsung Trial Reveal More Than Ever About Apple’s Secretive Design Process.
Like many of Apple’s inventions, the iPhone began not with a vision, but with a problem. By 2005, the iPod had eclipsed the Mac as Apple’s largest source of revenue, but the music player that rescued Apple from the brink now faced a looming threat: The cellphone. Everyone carried a phone, and if phone companies figured out a way to make playing music easy and fun, “that could render the iPod unnecessary,” Steve Jobs once warned Apple’s board, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography.
Fortunately for Apple, most phones on the market sucked. Jobs and other Apple executives would grouse about their phones all the time. The simplest phones didn’t do much other than make calls, and the more functions you added to phones, the more complicated they were to use. In particular, phones “weren’t any good as entertainment devices,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s longtime marketing chief, testified during the company’s patent trial with Samsung. Getting music and video on 2005-era phones was too difficult, and if you managed that, getting the device to actually play your stuff was a joyless trudge through numerous screens and menus.
That was because most phones were hobbled by a basic problem—they didn’t have a good method for input. Hard keys (like the ones on the BlackBerry) worked for typing, but they were terrible for navigation. In theory, phones with touchscreens could do a lot more, but in reality they were also a pain to use. Touchscreens of the era couldn’t detect finger presses—they needed a stylus, and the only way to use a stylus was with two hands (one to hold the phone and one to hold the stylus). Nobody wanted a music player that required two-handed operation.