



That history is on my mind the second time I meet with Tony, this time at the Gansevoort Park Avenue in New York so we can shoot photos and video. He’s somber as we chat about Steve Jobs, who has recently passed away. "If it wasn’t for Steve my wife and I would have never met. We met at Apple, we met because of Steve. He showed up on our first date." Tony’s been out of Apple for two years now, but it’s clear the loss has affected him. "He was a very very human person."

I ask him about the iPod, and how it grew into Apple’s empire of digital devices. Tony insists that there was no premeditation. "It was one foot in front of the other... We were finding our way as we went. There was no grand master plan. But to make fast iterations you had to build on a platform that you weren’t throwing away all the time." As each subsequent generation of chips matured, Tony and his team added features to the iPod: first photos and a color screen, and then video.

The obvious followup question is whether Nest might someday become a home-control platform as ubiquitous and powerful as the iPhone, and Fadell doesn’t shy away from the implication, even though he knows he won’t be selling people a new version of their thermostat every year, and Nest doesn’t currently integrate with popular home-automation systems like Control4. "There’s not just other hardware products, but there are services. The iPhone is new because you have new applications and new ways of doing things. It’s not just hardware upgrades all the time. There could be software and services that keep the product alive and evergreen for you."

One set of planned service updates sounds particularly intriguing; since Nest is already tracking how much energy you’re using (and saving), it’s just a quick hop to letting you share that information with other people — and compete with them. Social networking to save the earth.