Apple's chief design officer Jony Ive Mike Windle / Getty

In 2003, Apple was working on new types of inputs for the Mac. The plan was to get rid of the mouse and keyboard, and the team began to experiment with multitouch — rotating and zooming on-screen with a few careful flicks of the finger. One of the first prototypes of a finger-controlled tablet was known as Model 035, a large white tablet that looked something like a clunky precursor to the iPad. But at the same time, the mobile phone race began to take over and Apple made an important decision to change direction, that would revolutionise phones forever. The following is an extract from Cult of Mac editor Leander Kahney’s book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products.


While Jony’s team worked on several tablet prototypes, Apple’s executives were worrying about the iPod. It was flying high: Apple sold two million in 2003, ten million in 2004, and forty million in 2005. But it was becoming clear that the mobile phone would one day supersede the iPod. Most people were carrying around both an iPod and a cellphone. At that stage, cellphones could store a few tunes, but it was becoming clear that, sooner rather than later, someone, perhaps a competitor, would combine the two devices.

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In 2005, Apple teamed up with Motorola to release an “iTunes phone” called the Rokr E1. It was a candy bar-shaped phone that could play music purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Users could load songs through iTunes and play them through an iPod-like music app. But the limitations of the phone doomed it from the start. It could hold just one hundred songs; transferring songs from a computer was slow; and the interface was horrible. Jobs could barely conceal his disdain for it.

On the other hand, the Motorola Rokr phone made it apparent to all concerned that Apple needed to make its own phone. Customers wanted the experience of a full iPod on their phones, but, given Jobs’ insistence on Apple standards, another company could hardly be trusted to get it right.


Precisely how the project that had produced Model 035 got re-tracked into making the iPhone is a matter of dispute. During an appearance at the 2010 All Things D conference, Jobs took credit for having come up with the idea for a touch screen phone.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Jobs told the crowd. “It began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multi-touch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our people about it. And six months later, they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He got scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘My God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the iPhone.

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Others at Apple at the time have a different recollection of the beginnings of their iPhone pursuit. They say the idea came up during one of the regular executive meetings. “We all hated our phones,” recalled Scott Forstall, a software executive. “I think we had these flip phones at the time. And we were asking ourselves, could we use the technology we were doing with touch that we'd been prototyping for this tablet and could we use that same technology to build a phone, something the size that could fit in your pocket, but give it all the same power that we were looking at giving to the tablet?”


After the meeting, Jobs, Tony Fadell, Jon Rubenstein, and Phil Schiller went over to Jony’s studio to see a demo of the 035 prototype. They were impressed by Jony’s demonstration of the 035, but expressed doubts that the technology would work for a cell phone.

The crucial breakthrough was the creation of a small test app that used only part of the 035 tablet’s screen. “We built a small scrolling list,” said Forstall. “We wanted it to fit in the pocket, so we built a small corner of it as a list of contacts. And you would sit there and you'd scroll on this list of contacts, you could tap on the contact, it would slide over and show you the contact information, and you could tap on the phone number and it would say calling. It wasn't calling, but it would say it was calling. And it was just amazing. And we realised that a touchscreen that was sized, that could fit into your pocket, would work perfectly as one of these phones.”

Years later, Apple attorney Harold McElhinny would describe the immense amount of work the project required. “It required an entirely new hardware system. It required an entirely new user interface and that interface had to become completely intuitive.” He also said Apple took a huge leap of faith moving into a new product category. “Think about the risk. They were a successful computer company. They were a successful music company. And they were about to enter a field that was dominated by giants...Apple had absolutely no name in the [phone] field. No credibility.”

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Apple's chief design officer Jony Ive shows the Apple Watch to actor Stephen Fry in 2016 Stephen Lam / Getty

McElhinny also said he firmly believes that had the project gone wrong, it could have destroyed the company. To mitigate the risk, Apple’s executives hedged their bets. They would develop two phones in parallel and pit them against each other. The secret phone project was codenamed “Purple,” shortened to just “P.” One phone project, based on the iPod nano, got the codename P1; the other phone, led by Jony, was a brand new multitouch device based on the 035 tablet, codenamed P2.

The P1 project was led by Fadell; his group had the idea to somehow graft a phone onto a current iPod. “It was actually a natural progression of taking the iPod, which we already had, and morphing it into something else,” said the former executive.

Matt Rogers, a hotshot young iPod engineer who worked for Fadell, was given the job of creating the software for the device. As an intern, Rogers had previously impressed Fadell by rewriting some complex testing software for the iPod. As usual, the research was a big secret. “Nobody in the company knew we were working on a phone,” said Rogers. It was also a lot of extra work. At the time, the iPod team was also working on a new iPod nano, a new iPod classic, and a shuffle.

After six months of effort, Fadell’s team produced a prototype iPod-plus-phone that worked, more or less. The iPod’s click wheel was used as a dialer, selecting numbers one at a time like an old rotary phone. It could make and receive calls. Scrolling through an address book and selecting a contact to call was — unsurprisingly — its best feature. Apple filed a couple of patents from their experimentation. One of them suggested that the iPod-plus-phone could create text messages with a predictive text system. Jobs, Forstall, Ording, and Chaudhri, among others, were named as inventors.

But the P1 had too many limitations. Just dialling a number was a pain, and the device was too limited. It couldn’t surf the net; it couldn’t run apps. Fadell said later that the iPod-plus-phone was a “heated topic” of discussion at Apple. The biggest problem was that forced the team into a design corner. Using the existing device limited their design options in a way that was not optimal to the task. “[The P1] had a little screen and this hardware wheel and we were stuck with that … but sometimes you have to try things in order to throw it away.”

After six months of work on the iPod-plus-phone P1, Jobs killed the project. “Honestly, we can do better guys,” he told the team. Fadell was loath to admit defeat. “The multi-touch approach was riskier because no one had tried it and because they weren’t sure they could fit all the necessary hardware into it,” he said. And Fadell had been skeptical of touch screens from the start, based on experience of devices like Palm Pilots, which were clunky and awkward.


“We all know this is the one we want to do” Jobs said, referring to the P2. “So let’s make it work.”

Two years later, during the iPhone introduction at Macworld, Jobs jokingly flashed an image of an iPod with a rotary dialpad on its screen. This was how not to build a new phone, Jobs said, as the audience laughed. Few knew the company might well have produced just such a phone.

Read the full chapter on the birth of the iPhone at Cult of Mac here.