Developing the First iPhone: Behind the Scenes

In a piece published by the New York Times Friday, writer Fred Vogelstein has a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the monumental amount of preparation that went into designing and producing the first iPhone and the introduction event in January 2007.

The story starts with a look at the hectic moments before the now-famous keynote given by former CEO Steve Jobs. Andy Grignon, a former senior engineer at Apple, was not excited on his drive to San Francisco before the event:

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.

Grignon was the senior manager in charge of all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cellphones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic, they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the device didn’t make calls, or didn’t connect with Bluetooth headsets or Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life — often seven days a week — to the project. Read more…

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