How Tony Fadell lost a prototype iPhone, made a secret stylus, and other strange tales!Dave Lee and the BBC provide a look back at the original iPhone from a very Tony Fadell — former head of iPod at Apple and Nest at Google — perspective.
Indeed, one early iPhone concept design used the iPod's distinctive click-wheel as its input method. That was soon ditched.
"We were turning it into a rotary phone from the sixties," Fadell remembered. "We were like, 'This doesn't work! It's too hard to use'."
It just so happened that in another part of Apple, work had started on a touchscreen Macintosh computer.
There were two branches of Purple Experience Project (Purple or PEP). Fadell and team were working on P1, a more conservative prototype, while Scott Forstall and team were working on P2, what became the iPhone. If P2 couldn't get to market faster enough, P1 could. But P2 actually beat P1 to milestones like functioning SMS, and given all its other advantages, P1 ultimately went nowhere.
Listen to our interview with Nitin Ganatra on building the or...
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How Tony Fadell lost a prototype iPhone, made a secret stylus, and other strange tales!
