During 2006, the year before the iPhone was introduced, it seemed that innovation in mobile devices was beginning to slip away from Silicon Valley. Wireless computing was advancing more quickly in Europe than it was in the United States. That all changed abruptly when Steve Jobs stepped onstage at Moscone Center in San Francisco and asserted he was introducing “three revolutionary products” in one package—the iPhone.
How did iPhone come to be? On June 20, four members of the original development team will join historian and journalist John Markoff to discuss the secret Apple project, which in the past decade has remade the computer industry, changed the business landscape, and become a tool in the hands of more than a billion people around the world.
Watch Part 1 — Original iPhone Engineers Nitin Ganatra, Scott Herz & Hugo Fiennes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Vz1BeymHE
Why this is timely, read a Stratechery article then saw a podcast where Ben was discussing the loss of Scott Forstall. Fast forward today many still believe, according to Ben, that Apple lost its strongest internal champion for developers, which led to Apple becoming more hostile and indifferent to its developer community. Funny enough in the interview he had a vision for AI and Siri and talks about it briefly in the interview. It's too bad the interview didn't pursue on this, as Scott has a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University, with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence.
For those who don't know: Scott Forstall was from NeXT (Steve Jobs' previous company). Apparently, he was one of the technical foundations that underpinned Apple’s operating systems when they moved over. Forstall was not just a brilliant engineer; he was also a rare, powerful internal advocate for developers inside Apple. Ben said he was one of the few who pushed hard for the App Store when others resisted, helping to create the ecosystem that made the iPhone so dominant.
Like all of Jobs' handpicked understudies, Forstall was also known for being extremely arrogant and polarizing. After Steve Jobs died, internal tensions between Apple’s senior executives (especially between Forstall and Jony Ive) — (I had no idea?) — exploded without Jobs there to mediate.
Following the botched launch of Apple Maps, Forstall was forced out—largely because other top leaders refused to work with him and Cook not wanting to own the Apple Maps debacle. This was around 2012, when they released the bubble gum iOS design. Forstall was known for the skeuomorphism design that at the time was outdated.
Thought it was a great interview, you can tell Steve meant a lot to Scott and he talked about how Steve saved his life once. It was good to finally here a good thing about Steve Jobs "the human" for once as usually people love to say how awful he was.