Original iPhone dev team was 'shockingly small' - Apple engineer A former Apple engineer has revealed key details of the process behind the design of the iPhone. In a rare interview, senior software engineer Greg Christie described a frenzied creative process and hinted that Steve Jobs was the boss from hell. Jobs approached Christie and his team to asked them to get involved in a top …
...were devised by me, programmed by me, documented by me, tested by me, and deployed by me.
With very little in the way of support from management.
And once the projects hit the big time and become wildly successful, in swings an army of business analysts, project managers, tester, change control etc. et fucking cetera, that make like barely worth living.
Sheesh.
"you can't build an iPhone's hardware and software from scratch with just one person"
That wasn't the case in Apple either.
The development Greg is really talking about is that of the key UI features, not the full OS.
Even those working on the OS never got to see the real UI, just a faked-up UI that used the OS calls. That allowed the OS folks to develop OS features without seeing what the final product would look like.
I couldn't agree more. What we practice here is, however, a continuous demonstration that doing it the other way doesn't work: largish, rather undefined team which is pestered with daily business, a deadline set somewhere in eternity, lots of interference but much less support by senior management and a project, erm, they didn't think of a project sponsor really.
Well, I shot dead their first and even much larger attempt because it was going far off track. The second attempt wasn't that bad but management changed and so did the project scope. And this now is what a frustrated project team came up with. I'm sure it will be a huge success! /sarcasm
>with Steve Jobs gone, Ive, sorry Sir Ive will be pushed and in return the corporate decision makers again
Nah. Steve Jobs was ill for a long time, and knew to have plans for an Apple without him - indeed Tim Cook was acting CEO for months on end during Jobs' illness. Tim Cook, by recently telling some investors on where to get off, has shown that he knows better than to think short-term.
Sir Jony might look like a big softy, but he isn't the sort to be pushed around easily. If he was, he'd still be in the UK designing bathrooms.
Of course, there is no guarantee that it will be Apple who dominate profits in a new product sector (as they did with phones and tablets) but they are in a better position than most (enough cash to buy any company or talent they need).
Couldn't agree more with most of the comments so far. One of the reasons for the success of the iPhone was that it didn't look like it was designed by a committee. Small, focused and well lead teams are the way to go. We're very lucky where I work, we do have a small team, a VP who sees his role as setting us tasks and tough but achievable deadlines and then making sure nobody else interferes with our progress - almost work bliss ;-)
Actually Big teams are counter productive.
Most of the development was the revised GUI on the OS adapted from OS X as iOS.
They didn't develop any phone or CPU hardware, that had all become virtually commodity parts by then. From the late 1980s the reason for resistive screens was for two reasons:
1) Stylus use of stupid concept of miniaturised desktop GUI.
2) Holy Grail of Handwriting recognition.
Capacitive screens were ignored due to low resolution. Their big step was to say "forget handwriting". The idea of gestures wasn't invented by Apple. That dates back to 1980s or earlier. The stupidity of using a desktop "WIMP" GUI on a small screen was identified in late 1980s. But MS and others wouldn't listen (WinCE ). Part of it too was that for a long while (i.e. Nokia Communicator) a high end phone with GUI and applications was seen as a Business tool, not a consumer gadget.
The best way to do any product is a small team. Or several very small teams working on unrelated aspects.
Maybe if Steve hadn't killed Newton they could not have see their way to an iPhone as it is known today.
Other than the differences caused by the technical limitations of the time, the old PalmPilot, and by extension the one with the phone in it, seem very much to be prototype iPhones. Grid icon layout, standard apps, downloadable apps, touch screens, etc.
If you found your group of designers/software guys who'd been in a bunker for the last 20 years, chucked them a PalmPilot and said, higer-res, loads of colours, touchscreens can now do this you don't need a stylus, make it as sleek as possible, I wonder how different the result would be.
The GUI is quite a bit more revised than perhaps is obvious: Core Animation originated on the iPhone and made its way over the the Mac only afterwards (though, publicly, it was on the Mac long before the iPhone was announced). Core Animation primarily does three things: (i) it draws every view to GPU storage, always; (ii) it introduces an extra transform into the composition process, allowing any view to have any linear transform applied to it when drawn to the screen; and (iii) it takes advantage of Objective-C's dynamic runtime — including lookup of setters by name — to write introduce common code that can adjust a value from A to B per a function f(t) of time, then targets that one piece of interpolation logic all over the place to make the coding difference between an animated transition and a static one just a couple of lines of code.
I'm willing to bet that stuff, the 'how do we run a consistent metaphor at 60Hz on the hardware?', is what took the majority of the time for the team. Obviously iOS became the first GUI OS to work only in the presence of a GPU but which thing prompted the other? It's all obvious in hindsight but I'll bet time was spent on the back and forth over that.
"The best way to do any product is a small team. Or several very small teams working on unrelated aspects."
Bollocks. Things are never unrelated. In order to write good software, or design good hardware, you need to understand the context it is being used in and the trade offs worth making.
At one company I worked for, I was nominally developing software but spent a good 10% of my time hanging out with the hardware guys to make sure that they understood the software impacts of their decisions, so that they could make better decisions, and to take the info back to the software people to discuss with them and make sure all the drivers etc would work.
Another example, there might be two ways to write an algorithm: fast but using lots of RAM, or slow but using little RAM. Unless you have adequate knowledge of the RAM footprint, RAM costs etc, you can't make the right call.
I worked for Apple for a year. The inter-group secrecy was stifling and certainly slowed things down.
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Fair comment; I thought you were making a general complaint, not one about the Reg's house style.
Yes it can be irritating, but not half as irritating as Private Eye's all-public-schoolboys-together-mocking-the-establishment-before-daddy-finds-us-a-job. Yet Private Eye and the Reg both serve useful purposes. I guess you have to put up with it or rely on the Telegraph for your news coverage. (On today's front page, what would Kitchener have done about the Russkis in the Crimea)
>I'm afraid you're reading the wrong website then. There's plenty of other websites if you don't like this one.
That is true, but some intelligent people read the Reg and comment on its articles, so it is a shame when an opportunity to discuss different approaches to technology is wasted on tedious slanging matches. Fortunately, this thread has been left relatively unscathed.
"Learn to suck out the juice and spit out the pips."
That's well and good, but if the guy who's putting the pips in has a comment section in which one is invited to discuss the arti... the juice... then it doesn't seem unreasonable to raise the point when pip-spitting is outdoing juice sucking per unit time.
And I'm pretty sure that's as far as that analogy should ever be taken.
>"Steve thought it was foolish to do a split screen on such a small display," Christie added.
Splitscreen in hardware, or in the OS as two windows side by side?
Though perhaps niche, a device like the aborted MS Courier would be handy for collating and annotating content. It was a clamshell device with two touchscreens, offering some fair screen realestate yet still fitting in a jacket pocket. Obviously it wasn't ideal for video, but it would have been fine for webrowsing, and indeed the two screens lent it to working with a 'source' and a 'destination' document.
Only Sony have tried to do a similar device - a flavour of a 'Z' Android tablet, in which the second screen could act as a keyboard.
Ultimately people may not like Jobs for his management style, but it did work after all. If he had launched the iPhone and it had been rubbish his team would have been able to say they told him so about setting tight deadlines and getting angry with them when ideas where not being put together quickly enough, but history didn't turn out that way, he was proved right in what he thought was acceptable to launch.
Read an article by Bill Krause on a16z.com earlier today. Discussing the development of an Etherenet adaptor he said:
We had put Ethernet on a card, and instead of having to screw a tap we had a connector that looked a lot like the one you screw into your cable box and TV. And were all excited about it. We set up four PCs, and we called Steve Jobs who was a good friend and told him, “You have to come over and see this demo.” Steve comes over and we hook it up and show it to him.
It was a classic Steve response: “Who’s the brain-dead asshole that came up with this shit? This is dreck, this is crap. You want to make it easy to install, just plug it into the telephone jack for cryin’ out loud.”
Why didn’t we think of that? No one knows to this day that Steve Jobs deserves the credit for creating Ethernet the way it is today, and it is a part of why it beat out other competing technologies. It was another one of his brilliant insights around user-interface.
They should have bought him a pint - or several
I agree with most of the posts here that succesful projects tend to done by small independent teams with a clear target and fairly strict deadlines. See any .Gov project with continual spec changes and layers of 'management' between developer and user. In any trade leave the artisans to get on with their job.
But it is equally important to say that such a recipe does not guarentee success. Building the right thing the wrong way, or more commonly the wrong thing the right way is a failure, irrespective of team size.
The only real measure of a projects success is, Is it used and found useful by the users?
"Yet micromanaging Jobs steered them to worldwide mobe DOMINATION"
Pedantic point, but iPhones only show "domination" in the US market. Elsewhere in the world they barely break above double digits of percentage of sales compared to the other manufacturers.
US Sales
http://www.eweek.com/mobile/iphone-sales-make-apple-top-mobile-phone-vendor-in-america/
Global Sales
http://www.statista.com/statistics/263355/global-mobile-device-sales-by-vendor-since-1st-quarter-2008/
"iPhones only show "domination" in the US market"
I think they show domination in profits which is what businesses really, really, want.
They are expensive, not everyone can afford them, but they showed folk a form of touch-screen design that was usable and desirable. The significance is not for now, where there are good viable competitors, but when launched and the old guard of phone makers were, as you might say, caught off-guard.
Indeed, everybody keeps talking about the iPhone and what Apple did in the context of now when deriding Apple. The problem is, the world wasn't as it is now back then, if you wanted a good touch screen that was responsive and made sense to use with your finger and not a stylus the iPhone was the only choice.
While a little dated the "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering" by Fred Brooks should be required reading for anyone doing system development.
I had the pleasure of using working with OS/360 and had to smile every now and then - especially when dealing with the linker.
A classic example is the development of the video game 'Halo: Combat Evolved' which was done by a relatively small team at Bungie. Whether you like the game or not, the team made an effort to re-examine the actual game-play of first-person shooters to remove the tedious parts of the genre, then set it against a fairly straightforward plot in a world inspired by Niven and Iain M. Banks.
The sequel, Halo 2, was a mess by comparison. Bungie have said since that because they felt expected to make a much larger game, they recruited a far larger team - which of course meant the overall vision became fuzzy. The sprawling plot was hard to follow, and new features that sounded good on paper ('Wield two guns at once! Wow!) detracted from the simplicity of the original game.
I did post on this forum, but it seems to have been disappeared, foil hat anyone?
Anyway my comment was that the swipe to unlock feature patented by Apple had tons of prior art and the patent should never have got beyond the trash can. USPTO will at some point live up to their name, or at least we live in hope.
"Christie's team then went on to dream up many familiar facets of the iPhone, including the swipe-to-unlock gesture, the cover flow method of viewing images, the address book and most importantly, the touch screen itself."
Except none of those things were new. There was no "dreaming up" involved.
I worked in the mobile comms industry at the time, and we analysed the original iPhone design. The hardware was extremely poorly designed compared that from any other phone maker of the time, and indicated they had absolutely no experience in the area. On one side of the PCB they had identical hardware to an iPod and on the other side of the PCB they bolted on a whole new set of ICs that a mobile phone would use. In total they used double the number of ICs they actually needed, had poor power consumption, had 2G only, had a poor camera, no video recording, no secondary camera, no expandable memory, no removable battery, no GPS, no 3rd party application support, silly SIM tray thing, etc etc.
We laughed our heads off at how poor the hardware was, yet the hype from the US media (and infecting the UK media even though the price was absolutely insane for a phone in the UK). It only reached industry standard quality by the iPhone 4 (except for the antenna issues that is!). Just goes to show that the best tech isn't always what sells.
Yes, but Nokia in the same year had great HW, a great OS (symbian) spoilt by a bastard GUI (S60). They had lost the plot on management and GUI etc back around 2002. So Apple only had to make it shiny and simple to use, not needing every HW feature or great Battery life.
It was quite sensible to assemble phone chips, a capacitive screen (which are as old as Resistive ones) and an iPod for Mk1 iPhone.
MS tried gluing the Zune on everything from Phones to PC Desktop proving that sometimes simplicity doesn't work when taken too far.
"had poor power consumption, had 2G only, had a poor camera, no video recording, no secondary camera, no expandable memory, no removable battery, no GPS, no 3rd party application support, silly SIM tray thing"
* "poor power consumption" - a lie. Lasted 2 days, the same as any touchscreen smartphone
* "2G only" - another lie. It had EDGE support (2.75G)
* "poor camera" - not needed in a phone, go buy yourself a proper gear
* "no video recording" - a lie. You could do that on a jailbroken iPhone
* "no secondary camera" - only needed for 3G and skype video calls, no big deal IMO
* "no expandable memory" - no need for this, just don't be cheap and buy 16GB version. If you fill 16GB fast and are unable to manage your data, then microSD cards won't help you too
* "no removable battery" - same as most smartphones today
* "no GPS" - not a big problem - very few phones had it built in at the time (e.g. Nokia E90)
* "no 3rd party application support" - clearly a lie, it was lacking only until iOS 2
* "silly SIM tray thing" - you call it silly? It's clearly a great feature, I liked it very much on Moto StarTAC 130 and on iPhone too. It allows you to swap SIM card on the fly - without turning phone off
"We laughed our heads off" - it seems you've remained in this state ever since.
Now I understand why the screen is so small - designed by a team of shockingly small engineers. And now I with my 4XL oversized banana grabbers have to type WhatsFace messages on a little thing like that. It's torture.Next time I'll be getting a nice big kahuna Samsung again.
Hand me my glasses ------->
The reason for the small team was it was a Steve pet project. No-one else took it seriously. They'd tried making an iPod with a mobile with Motorola, it was a failure. So they were happy to ride the iPod wave and not get involved with partners and mobile phone companies.
Heck, even when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone he said he'd be happy if it got 5% market share from Nokia. And as well all know Ballmer was completely dismissive of it. And why not, a non-mobile phone company tries to do a phone, and forgets to add the keys. It was a hail Mary shot that paid off.
I bet the iPad team was HUGE in comparison, once they knew they were on to a winning idea/design. Just make a bigger iPhone,
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