The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry
By Fred Vogelstein 01.09.08 | 9:00 PM


Photo: Landov

The demo was not going well.
Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. "It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill," says someone who was in the meeting. Read more...

[Via Wired]


It is a huge article but is one of the most fascinating ones I've read in quite some time. Don't miss it if you're even slightly interested in the iPhone. - Aayush

Credits go to my friend Aayush for finding this one. I hope it's not a double post.

I read this last week, it's an interesting article. In some ways, it's just simple another example of Apple turning an industry on it's head, which it did with the desktop computer, MP3 market and now the phone market. The biggest impact (as previously) isn't the gadget itself, but the change it forces within the space it occupies.

Zoolook said:

I read this last week, it's an interesting article. In some ways, it's just simple another example of Apple turning an industry on it's head, which it did with the desktop computer, MP3 market and now the phone market. The biggest impact (as previously) isn't the gadget itself, but the change it forces within the space it occupies.

Click to expand...

I agree about MP3 players and the iPhone, but not about the desktop computer. The other two devices pretty much took the markets by storm and dominated their respective categories, while Apple's computers almost completely tanked at one point in history and are continuously climbing up in market share. Not really turning the market upside down there.

I'm thinking he means more along the lines of when the desktop computer first came out rather than more recently. Apple essentially created the desktop computer. If it weren't for Apple, we would still have a bunch of proprietary systems that don't work well together.

A very interesting read.

I don't quite agree that the iPhone has turned the mobile phone world on it's head, not yet anyway. Tons of potential that I'm just waiting for them to build on.