The remarkable story of how tech giant
Apple, which has been credited for creating the revolutionary iPod and Mactintoch computers, and how it invented
its first iconic iPhone, has been finally revealed.
The Samsung case,
which ended last month with a resounding victory for Apple, revealed a trove of
details about the invention of the world's most popular mobile handset.
According to Slate.com, Apple, which
created iPod that revolutionized the music industry, should have been the last
company on the planet to try to build something whose explicit purpose was to
kill music players.
Yet, Apple's inner circle knew that one
day, a phone maker would create a universal device that could make calls, play
music and videos, and do everything else, and would ultimately eat the iPod's
lunch. Apple's only chance at staving off that future was to invent the iPod
killer itself.
When Steve Jobs unveiled
the iPhone in
2007, he showed off a picture of an iPod with a rotary-phone dialer instead of
a click wheel.
A Samsung mobile phone, the X810, used
a similar rotating wheel for input, so Apple's Tony Fadell, the engineer who's
credited with inventing the first iPod, didn't like the idea.
The company decided to abandon the
click-wheel idea and try to build a multi-touch phone.
According to the paper, the iPhone team
broke down into two separate, but closely integrated groups -- the guys who
were doing the hardware and the guys who were doing the software.
The software team's main job was
figuring out a way to make a completely novel interface feel intuitive and
natural, and the hardware team, meanwhile, was trying to figure out what the
phone would look like.
Documents in the trial revealed some of
the many iPhone designs that Apple considered,
including thin phones; fat ones; ones with rounded glass on the front and back,
and many other designs.
By the spring of 2006, about a year
before the iPhone's release, Apple's design chief Jonathan Ive and
his team had settled on a design for the iPhone.
According to the paper, their winning
prototype looked similar to Apple's 2004-era iPod Mini -- it was a metallic
device with rounded sides, what designers referred to as 'extruded' aluminum.
