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Battle of the Titans: How the Fight to the Death Between Apple and Google is Transforming our Lives
Fred Vogelstein
The deathmatch between Apple and Google is not just a story of corporate competition – it’s a dramatic saga of a friendship gone sour, of trust and agreements betrayed, of visionaries Steve Jobs and his successor Tim Cook versus Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. This is a story of bickering, backstabbing, poaching and paranoia, of hardware versus software and patents versus products.After more than a decade of reporting on this rivalry, Fred Vogelstein has incredible access to the boardroom conversations, unofficial reactions, outbursts, personalities, deals, lawsuits and allegations that have shaped how we use these products.
BATTLE OF THE TITANS
Fred Vogelstein
Copyright (#ulink_6f113110-da05-5a79-a19e-539383446de1)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published as Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution in Great Britain by William Collins in 2013
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013
Copyright © Fred Vogelstein 2013
Fred Vogelstein asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007448401
Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007448418
Version: 2014-10-01
Dedication (#ulink_154cd3bb-68e2-59db-9f76-9c2d89876c92)
For Evelyn, Sam, and Beatrice
Contents
Cover (#uc243080b-2c74-5ce3-8b79-273e9ae57d8d)
Title Page (#u6fb28459-7f30-533e-9ee6-cd342e43e68b)
Copyright (#u4f31facd-7d4d-5c18-8711-565b47d68c28)
Dedication (#ub4612826-5ad6-5df7-bf1a-3a67f73ee845)
Introduction (#ue2568732-d1d6-5fbf-8120-dd4443bbfaab)
1. The Moon Mission (#ue01ed341-1083-55a9-8d34-a881852ed2db)
2. The iPhone Is Good. Android Will Be Better. (#u8f2b7074-015b-5f3d-823c-d1cda2315de7)
3. Twenty-Four Weeks, Three Days, and Three Hours Until Launch (#litres_trial_promo)
4. I Thought We Were Friends (#litres_trial_promo)
5. The Consequences of Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Android Everywhere (#litres_trial_promo)
7. The iPad Changes Everything—Again (#litres_trial_promo)
8. “Mr. Quinn, Please, Don’t Make Me Sanction You.” (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Remember Convergence? It’s Happening (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Changing the World One Screen at a Time (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note on My Reporting (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_2a7722be-4321-5497-9957-5e4c81ae636a)
When Steve Jobs stood before the world at the beginning of 2007 and said he was going to reinvent the cell phone, the expectations were modest—at best. Jobs had upended the music business with the iPod and iTunes. But taking on the cell phone industry? That seemed unlikely. The wireless carriers, who controlled the market, had been foiling cell phone innovators for years. And the iPhone, while cool looking, seemed no match for their iron grip on the industry. It was more expensive than most phones out there. And it was arguably less capable. It ran on a slower cell/data network. And it required users to type on a virtual, not a physical, keyboard. To some critics, that meant the iPhone was dead on arrival.
If anything, Jobs undersold the iPhone that day. It truly was a breakthrough. The iPhone wasn’t really a phone, but the first mainstream pocket computer that made calls. With its touchscreen, it did so many things that other phones could never do that consumers overlooked its shortcomings. Consumers got used to the virtual keyboard, and Apple continued to make it better and better. It cut the price to equal that of other phones. It quickly upgraded the slower cell/data radios to make its technology competitive. It developed displays with unheard-of resolutions. It bought a chip design company to make sure the iPhone was always the fastest device out there. It rolled out a completely new version of the iPhone software every year. And it designed iconic television ads—as it had done for the iPod—that made consumers feel special about owning one.
The subsequent frenzy of demand gave Apple and Jobs the leverage to turn the tables on the wireless carriers and start telling them what to do. More important, it ignited a technology revolution that today touches almost every corner of civilization. The iPhone has become
one of the most popular cell phones of all time, selling more than 135 million units in 2012 alone. It has become the platform for a new and hugely profitable software industry—phone apps—that has generated more than $10 billion in total revenues since starting five years ago, in 2008. And the iPhone has become the source of an entire rethink of how humans interact with machines—with their fingers instead of buttons or a mouse. The iPhone and its progeny—the iPod Touch and the iPad—haven’t just changed the way the world thinks about cell phones, they have changed the way the world thinks about computers for the first time in a generation, arguably since the advent of the Macintosh in 1984.
Since 2010, when Jobs followed the iPhone with the iPad, the questioning has grown frenzied. Who said our computer had to sit under our desk or on our lap? Can’t it just be a screen that fits in our pocket or purse, or something we leave lying around the house? Indeed, if you compare iPad sales to sales of desktops and laptops, Apple is now the largest
PC maker in the world. It now sells more iPads per quarter than Dell or HP sells laptops and desktops. Apple’s total sales of iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches now exceed 200 million devices a year. That’s about the same number of TVs sold by all manufacturers every year and about four times the number of cars sold worldwide. All of this has turned Apple, the corporation, into a colossus larger than even Jobs’s enormous ambitions. Once on the precipice of bankruptcy, in 1997, Apple today is one of the most valuable and profitable companies anywhere.
And yet Apple behaves like a corporation under siege—because despite all this success, it is. From the moment in late 2007 that Google unveiled Android—and its own plan to dominate the world of mobile phones and other mobile devices—Google hasn’t just tried to compete with the iPhone, it has succeeded in competing with the iPhone. Android took hold in 2010, and it has exploded in popularity since. To Apple’s astonishment
, there are now more smartphones and tablets running Android software than there are iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches running Apple’s software, known as iOS. In 2012 there was even debate about whether the iPhone was the most popular smartphone anymore. During the third quarter of 2012
, some surveys said, Samsung sold more Android-powered Galaxys than Apple sold iPhones.
Apple ended the “who has the most popular smartphone” discussion at the end of 2012, when it unveiled the iPhone 5. But more and more wonder whether this is even relevant anymore. The differences between the two platforms are narrowing by the day. Sure, they are different structurally. Apple makes every inch of the iPhone—the hardware and the software (though the devices are assembled in China). Google just makes the software for Android phones. It allows phone manufacturers such as Samsung to make the hardware. But both platforms now have an equivalent number of pluses and minuses: Apple’s platform is a little easier to use, but it only offers three products—the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod Touch. Google’s platform offers many more phone choices, and often has the latest phone features ahead of Apple, but it lacks the polish of Apple’s interface. Still, both platforms are now equally available among large carriers worldwide, and, with the exception of Apple stores, they are available for purchase in the same places.
Seeing Apple’s market dominance challenged so swiftly and broadly was uniquely painful for Jobs and remains that way for the company’s other executives. Jobs thought, and Apple executives still think, that Google and the Android community cheated to create their success. They think that Google executives stole Apple’s software to build Android, and that Android’s largest phone maker, Samsung, copied Apple’s designs to build its supersuccessful Galaxy phones. They feel betrayed. Apple and Google weren’t just business partners when the iPhone was unveiled in early 2007. They were spiritual allies—the yin and yang of the technology revolution. This was one of the closest alliances in American business. Apple made great devices. Google made great software. Google’s founders considered Jobs to be a mentor. Google’s then CEO, Eric Schmidt, sat on Apple’s board of directors. They had a common enemy: Microsoft. Together they planned for a long and prosperous marriage.
Then, as can happen in a marriage, the relationship frayed. Secrets were kept. Promises were broken. And the two went to war. When Jobs died in October 2011, there was hope that the dogfight would feel less like personal betrayal and quiet down—that Apple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, would take the emotion out of the battle and find a way to settle it. But if anything, Apple has gotten more aggressive and nasty toward Google since then. It still has dozens of patent lawsuits in at least seven countries pending against the Android community—mostly against Samsung and Motorola (owned by Google). In the summer of 2012, it took the unheard-of step of having its fight with Samsung, Google’s top distributor of Android phones, tried in front of a jury in San Jose. It won a $1 billion judgment, though the damages were subsequently reduced by nearly half on appeal. In September 2012 Apple stopped selling the iPhone preloaded with Google Maps. It replaced the app with one of its own, despite wide consumer complaints that the app was inferior. Apple is believed to be working on a video service to compete with YouTube, which Google owns.
Apple has even begun replacing
some Google search technology in the iPhone with search technology from its old enemy, Microsoft. Now when you use Siri, the iPhone’s voice recognition feature, Apple’s newest software no longer uses Google search. Instead, she queries Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which has been clawing at Google for a decade over search market share. To get Siri to use Google’s search, you have to specifically ask her to “search Google” before each request. Google is still the default search engine inside the iPhone’s web browser. But for those with long memories, the idea that Apple would dump any Google technology for Microsoft’s—when Microsoft was the bitter enemy of both for so long—is an astonishing development.
Google’s public posture in its fight with Apple has consistently been “Who, us? We’re just a bunch of geeks out to change the world.” But in its quiet, nerdy way Google has fought back ferociously. It defied Apple’s demands that it remove software from Android phones or face patent lawsuits. It bought the cell phone maker Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2012, its largest acquisition by far. It said the only purpose of the purchase was to buy Motorola’s patents. It said it would be easier to fight a litigious opponent like Apple if it owned the company that invented the modern cell phone and all the patents associated with that. That’s true, but the claim hid another equally powerful reason: the acquisition means that Google will always be able to make phones to compete with Apple no matter how successful Apple is with its lawsuits against other phone and tablet manufacturers. The purchase also gives Google leverage in case new challengers emerge.
Last, Google now finds itself doing something most thought it would never do: it is making its own consumer electronics from scratch to compete with Apple devices in the living room. Google has all the pieces not only to hook users on cell phones running its Android software, but to reach them wherever they go, inside or outside their homes.
Usually, the story of two companies and their powerful leaders going at it makes a great magazine piece and little more. Company X attacks company Y. Company Y fights back. One wins. One loses. But this is a much bigger tale than that. It’s hard to imagine a more revolutionary object than the object the two companies started fighting over: the smartphone. The smartphone has fundamentally changed the way humans get and process information, and that is changing the world in ways that are almost too large to imagine. Ponder the individual impacts of the book, the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, the tape recorder, the camera, the video camera, the compass, the television, the VCR and the DVD, the personal computer, the cell phone, the video game, and the iPod. The smartphone is all those things in one device that fits in your pocket. It is radically changing the way we learn in school, the way doctors treat patients, the way we travel and explore. Entertainment and all media are accessed in entirely new ways. That sounds like something Jobs might have said at one of his famous product launches. But it is not an exaggeration.
What this means is that Apple versus Google isn’t just a run-of-the-mill spat between two rich companies. It is the defining business battle of a generation. It is an inflection point, such as the moment when the PC was invented, when the Internet browser took hold, when Google reinvented web search, and when Facebook created the social network. In this massive reexamination of how technology, media, and communications intersect, two of the most powerful companies in the world to dominate that new landscape are in open warfare.
Yes, invariably this reminds you of previous fights among entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, such as Apple versus Microsoft in the 1980s or Microsoft versus Netscape in the 1990s. But the stakes are infinitely higher now. In the 1980s personal computing was a nascent market, and both Apple and Microsoft were new companies. In the 1990s people saw the potential of the Internet, especially in a device that fit in your pocket. But wireless bandwidth was still too slow and expensive. Today, 1.8 billion cell phones
are sold worldwide every year, and in five to ten years most of them are going to be smartphones. No one knows how big the tablet market is going to be yet, but the tablet is already becoming an important new technology for people to read books, newspapers, and magazines, not to mention watch TV or play video games. In other words, the stakes of this battle are infinitely higher than any earlier struggles.
It’s not just that there is a lot more money to be made and lost in the Apple/Google fight than in previous Silicon Valley battles. It’s that the fight feels—to the players, at least—like a winner-take-all situation. Why? Because they’re not just fighting over which side has the hottest devices, they’re battling for control of the online stores and communities these devices connect to—the so-called cloud. A lot of what we buy via Apple’s iTunes store—apps, music, movies, TV shows, books, etc.—doesn’t work easily on Android devices or at all, and vice versa. And both companies know that the more money each of us spends on apps and other media from one store, the less likely we are to switch to the other. They know we will ask, “Why rebuy all that content just to buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone?” Many companies have free apps that work on both platforms, but even having to redownload them, and re-set them up, is enough to keep many users from switching. In Silicon Valley parlance, it’s a platform war. Whether your example is Microsoft with Windows and Office, eBay with auctions, Apple with the iPod, Amazon with books, Google with search, or Facebook with social media, history suggests that the winner in fights like this gets more than 75 percent of the market share, while the loser struggles to stay in that business.
This is a big deal. In the coming years most of what we consider information—news, entertainment, communications—will get funneled through either Apple’s or Google’s platform. Doubt me? It’s already happening. We now spend as much time connected to the Internet as we do watching television, and more and more of our access to the Internet comes through smartphones and tablets. Think about how much time you spend staring at your phone or tablet now—not just responding to email, reading the news, tweeting, facebooking, watching a video, playing games, or surfing the web. Include the seconds you spend in elevators, standing in line, at stoplights, in the restroom too. Now ask yourself this question: Who controls what you see on your television? Your cable company. Who controls what you see on your smartphone? Ultimately, it is Apple and Google.
I remember when, as a contributing editor for Wired, I first started thinking about the mobile revolution. At that time the top-selling phones worldwide came from Nokia, RIM (which makes the BlackBerry), Sony Ericsson, and Motorola. Then the iPhone was announced. It quickly seemed inevitable that Apple and Google would end up fighting. Few agreed with me. An editor friend of mine said the idea seemed preposterous. How could Apple and Google compete when they were in entirely different businesses? he asked. Technically he was right. Apple makes money selling the devices it creates. Google makes money selling online advertising. What he and many missed is that those are now only means to a much bigger end. Both companies see themselves as becoming new kinds of content distribution engines—twenty-first-century TV networks, if you will. They won’t make content as the TV networks do today; but their control of huge global audiences, and their enormous balance sheets, will enable them to have a big impact on what gets made and who sees it.
This may seem counterintuitive. It’s hard to imagine the geeks at Apple or Google producing Mad Men. But makers of movies and TV shows essentially care about only two things: How much is their project going to cost? And how many people are going to see it? No two companies have more reach than Apple and Google. Fewer still have more money. Together they controlled $200 billion in cash alone by mid-2013. That’s not only enough to buy and/or finance an unlimited amount of content for their audience; it’s actually enough to buy most of Hollywood. The market capitalizations of News Corp., Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS total that much combined. Although most people don’t think
of Apple and Google as entertainment giants, Apple through iTunes controls roughly 25 percent of all music purchased and 6 to 10 percent of the $18 billion home video market. Meanwhile, Google is investing millions of dollars in original programming for YouTube, which is already a video destination for tens of millions of consumers around the world.
This isn’t to suggest that there won’t be enormous room for new and old companies to build substantial businesses of their own in this new world. In early 2013 Netflix boasted 30 million subscribers, as many as HBO. Two years ago it looked to be a company that might not make it. Studios jacked up the price of their content to unaffordable levels. Movie and TV-show selection fell and customers started to leave. So Netflix—a technology company based in Los Gatos, not a Hollywood studio—started financing its own programming. Its first stab at this, the series House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey, has been an enormous hit. Amazon and Microsoft are getting production facilities up and running too. Meanwhile, Facebook, with more than 1 billion members—half the Internet—has become a favorite stop for Hollywood agents looking to use this giant global audience as another way to finance and distribute their clients’ work.
But despite the power of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft, at the moment they all still have to largely go through two companies—Apple and Google—to get to the increasingly massive audiences using smartphones and tablets for their news, entertainment, and communications. What this means is that the Apple/Google fight is not just a story about the future of Silicon Valley. It is about the future of media and communications in New York and Hollywood as well. Hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue are at stake, and for at least the next two years, and probably the next five, these companies, their allies, and their hangers-on will be going at it full bore.
In many ways what is happening now is what media, communications, and software moguls have been predicting for a generation: The fruits of Silicon Valley’s labor and those of New York and Hollywood are converging. This is as close to tragic irony in business as one ever gets. For two decades—the 1980s and 1990s—a procession of celebrated media executives marshaled the best technology they could assemble to position themselves for the new world they saw coming. They spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying one another to bulk up. But their timing was so off, their innovations were so bad, and their mergers were so disastrous—such as AOL’s purchase of Time Warner in 2001—that by 2005 convergence had become a discredited idea, and few dared to mention the word.
Where did all these very smart and very wealthy people go wrong? They had the wrong devices in mind. The media and communications tycoons all predicted that the convergence would happen on the personal computer—that their equipment supplying television programming, such as set-top boxes, would ultimately control our personal computers too. The software tycoons—largely Microsoft and Bill Gates—predicted that it would be personal computers that would take over our television sets. Instead, the touchscreen smartphone and touchscreen tablet are driving all the changes—two devices that hadn’t been invented until recently. The problem with the television is that it is a lousy device to do any kind of work on. The problem with the PC is that it is a lousy device to consume entertainment on. The smartphones and tablets, because they are portable and so easy to use, are turning out to be the perfect blend of both. You’d never pull out a laptop to play a game or watch a movie when you’re standing in line or sitting in the back of a cab. But we do that with our smartphones and tablets all the time. We accept the trade-off of screen size for portability because, unlike with previous portable devices, there are no other compromises we need to make. Their screens, while small, are actually sharper than those of most televisions. Their batteries last all day. They turn on immediately. They are connected to wireless networks that are fast enough to stream movies. And they are powerful enough to effectively run the same applications as every other machine we have.
By the end of this book you’ll have a good idea who I think is winning the Apple/Google fight. But you’ll also develop enough respect for what each side has had to go through just to stay in the game that you might feel bad rooting for either side. One of the things that I didn’t expect when I took on this project was how hard it is to conceive and build the products that Steve Jobs liked to casually pull out of his pocket onstage. Whether you are an Apple engineer, a Google engineer, or any engineer, building products that change the world isn’t just work. It’s a quest. It leaves its participants not only tired the way all jobs sometimes do but mentally and physically exhausted—even traumatized—at the end. Part of Jobs’s appeal as a leader and a celebrity was that he successfully hid all this from public view. He made innovation look easy. Now he is gone. And, as you’ll see in the following pages, there are many engineers at both companies who want the rest of the world to know what changing the world really has been like. Before there could be the smartphones and tablets we all now buy and take for granted, there was yelling, screaming, backstabbing, dejection, panic, and fear over what it would take to get those projects off the ground and into consumers’ hands. They want you to understand what the iPhone and Android projects were like at the beginning—and so that is where this book will start.
1 (#ulink_0d75fcb4-92fd-5897-9519-470e0039f3f7)
The Moon Mission (#ulink_0d75fcb4-92fd-5897-9519-470e0039f3f7)
The fifty-five miles from Campbell to San Francisco is one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Known as 280 to locals, it is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cell phone reception. For Andy Grignon in his Porsche Carrera, therefore, it was the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on January 8, 2007.
This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly fifteen minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cell phone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and at 10:00 a.m. the following day they—along with the rest of the world—would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.
Getting invited to one of Jobs’s famous product announcements was supposed to be a great honor. It anointed you as a player. Only a few dozen Apple employees, including top executives, got an invite. The rest of the spots were reserved for Apple’s board of directors, CEOs of partners—such as Eric Schmidt of Google and Stan Sigman at AT&T—and journalists from around the world. Grignon got an invite because he was the senior engineer for all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cell phones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the phone didn’t make calls, connect with Bluetooth headsets, or connect to Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life—often seven days a week—to the project. Few deserved to be there more than he did.
But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cell phone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? Jobs’s presentations were live, however. It was one of the things that made his shows so captivating. But for those in the background, such as Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress. Grignon couldn’t remember the last time a Jobs show of this magnitude had gone sideways. Part of what made Steve Jobs such a legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But Grignon found it hard to recall the last time Jobs was so unprepared going into a show.
Grignon had been part of the iPhone launch-preparation team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. But he had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his ninety-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been rehearsing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing the Internet connection, freezing, or just shutting down.
“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all—kind of like a cred badge. ‘Fuck yeah, I get to hang out with Steve,’” Grignon said. Like everything else that surrounded Jobs, the preparations were as secret as a U.S. missile attack on Afghanistan. Those who were truly in felt as if they were at the center of the universe. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards twenty-four hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in or out without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. More security checkpoints needed to be cleared once visitors got inside. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off-limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple had hired for the announcement—from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound—sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.
“It quickly got really uncomfortable,” Grignon said. “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall [when he was done chewing you out].” Grignon said that you would always ask yourself two questions during one of these lectures: “‘Is it my shit that broke this time?’ and ‘Is it the nth time it broke or the first time?’—because that actually mattered. The nth time would frustrate him, but by then he might have figured out a way around it. But if it was the first time, it added a whole new level of instability to the program.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems, he would come after people like Grignon. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times and that each time something went wrong,” Grignon said. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”
The iPhone didn’t work right for a good reason; it wasn’t close to being finished. Jobs was showing off a prototype. He just didn’t want the public to know that. But the list of things that still needed to be done before the iPhone could be sold was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying degrees of quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge, others had scuff marks on the screen. Thus no one in the public was allowed to touch an iPhone after Jobs unveiled it, despite a day of press briefings and a whole exhibit set up for them in the convention center. The worry was that even the best prototypes wouldn’t stand close scrutiny, Grignon said. They’d look fine at a distance and for Jobs’s demo, but if you held one in your hand, “You would laugh and say, ‘Wow, this thing really looks unfinished.’”
The phone’s software was in even worse shape. A big chunk of the previous four months had been consumed figuring out why the iPhone’s processor and its cell radio wouldn’t reliably communicate. This huge problem was akin to a car with an engine that occasionally doesn’t respond to the accelerator, or wheels that occasionally don’t respond to the brake pedal. “It almost brought the iPhone program to a halt,” Grignon said. “We had never seen a problem this complicated.” This was ordinarily not a problem for phone makers, but Apple’s obsession with secrecy had kept Samsung, the manufacturer of the phone’s processor, and Infineon, the maker of the phone’s cell radio, from working together until Apple, in desperation, flew teams of engineers from each company to Cupertino to help fix the problem.
Jobs rarely backed himself into corners like this. He was well-known as a master taskmaster, seeming to always know just how hard he could push his staff so that they delivered the impossible. But he always had a backup, a Plan B, that he could go to if his timetable was off. Six months prior he’d shown off Apple’s upcoming operating system, Leopard. But that was after letting the date for the final unveiling slip.
But Jobs had no choice
but to show off the iPhone. He had given this opening keynote at every Macworld since he’d returned as Apple’s CEO in 1997, and because he gave public presentations only once or twice a year, he had conditioned Apple fans to expect big things from them. He’d introduced iTunes here, the iMac that looked like a fancy desk lamp, the Safari web browser, the Mac mini, and the iPod shuffle.
It wasn’t just his own
company that Jobs had to worry about disappointing this time. AT&T was expecting Jobs to unveil the iPhone at Macworld too. In exchange for being the exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the United States, AT&T had given Jobs total control of the design, manufacture, and marketing of the iPhone. It had never done anything like this before. If Jobs didn’t launch on time, AT&T could back out of its deal. It’s not hard to explain that a product called the iPhone that couldn’t make calls would sell poorly. Days before, Jobs had flown to Las Vegas to give AT&T’s top mobile executives a limited demo of the iPhone. But they were expecting a full show at Macworld.
Lastly, the iPhone was truly the only cool new thing Apple was working on. The iPhone had been such an all-encompassing project at Apple that this time there was no backup plan. “It was Apple TV or the iPhone,” Grignon said. “And if he had gone to Macworld with just Apple TV [an experimental product back then], the world would have said, ‘What the hell was that?’”
The iPhone’s problems were manifest. It could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an email and then surfed the web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it did not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and in a specific order, that made the phone look as if it worked.
But even when Jobs stayed on the golden path, it required all manner of last-minute work-arounds to make the iPhone functional. On announcement day the software that ran Grignon’s radios still had bugs. So too did the software that managed the iPhone’s memory. And no one knew whether the extra electronics Jobs had required to be added to the demo units would make these problems worse.
Jobs had required the demo phones he would use onstage to have their screens mirrored on the big screen behind him. To show a gadget on a big screen, most companies just point a video camera connected to a projector at the gadget. That was unacceptable to Jobs. The audience would see his finger on the iPhone screen, which would mar the look of his presentation. Instead, he had Apple engineers spend weeks fitting extra circuit boards attached to video cables onto the backs of the iPhones he would have onstage. The video cables then connected to the projector showing the iPhone image on the screen. When Jobs touched the iPhone’s calendar app icon, for example, his finger wouldn’t appear, but the image on the big screen would respond. The effect was magical. People in the audience felt as if they were holding an iPhone in their own hands. But making the setup work flawlessly given the iPhone’s other major problems seemed hard to justify at the time. “It was all just so monkey-patched together with some of the ugliest hacks you could imagine,” Grignon said.
The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team ultimately soldered antenna wires to the demo phones and ran them offstage along the wires to the projection setup. The iPhone would still connect wirelessly to the network, but the signal wouldn’t have to travel as far. Even then, Grignon and his team needed to make sure no one in the audience could get on the frequency they were using. “Even if the base station’s ID was hidden [and therefore not showing up when laptops scanned for Wi-Fi signals], you had five thousand nerds in the audience. They would have figured out how to hack into the signal.” The solution, Grignon said, was simply to tweak the AirPort software to think it was operating in Japan instead of the United States. Japanese Wi-Fi uses some frequencies that are not permitted in the U.S.
There was even less they could do to make sure the phone call Jobs planned to make from the stage went through. All Grignon and his team could do was make sure the signal was good and pray. They had AT&T bring in a portable cell tower so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s support, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of the true signal. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the ninety-minute presentation were high. “If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that. So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars,” Grignon said.
None of these kluges fixed the iPhone’s biggest problem: it often ran out of memory and had to be restarted if asked to do more than a handful of tasks at a time. Jobs had a number of demo units onstage with him to manage this problem. If memory ran low on one, he’d switch to another while the first was restarted. But given how many demos Jobs planned, Grignon worried that there were far too many potential points of failure. If disaster didn’t strike during one of the dozen demos, it was sure to happen during Jobs’s grand finale, when Jobs planned to show all the iPhone’s top features operating at the same time on the same phone. He’d play some music, take a call, put it on hold and take another call, find and email a photo to the second caller, look up something on the Internet for the first caller, and then return to his music. “Me and my guys were all so nervous about this. We only had 120 megabytes of memory in those phones, and because they weren’t finished, all these apps were still big and bloated,” Grignon said.
The idea that one of the biggest moments of his career might implode made Grignon’s stomach hurt. At forty, Grignon looks like the kind of guy you’d want to drink with—and he is. When he moved from Campbell to Half Moon Bay in 2010, he quickly became friendly with the sommelier at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. He even had a wine fridge in his office. But behind that gregarious exterior is a fierce intellect and an ultracompetitive streak. Once when trying to get to the bottom of a slew of software bugs in an iPhone subcontractor’s equipment, he turned the AC on high in the conference room he used to make the subcontractors uncomfortably cold. When that didn’t get them moving fast enough, he tried a more aggressive approach: he accused them of holding out on him and threw his laptop against the wall.
By 2007 he’d spent virtually his entire fifteen-year career at Apple or companies affiliated with it. While at the University of Iowa in 1993, he and his friend Jeremy Wyld—now cofounder with Grignon of Quake Labs—reprogrammed the Newton MessagePad to wirelessly connect to the Internet. That was quite a feat back then, and it helped them both get jobs at Apple right out of school. Wyld actually worked on the Newton team, and Grignon worked in Apple’s famous R & D lab—the Advanced Technology Group—on video conferencing technology. Even though the Newton did not succeed as a product, many still think of it as the first mainstream handheld computer. But by 2000 Grignon had found his way to Pixo, a company spun out of Apple that was building operating systems for cell phones and other small devices. When Pixo’s software found its way into the first iPod in 2002, Grignon found himself back at Apple again.
By then, thanks to his work at Pixo, he’d become well known for two other areas of expertise besides building video conferencing technology: computer radio transmitters (what we now call wireless) and the workings of software inside small handheld devices such as cell phones. Grignon works in an entirely different world from that inhabited by most software engineers in the Valley. Most rarely have to think about whether their code takes up too much space on a hard drive or overloads a chip’s abilities. Hardware on desktop and laptop computers is both powerful, modifiable, and cheap. Memory, hard drives, even processors, can be upgraded inexpensively, and computers are either connected to electric outlets or giant batteries. In Grignon’s world of embedded software, the hardware is fixed. Code that is too big won’t run. Meanwhile, a tiny battery—which might power a laptop for a couple of minutes—needs enough juice to last all day. When Jobs decided to build the iPhone at the end of 2004, Grignon had a perfect set of skills to become one of the early engineers on the project.
Now, in 2007, he was emotionally exhausted. He’d gained fifty pounds. He’d stressed his marriage. It had been a grueling two years. Apple had never built a phone before, and the iPhone team quickly discovered the process didn’t resemble building computers or iPods at all. “It was very dramatic,” Grignon said. “It had been drilled into everyone’s head that this was the next big thing to come out of Apple. So you put all these supersmart people with huge egos into very tight, confined quarters, with that kind of pressure, and crazy stuff starts to happen.”
The iPhone didn’t start out as Apple’s “next big thing.” Jobs had to be talked into building a phone. It had been a topic of conversation among his inner circle almost from the moment Apple launched the iPod in 2001. The conceptual reasoning was obvious: Why would consumers carry two or three devices for email, phone calls, and music when they could carry one?
