iOS 16 brings a complete overhaul of the iPhone's iconic lock screen, and Apple's executives refer to it as being “an act of love this year.”
Interview
Apple silicon head Johny Srouji talks chip development challenges in a rare interview
Johny Srouji reveals unknown tidbits about Apple's in-house custom silicon operation, including M1 chip development struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Design tzar Jony Ive talks Apple Watch origin, aesthetics & design in a rare interview
Jony Ive sat down with specialized watch magazine Hodinkee to talk Apple Watch.
Tim Cook talks about the culture that led to iPhone X, AirPods, Apple Watch 3 & HomePod
Juts a day after it named Apple the most innovative company of the year, Fast Company on Wednesday sat down with Apple CEO Tim Cook to discuss topics like competition, innovation and the culture and approach that led to iPhone X, AirPods, Apple Watch 3 and HomePod.
Phil Schiller talks HomePod & the tech behind it
Now that HomePod is ready to start getting into the hands of customers, Apple is trotting its execs out for a myriad of press interviews.
Apple’s Joswiak defends the iPhone X notch
Apple's Vice President of Product Marketing, Greg Joswiak, said in a recent interview with Tom's Guide how proud Apple is of the notch on iPhone X.
Apple is “working like gangbusters” to make its devices entirely from recycled materials
Lisa Jackson, Apple's Vice President of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, yesterday sat down for an interview with News.com.au to talk environmental initiatives following the company's pledge to build its devices entirely from recycled materials.
Jony Ive talks foregoing the Home button, iPhone X price & more
Jony Ive, Apple's boss of all design across the company, and hardware engineering boss Dan Riccio sat down with TIME on Thursday to defend the controversial decision to ditch the familiar Home button in favor of touchscreen gestures on iPhone X.
Tim Cook on rumored iPhone X supply shortages: “We’ll see what happens”
Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down for an interview with BuzzFeed News to talk a range of topics, among them the rumored iPhone X production bottlenecks and availability.
Jony Ive reveals iPhone X took over two years to develop
Apple spent more than two years developing its upcoming iPhone X flagship, the company's Chief Design Officer Jony Ive said in a brief interview with Japanese design magazine Casa Brutus published Tuesday.
Tim Cook: today’s launch of iOS 11 & ARKit is “a day to remember”
Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down with Robin Roberts of ABC's “Good Morning America” show earlier this morning to discuss a few topics of interests such as the launch of the major iOS 11 software update, Apple's $999 price tag for the new iPhone X and more.
Video: former Apple executives recount original iPhone creation
Apple earlier this year celebrated the tenth anniversary of the original iPhone's unveiling. And as we approach the tenth anniversary of the handset's June 29, 2007 debut, Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal sat down with the original iPhone team members who recounted designing the handset's touchscreen interface and more.
Running nine minutes long, the interview features former iOS chief Scott Forstall, former Vice President of Human Interface Design Greg Christie and the iPod “Godfather” Tony Fadell.
Fadell's team was tasked with the development of a device that was basically an iPod with a phone. It featured a clunky hardware keyboard and ran a version of the iPod interface.
“We tried 30 or 40 ways of making the wheel not become an old rotary phone dial and nothing seemed logical or intuitive,” said Fadell. “To actually dial a real number, it was so cumbersome.”
It was 2005 and Jobs was displeases with the direction of “Project Purple”.
“We’d been doing a lot designs which weren’t quite there yet. It didn’t feel complete. And Steve came to one of our design meetings and he said, ‘This isn’t good enough. You have to come up with something so much better. This is not good enough'”, Fadell recounted.
“Start showing me something good soon or I’m going to give the project to another team,” Christie paraphrased Jobs. According to Forstall, Jobs gave the team two weeks to come up with something special.
“So we went back to the drawing board and Greg assigned specific ownership of different pieces of the design to different people and that team worked 168 hours per week for two weeks. They never stopped,” said Forstall. Eventually, Forstall and Christie's vision for the user interface of the original iPhone, based on OS X code, prevailed over Fadell's click-wheel design.
Christie reflected on how their early iPhone interface designs blew Steve Jobs away:
The first time he saw it he was completely silent, he didn't say a thing. He didn't say anything, he didn't gesture, he didn't ask a question.
Then he sat back and he said, 'Show it to me again.'
And so we go through the whole thing again and Steve was pretty much blown away by the whole demonstration. It was great work.
It took them nearly two and a half years to turn that demonstration into a shipping product.
A ping pong table sized demo had a projector that was beaming a Mac interface on it, allowing engineers to use their whole hand to touch different things on it. “It was literally a ping pong sized multi-touch display,” said Tony Fadell.
And now, watch The Wall Street Journal's full video, titled "How The iPhone Was Born: Inside Stories of Missteps and Triumphs”.
According to Fadell, back at the time sales of the iPod music player accounted for half of Apple's total sales so they wondered about iPod's success long term and kept asking themselves what will cannibalize sales of the music player.
“And one of the biggest concerns was cell phones,” said Fadell.
The three former Apple execs also talk about pinch to zoom, rubber-band scrolling and more. Be sure to watch the whole thing, it's definitely worth ten minutes of your time.