“One of the fascinating tidbits of Apple history that emerged online this week was the story that Phil Schiller was insistent that the original iPhone ship with a physical keyboard,” Luke Dormehl reports for Cult of Mac. “Only problem is, no-one seems to know whether it’s true or not. Former Apple exec Tony Fadell claimed it is. Schiller denied it. Now Fadell has denied it, too, but the author he told the story to is sticking by what he was told. What a mess!”
“The anecdote is from an upcoming book by tech writer Brian Merchant, titled The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, timed to coincide with the iPhone’s tenth anniversary,” Dormehl reports. “In a lengthy excerpt from the book published this week on The Verge, Tony Fadell — who worked at Apple from 2001 to 2008, before going on to found Nest Labs — is quoted as saying that Schiller was the only holdout in wanting the iPhone to come with a BlackBerry-style keyboard.”
“However, it didn’t sit well with Phil Schiller, who tweeted to say the story never happened,” Dormehl reports. “Strangely, Fadell then also tweeted to say that, ‘I respect @pschiller as a colleague & friend. The story about him is not true. Have asked writer to correct the record’ … But having had his credibility called into question, author Brian Merchant now says that he has a recorded conversation with Fadell to prove his point.”
https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/874714380058763264
I respect @pschiller as a colleague & friend. The story about him is not true. Have asked writer to correct the record. https://t.co/87BkZGcHSi
— Tony Fadell (@tfadell) June 14, 2017
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s nothing like a little “controversy” to move some books!
https://twitter.com/bcmerchant/status/875112975828361216
Someone in the room did, including most of the Geeks in the Tech world at the time.
Obviously this lame brained idea was given an early and well deserved death.
Losing the keyboard is a necessary sacrifice to gain screen, I agree with that sacrifice. But physical is missed, there’s absolutely nothing tactile about touch at the moment.
So, you haven’t a single clue what the word tactile means, eh?
Do you? Glass has one texture.
Apple has provided some decent compensation for working one’s fingers over a flat screen:
What is Taptic Engine? @Webopedia
This wasn’t’ just for the iPhone, I don’t have one, I do have two iPads however. Same applies for Android devices, they have various Taptic schemes too. I don’t think any of them come close to the tactile input you get from physical buttons.
PS-Back when I had an iPhone I was really pissed I couldn’t pair it to my PDA Bluetooth keyboards, mostly due to App Store censorship on not allowing the appropriate Bluetooth profiles.
🙁
Number 5: [on seeing the sun] Ohh beautiful lightbulb!
My two cents, the sad pathetic hack author/a-hole just wanted something volitile to get recognition in a sad attempt to sell more books. Just another scumbag, brian merchant your run in the mill )•(. He knows he writes cr*p so this is what he resorts to.
He says he has an audio recording. Perhaps Fadell did say it, but was wrong and then had reservations about it. Seems like it would be a simple matter to reveal the truth. Either he has the recording or he doesn’t.
Post the recording!!!!!!
Oh wait!! I thought you were talking about Trumps recordings! LOL
I see no reason to poke Phil Schiller over odd rumors.
But I will point out that it’s important to NOT let marketing pretend to be R&D. Never the twain should meet. Let marketing advise, not set the standards. This is part of my Marketing-As-Management rant.
Exactly! Advise! What I believe happened is that Schiller did hold out for the hard keyboard because it was a proven market commodity, but he did so mainly as a challenge to hapless engineers who he perceived as overly enamoured of a concept at the expense of consumer acceptance. In other words, he played devil’s advocate to force a come-to-jesus over the fundamental UI design. And now, there is a misconstrual all around about the nature of that give-and-take, something all too natural to humans with defective, self-aggrandising memories.
Apple had no need for a devils advocate. Steve Jobs was pushing this project and the engineers would have had the fear of God put in them over any missteps.
Back then Jobs was not yet a terrible, vengeful God. Engineers were encouraged to speak their minds.
But we all know how it turned out. No physical keyboard!
Number 5: Okay, to make these beautiful fluffy pancakes…add flour, milk and eggs…mix thoroughly
what is more interesting to me are the stories that Jobs rejected Jony Ive’s initial iPhone designs and asked him to redo them.
I wonder if there is anyone at Apple today to act as ‘counterpoint’ to Ive.
No one is reining in Sir Jony Ive. That coffee table book was the proof. Yes it was amazing. It was also evidence that his attention was wandering. What CEO would be so dense as not to think, “Hm. Our Mac users will look at this askance. Better get Jony to knuckle under, lest our customer sat take a dive.” Steve Jobs set up Jony with a golden ticket, not fully realising that it was the synergy of the two of them that made the magic, that made it all work.
Good point and that’s the untold story. Jony’s “design team’s” first iPhone was aluminium:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?referer=
“The second iPhone prototype in early 2006 … was made entirely of brushed aluminum. Jobs and Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, were exceedingly proud of it. But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well. “I and Rubén Caballero” — Apple’s antenna expert — “had to go up to the boardroom and explain to Steve and Ive that you cannot put radio waves through metal,” says Phil Kearney, an engineer who left Apple in 2008. “And it was not an easy explanation. Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.”
Now that Jony has final say in anything coming out of Apple, expect more of the ‘beautifully designed, but fundamentally flawed’ products in the future.
No one is acting as a counterpoint to Jony Ive. We can see this easily: to compensate for his inability to draw good, he put whirligig graphics in iOS 7 that gave people vertigo and had to take them out in the first dot release. He used Helvetica in Yosemite and made the iTunes icon red, both of which he’s backed out of. He has also made symbols that look good on giant poster board, but not on the screen—replacing the waste basket with the white artist’s eraser. All the icons are turning into circles or rounded squares with tiny symbolic squiggles in them. I have a friend who owns an Apple Watch but can’t use the bubblebath to launch apps because all the circles look the same to him. Obviously there is no approval process, no user testing, no usability testing; Jony Ive’s first draft is what goes out the door. I have talked to Apple employees who wanted to hear details about using either the manual procedure or XRevert to change the symbols back to icons on their Mac.
Seriously, who cares?
What difference does it make?
Does it matter either way – point is, the decision was made to not have a keyboard.
Are they trying to pin some sort of negative attitude on Phil?
If so, why?
The only news here is that , OMG, different people at Apple have different visions for what they think is right and wrong and they debate them before deciding on what to do.
When promoting a new book, fan the flames of controversy even when one doesn’t exist. Sales are all that matters. Reputations, truth, intricate nuances of the development process, screw all that.
I think the point is that the Apple brain trust is deficient in grey cells. That the myth of Apple intelligentsia is just that. Apple has some profound successes, but Apple had made some incredible blunders. Keep it real, peeps.
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It’s not uncommon for Apple to create various prototypes of devices with or without various features during development, so they can be analyzed and compared and tested. This is more likely what happened.