How the World Got Wired · The Phone in Your Pocket

Project Purple

He gave the project a code name. He called it Project Purple.

For the next two and a half years, about two hundred people at Apple worked, in extreme secrecy, on what would eventually become the iPhone. The secrecy was unusual even by Apple’s standards. Engineers on the project were not allowed to tell their own families what they were working on. Different teams were separated by locked doors and security badges. Even within the company, almost nobody knew the whole picture.

Two competing designs were considered. One was a phone based on the iPod — using the famous spinning click wheel as a way to dial numbers and navigate menus. The other was based on a completely different idea: a small, flat slab of glass that the user would control by touching the screen directly with their fingers, with no buttons at all.

The touchscreen idea won. The technology that made it possible — a way for a screen to recognize when multiple fingers were touching it at once, and to interpret pinches and swipes — had been developed by a tiny company called FingerWorks, which Apple had quietly bought in 2005. The team built a phone, designed by a famous British designer named Jony Ive, that was made almost entirely of one rectangle of glass, with a single button on the front and a thin aluminum band around the edges.

When Steve Jobs walked onto that stage in January of 2007, he was holding the first working version of this thing in his hand. It barely worked. The software had been finalized just days before. During his demonstration, the engineers backstage held their breath, hoping nothing would crash. Nothing did.

The iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007. People stood in lines around the block to buy one. The first version cost $499 — enormously expensive for a phone at the time. It could not, in its original form, run apps made by anyone other than Apple. It worked only on the slowest American mobile network. It had no copy-and-paste. It could not record video. Many serious technology critics looked at it and said it was a beautiful toy that would sell to a few enthusiasts but not change anything.

They were wrong by an embarrassing distance.

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