If it wasn’t for one particular executive at Microsoft, whom Steve Jobs seemingly hated with a passion, Apple may never have created the iPhone or iPad.
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Recounting the story of the birth of the iPhone at a talk at the Computer History Museum in California, former Apple iOS chief Scott Forstall said: The iPhone had a very circuitous route. We’d been working on a tablet project.
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It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft. Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he’d come back pissed off.
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The unnamed Microsoft executive, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs’s wife Laurene Powell Jobs, continuously talked and bragged about Redmond-based company’s plans for tablets and styluses, so much so that Jobs decided to try and beat him.
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After being badgered by the Microsoft executive over dinner for the 10th time, being told how Microsoft was going to change the world with its tablet PC software and stylus and that Apple should just license it, Jobs lost patience and, as recounted in Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography, said: F*** this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.
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Despite the iPad having the Apple Pencil today, Jobs famously hated styluses. Forstall recounted Jobs as saying: You don’t use a stylus… we’re born with 10 styluses.
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During the development of the iPad, which began as a table-sized multi-touch prototype on which you could move photos with your fingers codenamed project purple, Apple identified that smartphones were becoming a threat to its iPod business and so diverted efforts towards what was to become the iPhone.
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Forstall recounted Jobs saying: Do you think you could take that demo that we’re doing with the tablet and the multi-touch and shrink it down to something small enough to fit in your pocket?
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We went back to the design team and…