Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Story of the iPhone

Galley Friend S.B. now has an iPhone and after tinkering with it for 10 minutes, I've been transformed from nauseated skeptic to total true believer. I want need one.

Not that you care, of course. But what you might very much care about is this outstanding Wired story on how the iPhone came to be. It's filled with great stuff like this:

Through it all, Jobs maintained the highest level of secrecy. Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2 (the abandoned iPod phone was called Purple 1). Teams were split up and scattered across Apple's Cupertino, California, campus. Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter. Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes. By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.


I'd like to think that the CIA is capable of doing a project with such rigidly compartmentalized security.

2 comments:

Famous J said...

I'd like to think the CIA has a magic wand that's capable of making terrorists strap flowers on themselves instead of explosives. Somehow I don't think that's true either.

Anonymous said...

even if they did have such a wand, they wouldn't use it while Bush is in office...