iPhone-creator Tony Fadell: don't let smartphones threaten your 'analogue life'

On the week of its 10th anniversary, the inventor of the iPod, and a key member of the iPhone team talks exclusively to WIRED about how Apple’s mobile came to be
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Few people have genuinely had a hand in shaping modern society, but Tony Fadell – without bombast – can legitimately claim to be one of them. Before becoming known as "one of the fathers” of the iPod, Apple’s ubiquitous music player, Fadell, 48, had a glittering early career at Philips Electronics and Apple spinoff General Magic, working with Sony, Philips, Matsushita, Toshiba and other consumer electronics firms developing personal handheld communicators.

Read more: How Tony Fadell brought a touch of Apple to Google

Indeed, at Philips he co-founded the company’s Mobile Computing Group, becoming the firm’s chief technology officer and director of engineering. Then, in January 2001, destiny came calling in the form of Jon Rubinstein, Apple's then hardware boss. Fadell was on vacation on a ski slope in Vail, Colorado, at the time, when he stopped to take a call from Rubinstein. Rubinstein was getting it touch to hire him to assemble and run Apple's iPod and Special Projects group and develop what would eventually become the first iPod.

Five years later, Fadell would replace the retiring Rubinstein as senior vice president of the iPod Division, a device he helped create that had become responsible for 50 per cent of all Apple revenue.

In his seven years at Apple, before leaving to found Nest Labs - bought by Google for $3.2 billion (£1.9 billion) in cash – he also played a key role in creating the first three iterations of the iPhone.

What better person to ask about the origins of the original smartphone, a piece of technology that changed the world as we know it, as it approaches its 10th anniversary this Thursday. We speak to Fadell about the origins of the iPhone, early competitors, and the importance of holding on to the analogue core of our lives, in this digitally driven age.

WIRED: There are many differing origin stories for the iPhone. Why is this?

Tony Fadell: Well, there were many projects that came together to make the final phone. There was a large screen iPod for video that had a touch interface. There was an iPod phone, which was basically an iPod Mini, perhaps a bit bigger, with a phone inside that had a wheel and a small screen. There was a touchscreen Macbook Pro being worked on, a multitouch Macbook Pro. That was what was going on from a hardware perspective. Then there were different software projects, too. This was over a period of nine to 12 months.

The touchscreen Macbook project was basically trying to get touchscreen technology into a Mac to try to compete with Microsoft tablets. Steve was pissed off, and wanted to show them how to do it right. Well, that might have been the project to show Microsoft how to do it right, but they quickly realised there was so much software and there were so many new apps needed, and that everything had to be changed that it was very difficult. Plus the multitouch itself, we didn't know we could scale it that large to a full-screen display. Those were the challenges over on Mac.

The big-size iPod with a display and single-touch system already had video. But you couldn't see enough of the video at the time. There was a big screen [version] without the wheel, so we were trying to make the touchscreen work to replicate the wheel, but we quickly found out the single-touch touchscreen was not good enough.

Then there was the iPod phone, which was all about getting a phone inside of an iPod so you could make calls using the headphones. This had the problem that you couldn't dial properly or do text entry or anything else - you just couldn't use it. So, you had a text entry problem there, a single-touch problem on the video iPod and then you had a huge software, applications and touchscreen size problem on the Mac version.

Then there was the Motorola Rokr [Apple collaboration]. So those were the four big brands that were going on.

Did Apple deliberately make the Rokr a poor device?

No, it was not deliberately made poor. Not at all. We tried our best. Motorola would only do so much with it. Their software team was only so good. Their operations system was only so good. And that experience just didn't work very well. It was a clash of all kinds of problems, it wasn't a case of trying to not make it good.

We were trying to do this because we didn't want cell phones to come eat our lunch, OK? The Motorola Rokr died much earlier than the arrival of the iPhone. This was us trying to dip our toe in the water, because we said, 'Let's not make a phone, but see how we can work with phones to see if we can have a limited number of songs on a phone'. So people could use iTunes and then they would want to move over to an iPod. It wasn't about making it less good because the iPhone was coming. This was well before the iPhone was even thought of.

The iPod was 50 per cent of Apple's revenue at the time. Did you feel tremendous pressure to repeat the success?

Oh, absolutely. We felt the pressure every holiday. Every holiday quarter we had to outdo ourselves from the last holiday to grow the revenue but to keep the users, to make sure none of our competition would be able to gain on us. So our whole goal was what can we do to 'wow' the world every year and keep leapfrogging ourselves and keep it competitive.

What we ran into, though, was cell phones. How to put this functionality in them, that was the big problem - and users going, 'Which one am I going to take, my iPod or my cell phone?' Because they were not going to carry both. That's what we started with the Rokr.

It was very clear, after the Rokr, and after everything we had learned in what it was going to take, that the worry was about the 'celestial jukebox' - people wouldn't have to buy large capacity iPods, 150GB or so, because they were soon going to be able to download. So we had an existential problem, people were not going to have to buy larger and larger iPods. The high-capacity iPods were where we were making all our money, and if they could download at any time - and we could see the time when the networks were going to get faster because of 3G - we were like 'oh my God, we're going to lose this business' to this music jukebox in the sky, which is basically what Spotify is.

Did you know at the time about the LG Prada touchscreen smartphone that came out a year earlier in 2006?

Yes, I knew about it. I had probably 100 different cell phones, 100 different competitor music players, consumer electronics of all sorts ripped apart and looked at. We looked at everything. They were all over my office in various pieces, just to look at them, to understand what they were, see how they were built and what their competitive value was.

Steve Jobs described the final first version of the iPhone as more like an iPod than a computer. Does this description still stand up today?

In the form, yes - but not in the function. From the form perspective where it's a very personal device and fits in your pocket, yes it is definitely like an iPod. But from a computing view it's nothing like the iPod; it has everything to do with a computer but with a much friendlier, on-the-go interface.

Finally, ten years on, how has the iPhone changed your life?

It has made me incredibly productive and has changed the world, from how I shop, how I travel, how I message people and communicate - every single aspect of my life has changed because of it. And, even more so, it has changed how my kids are growing up compared to how I and my wife grew up. And sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes that's a bad thing - and it requires all of us to make the proper changes in our lives to make sure we don't lose the analogue portion of our life and we don't just stay digital and mobile all the time.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK