📱 iPhone: The Device Steve Jobs Didn’t Want To Build

The Best One Yet

Nick & Jack Studios

News, Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2025

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet here: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/

Before 2007, mobile phones had tiny keyboards, crappy screens with internet so slow - you could finish a super burrito while waiting for your MySpace profile to load. Then Apple wowed the world with the iPhone: a digital Swiss Army knife that replaced cameras, maps, music players, AND created an entire new app economy. But the wildest part? Steve Jobs didn’t even want to build it…at first. Once Steve finally said ""yes,"" the real work began: a top-secret team (codename: Project Purple), some engineering dead-ends (a click wheel), and a near-impossible engineering challenge. Even then, Apple barely pulled it off — the first iPhone prototype was so flakey, one wrong tap could have sunk Steve's big reveal. Find out the (many) ways the iPhone almost failed before it even launched, what drove Steve Jobs to order 4,000 lattes, how a single device reshaped society (and your screen time), and why the iPhone is the best idea yet.

Subscribe to The Best Idea Yet for the untold origin stories of the products you’re obsessed with — and the bold risk takers who made them go viral.

Episodes drop every Tuesday, listen here: https://wondery.com/links/the-best-idea-yet/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yeties, Nick and Jack here coming at you from the T-Boy Studio. On our weekly show, the best idea. Yeah,
0:06.1	we go deep on the most popular products of all time. And in the latest episode, we revealed the
0:10.9	untold origin story of the iPhone, the most influential product of the last century. That's right.
0:17.3	The thing you're most likely listening to us on right now? Yeah. You don't know how Apple actually invented it.
0:23.2	Because Jack, it didn't actually begin with Steve Jobs, did it, man? No. It started with a guy named Tony, and it started with the iPod. Yeah, and a secret team called Project Purple. So besties today, we whipped up a sample of our latest, The Best Idea Yet episode
0:39.3	all on the Apple iPhone. So enjoy this sample and then head over to the best idea yet to hear
0:45.0	the rest of Apple HQ.
1:03.2	He flicks on the lights and reveals this strange new device.
1:06.7	It looks like an air hockey table with a projector hanging above it.
1:11.4	The projector casts an enlarged image of a computer's home screen onto a giant trackpad.
1:18.2	When Johnny taps one of the projected icons with his finger, it opens a file.
1:23.3	He pinches his fingers together and pulls them apart, and the document zooms in and zooms out.
1:28.0	This is basically a giant early mock-up of the iPhone home screen.
1:33.1	It's huge. It's ugly, and it took a heck of a lot of work to get it this far.
1:37.0	It's important to note here, this isn't a touchscreen.
1:40.3	It's a giant trackpad, like a crude version of the one you probably have on your laptop right now.
1:45.5	But Steve, he can see through the crudeness to the underlying beauty.
1:49.7	They call this interface multi-touch, and it is light years ahead of the other touch interfaces.
1:56.3	Remember BlackBerry?
1:57.7	They're like click-clacking away with 35 different buttons, and computers are still using mice.
2:04.0	Multi-touch might be the most important technology at Apple you've never heard of,
2:08.6	because those other interfaces only respond to one touch point. Your finger, or stylus, can basically
	...

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