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Name: The One Device
Rating: 3.5 (26 reviews)
Author: Brian Merchant

Brian Merchant

The Secret History of the iPhone

3.5 (26 Bewertungen)

17 Min.

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"The One Device" by Brian Merchant provides a comprehensive history of the iPhone's creation, from concept to launch, delving into Steve Jobs' life and the impact this revolutionary object had on our world.

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What’s in it for me? Learn the little-known story of the one device to rule them all.

Apple’s iPhone is often seen as the pinnacle of modern consumer technology. It rules modern markets, having replaced MP3 players, cameras and palm pilots with one handheld miracle. But this device’s story is deeper and more complex than is immediately apparent.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. It rests on the shoulders of countless other innovations, including phones, voice-recognition tools and touch-screen technology.

And the innovators who paved the way for the iPhone aren’t the only unsung heroes in this tale; there are also the millions of workers worldwide who toil in abominable South American mines and Chinese mega factories.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why Steve Jobs can’t really be credited with inventing the iPhone;
the horrible reality behind the raw materials used to manufacture the iPhone; and
that the iPhone’s roots reach back to an early twentieth-century Swedish inventor.

The iPhone has changed the technological world and its history stretches far beyond Steve Jobs.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years, you know that the iPhone is a colossal success. Indeed, it’s so successful that, in 2016, when technology-industry expert Horace Dediu made a list of the world’s top products, he listed the iPhone as not only the best-selling phone, but the best-selling camera, music player, video player and computer. The phone has sold one billion units. To give some perspective, that’s 550 million more units than the mega-hit Harry Potter series sold.

Not just that, but when Wall Street analysts took stock of the most profitable products in the world, the iPhone was one of the top items on their list as well. It was even one place above Marlboro cigarettes, one of the biggest manufacturers of one of the world’s most addictive products.

So the iPhone is ludicrously popular. But why?

Most people attribute its success to Steve Jobs, the man often given sole credit for its invention. However, the history of the iPhone truly begins in the early 2000s with a small group of Apple employees who were secretly experimenting with human-computer interfaces.

The group contained a few software designers and input engineers and one industrial designer, all of whom met, without Job’s knowledge, to experiment with unconventional user interfaces. Among them was Joshua Strickon, who’d recently received his PhD from MIT Media Lab. He was a wiz with human-computer interaction and touch-based technology software.

Alongside Strickon were people who pioneered the field itself, like Greg Christie, head of the Human Interface team and a lead force on Apple’s handheld mobile device, the Personal Digital Assistant.

Other crucial people in the team were designers Imran Chaudhri and Bas Ording. One member of the original iPhone team described them as “the Lennon and McCartney of user interface design.”

The group collectively believed that the traditional keyboard and mouse were outmoded. So they set out to enable more direct interaction with computers and explored motion sensors and multitouch technology in particular.

After months of tinkering, they produced the first, very low-tech prototype of what would eventually become the iPhone. However, they certainly weren’t the first to delve into such technology.

The first mobile phone is a century old, but cell phones didn’t take off until the 1980s.

You might be surprised to hear that the original precursor of the iPhone is quite old – over a century old, to be exact.

The first mobile phone was made in 1910 by the Swedish inventor Lars Magnus Ericsson, who later founded the tech giant Ericsson. To be fair, this mobile device was a car phone and to function it actually had to be directly connected to telephone lines using a wire.

The battery in your iPhone is rechargeable thanks to years of research, trial and error.

One of the most remarkable things about the iPhone is its battery capacity. Interestingly, the technology behind this super battery has somewhat unusual origins. It dates to the oil crisis of the 1970s, when prices were soaring and the public was getting uneasy – and scientists everywhere were asking whether there might be a way to decrease dependence on oil.

This fear resulted in greater alternative-energy research. Exxon, for instance, hired a brilliant Stanford University chemist, Stan Whittingham, whose job it was to find new energy sources. And his work broke new ground.

The selfie is old news, but the iPhone camera popularized it.

Did you know that, in 2007, the so-called “dumb” phones sold by Nokia had a better camera than that of the original iPhone? It’s true and, shockingly enough, the original iPhone camera only had two megapixels, compared to the eight megapixels of the iPhone 6.

Even more interesting is that, when Apple began considering incorporating a camera, the company didn’t consider it an essential feature. Today, the camera is almost as essential as the phone itself; it’s also seriously complex. The camera module that goes into an iPhone today has over 200 parts and is considered indispensable. It has a sensor, an image-stabilization module and an image-signal processor that sharpens the image.

Early versions of the AI technology used in the iPhone emerged decades ago.

Off the top of your head, do you know if it’s going to rain today? How about who invented the light bulb or where the nearest sushi restaurant is?

Well, Siri does. In 2015, this artificial intelligence gave out one billion answers a week. In 2016, that number doubled.

The raw materials used to make the iPhone cause all manner of human suffering.

Can you name all the different materials in an iPhone? Most people wouldn’t even know where to start. And the list is pretty long, with at least 30 materials, including aluminum, iron, copper and even a bit of tin.

That tin most likely comes from the mines of Cerro Rico, right outside the Bolivian city of Potosí. After being mined, the tin is sent to smelters, usually EM Vinto or Operaciones Metalúrgicas, before being shipped to, among other firms, the manufacturers of Apple products. In iPhones, this tin is usually used in the form of solder, a tin-based alloy that connects the various components within the device.

The parts that make up your iPhone are manufactured by exploited workers.

In China, just outside of Shenzhen, there sits a massive Foxconn factory that manufactures and assembles the iPhone. Foxconn is the largest employer in mainland China; it employs some 1.3 million people globally, a number only topped by McDonald’s and Walmart.

The company’s Longhua plant in Shenzhen is roughly 1.4 square miles in size and at one point it housed some 450,000 workers. Today, while fewer people work in the plant, it’s still one of the largest in the world.

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Worum geht es in The One Device?

The One Device (2017) lays out the history of what may be the most important piece of technology on the market: the Apple iPhone. From an interview with an IBM engineer to the frightening depths of a Bolivian mine, Merchant takes us everywhere and explains how the iPhone was born and what it means for the world.

Bestes Zitat aus The One Device

Full-time Cerro Rico miners usually dont live much longer than the age of 40. One of the reasons is that the harmful chemicals they inhale on a daily basis destroy their lungs.

—Brian Merchant

Wer The One Device lesen sollte

Tech geeks and gadget nerds
Lovers of technological history
iPhone users

Über den Autor

Brian Merchant is a journalist of science and technology. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Slate, Fortune magazine and the Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. He’s also an editor for Motherboard – the science and technology department of VICE.

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