The Untold Origin Story of the iPhone: How a Side Project Became Apple’s Defining Product

The breakthrough that turned Apple into a global, billion-unit-selling, culture-shifting industry giant wasn’t a laptop or a portable music player—it was the iPhone. When it debuted in 2007, it launched to the public as a fully realized, elegantly crafted, confident product that felt like an obvious, inevitable leap forward for technology.

But behind the polished finished product, the iPhone we know today wasn’t built only on big gambles, obsessive attention to detail, visionary design, and a clear view of the future. It was also shaped by wrong turns, eleventh-hour overhauls, and more than a little lucky coincidence.

To start at the very beginning: the first product Apple set out to build wasn’t a phone. It was a tablet.

Cross-functional teams across Apple constantly tinker with unproven, emerging technologies. “We have hundreds of small internal projects just poking around, testing new ideas,” explains Myra Haggerty, Apple’s vice president of sensors. “Every so often someone will say, ‘Hey, come check out what we’re working on!’ You wander into some random lab, and they’re building something really cool, and the next question is always: what could we actually do with this?”

One early example of this experimental spirit came from a project led by designer Duncan Kerr. In 1999, Kerr—a British designer with a wide-ranging background spanning engineering, technology, industrial design, and interface prototyping—joined the industrial design studio led by Apple’s legendary design chief Jony Ive.

In early 2003, he began hosting weekly Tuesday meetings with interface designers and input engineers to reimagine how people interact with computers. After all, the decades-old “point and click with a mouse” standard had already been around for 25 years. Kerr’s team tested a range of cutting-edge technologies: camera-tracking interaction systems, spatial audio, haptic (vibration-based) feedback, and 3D displays. “We’d bring in research teams or companies working on interesting new tech, run dozens of demos, and test out whatever weird ideas we had,” he says.

Kerr was particularly fascinated by the idea of controlling on-screen objects directly with a user’s fingers. But paper mockups could only take their work so far. He, alongside interface designers Bas Ording and Imran Chaudhri, wanted to build a working physical multi-touch display to advance their experiments. That search led them to the iGesture NumPad, a combined mouse and touchpad built by FingerWorks, a small Delaware-based startup.

FingerWorks was founded by Wayne Westerman, a piano player who lived with repetitive stress injury. Working with his professor John Elias, he invented a line of keyboards that required almost no pressure to register input. Because these devices could detect and track multiple finger touches at once, they could also interpret custom gestures drawn on the surface, replacing standard mouse actions. For example, to open a file, you would twist your fingertips on the pad like you were twisting open a jar lid.

In late 2003, Apple commissioned FingerWorks to build a larger version of their multi-touch pad: 12 by 9.5 inches, a size much closer to that of a standard computer screen. Kerr’s team set up a test rig in Apple’s Infinite Loop 2 design studio. They mounted an LCD projector on a tripod, pointed directly down at the touchpad, and taped a sheet of white paper over the pad to make the image projected from a nearby Power Mac bright and clear. Then the real work began: they built new ways to interact with the on-screen elements. Slide a finger across the pad, and you could move an icon. Spread two fingers apart, and a map or photo would enlarge. Use both hands, and you could tap, drag, and stretch content freely. The experience felt nothing short of magical.

In November 2003, Kerr’s team showed the prototype to Jony Ive, who immediately brought Steve Jobs in to test it. Every person who tried the multi-touch demo fell in love with it, and agreed it was the future of computing—they just weren’t sure yet what product it would end up in.

That question got an unexpected answer in late 2005. Jobs attended the 50th birthday party of a Microsoft engineer, who was married to a friend of Jobs’ wife Laurene. Over dinner, the engineer pitched Jobs on Microsoft’s vision for the future of computing: a stylus-controlled tablet that was portable, powerful, and untethered.

“But he got the entire product wrong,” Jobs later recalled, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs. “This was at least the tenth time he’d brought this up to me, and I got so fed up that I went home and said, ‘Fuck this. Let’s show him what a real tablet can actually be.’” Jobs showed up to the executive team meeting the following Monday fired up. “We need to show the world how to build a real tablet,” he announced—and by real, he meant one that didn’t require a separate stylus. “God gave us 10 styluses,” he often joked, wiggling his fingers for emphasis.

Suddenly, the multi-touch prototype Kerr’s team had built years earlier felt like the perfect fit for this new tablet project. Using parts from iBook laptops, Ive’s team built working multi-touch tablet prototypes that ran Mac OS X, but the results underwhelmed. In 2005, a touchscreen the size of a sheet of paper required a high-speed processor, which in turn required a large, heavy battery. The prototypes were disappointingly bulky and thick. Even worse, the desktop Mac operating system wasn’t designed to be controlled by finger touches. Even so, Apple bought FingerWorks outright, bringing Westerman, Elias, and all of their valuable patents to Apple’s Cupertino campus.

Many people have claimed credit for putting the idea of an Apple phone into Steve Jobs’ head, but the idea didn’t need any pushing. By 2005, cell phones could already play music. They were clunky and limited, but the writing was on the wall: consumers didn’t want to carry two separate devices. The iPod’s days as Apple’s core blockbuster product were already numbered.

But Apple had zero experience building phones: no dedicated engineers, no designers with handset experience, no existing relationships with cellular carriers. On the board’s recommendation, Jobs partnered with an established industry veteran: Motorola.

It was a logical choice. Motorola had supplied processors for Mac computers for years, and its slim, sleek RAZR flip phone was one of the best-selling handsets on the market. The plan was simple: integrate Apple’s iPod software into a phone Motorola had already designed. The result would be the first phone that could play music purchased from the iTunes Store, which was already the go-to source for 80% of people who downloaded music online.

When rumors spread that Apple was building a phone, the company’s stock spiked, photoshopped concept images circulated across the internet, and Apple fans grew obsessed with the upcoming device. They wondered if it would have the iconic sleek iPod design, a physical click wheel, space for thousands of songs, and the ability to use any song as a ringtone. In every case, the answer was no. The final product, called the Motorola ROKR E1, was an unattractive, cluttered plastic handset. No matter how much free space was on its memory card, it was limited to holding just 100 songs. Without FireWire or USB 2 connectivity, transferring music from a computer took forever. Though it could connect to the internet, it couldn’t download songs directly over the connection.

“The most frustrating part was that people kept calling it the Apple phone or the iTunes phone,” says Greg Joswiak, Apple’s current head of worldwide marketing. “It was like, ‘Trust me: We had nothing to do with this. We built iTunes; they built the phone.’”

When Jobs unveiled the ROKR at a special event in September 2005, his disappointment was impossible to miss. “It’s a pretty cool phone,” he managed to say, and the audience responded with no applause. And the ROKR wasn’t an exception—every cell phone on the market at the time was a terrible user experience.

“We just hated them; they were so awful to use,” Jobs later told Fortune magazine. He noted the market was enormous: a billion phones sold every year, four times the number of personal computers shipped. “It was a great challenge: Let’s make a great phone that we fall in love with,” he said. “We’ve got the technology. We’ve got the miniaturization from the iPod. We’ve got the sophisticated operating system from Mac.” Of course, an Apple music phone would essentially end the iPod’s reign as Apple’s blockbuster product. But Jobs reasoned it was better for Apple to disrupt its own business than for a competitor to do it.

The fastest path to a music phone was to add calling features to the existing iPod. Jobs asked Tony Fadell, who led Apple’s iPod division, to build working prototypes of this concept. Fadell’s small team tested two main approaches. One was a full-screen video iPod—“like a tiny little iPad before iPads even existed,” Fadell says. It would have a virtual click wheel: it would appear on the screen when you needed to scroll through lists, and disappear when you played video. The second prototype was a standard iPod with internal cellular hardware added in.

Both designs ran into the same fatal problem: the click wheel. It worked great for scrolling through a list of contact names, but typing text was a nightmare. You had to scroll to one letter at a time, and even with predictive text help, the process was ridiculously clunky. “We tried for weeks and weeks and weeks to make that work, but it never did,” Fadell says.

That’s when someone remembered the multi-touch experiment the design team had built a few years earlier. What if they shrank that technology down to use as a phone’s interface? What if the entire front of the phone was just a multi-touch screen—no tiny physical keyboard, nothing but screen on the front?

“Put the tablet project on hold,” Jobs ordered. “Let’s build a phone.”

By this point, the multi-touch team—including Kerr, Ording, and Chaudhri—no longer needed their DIY projector setup. They had built standalone hardware: 12-inch multi-touch iBook screens, though they were still tethered to Power Macs to run software. To mimic the size of a phone screen, they limited the active display area to a phone-sized rectangle on the larger screen.

Bas Ording, who had worked as an interface designer at Apple since 1998 and specialized in smooth, intuitive animations, built a working demo of a contacts app with 200 names stored. Flick your finger on the screen, and the list would scroll. Tap a name, and it would open that person’s contact card. Tap a phone number, and it would pull up a fake dialing screen.

The most impressive feature, though, was inertial scrolling. Flick your finger on a web page, for example, and it would keep scrolling on its own momentum, just like a physical object would. Flick again to speed it up; if you stop flicking, it would gradually slow to a stop, following natural physics. When you reached the end of the page, “Instead of just stopping abruptly, it would actually have sort of a bouncy feel to it,” Ording says. “So it’s not only more fun to use, it’s also functional.” The small bounce told users they had reached the edge of the content. It was an incredibly compelling, joyful, natural-feeling bit of technical magic.

Now there were two separate teams working on competing phone concepts. Fadell led the iPod-plus-phone project, codenamed P1. Jobs assigned the all-screen multi-touch project, codenamed P2, to senior software designer Scott Forstall. Forstall had joined NeXT straight out of Stanford in 1992, followed Jobs to Apple when Jobs returned, and had led the design of Mac OS X’s iconic Aqua interface and the Safari web browser.

Jobs encouraged both teams to work at full speed for six months, and the competition between the two projects ranged from friendly to cutthroat, depending on which team member you ask. Finally, it was time to pick a winner: Apple would bet everything on the most promising concept.

After watching the latest demos from both teams, Jobs concluded that P2—the all-glass, multi-touch phone—was far more challenging and complex, but also far more exciting. “We all know this is the one we want to do, so let’s make it work,” he said. Fadell would lead hardware development, while Forstall would build the operating system and software. There was now one official project, and its codename was Purple.

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Excerpt adapted from Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue. Published by arrangement with Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2026 David Pogue.