By the end of this book you’ll have a good idea who I think is winning the Apple/Google fight. But you’ll also develop enough respect for what each side has had to go through just to stay in the game that you might feel bad rooting for either side. One of the things that I didn’t expect when I took on this project was how hard it is to conceive and build the products that Steve Jobs liked to casually pull out of his pocket onstage. Whether you are an Apple engineer, a Google engineer, or any engineer, building products that change the world isn’t just work. It’s a quest. It leaves its participants not only tired the way all jobs sometimes do but mentally and physically exhausted—even traumatized—at the end. Part of Jobs’s appeal as a leader and a celebrity was that he successfully hid all this from public view. He made innovation look easy. Now he is gone. And, as you’ll see in the following pages, there are many engineers at both companies who want the rest of the world to know what changing the world really has been like. Before there could be the smartphones and tablets we all now buy and take for granted, there was yelling, screaming, backstabbing, dejection, panic, and fear over what it would take to get those projects off the ground and into consumers’ hands. They want you to understand what the iPhone and Android projects were like at the beginning—and so that is where this book will start.
The fifty-five miles from Campbell to San Francisco is one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Known as 280 to locals, it is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cell phone reception. For Andy Grignon in his Porsche Carrera, therefore, it was the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on January 8, 2007.
This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly fifteen minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cell phone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and at 10:00 a.m. the following day they—along with the rest of the world—would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.
Getting invited to one of Jobs’s famous product announcements was supposed to be a great honor. It anointed you as a player. Only a few dozen Apple employees, including top executives, got an invite. The rest of the spots were reserved for Apple’s board of directors, CEOs of partners—such as Eric Schmidt of Google and Stan Sigman at AT&T—and journalists from around the world. Grignon got an invite because he was the senior engineer for all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cell phones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the phone didn’t make calls, connect with Bluetooth headsets, or connect to Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life—often seven days a week—to the project. Few deserved to be there more than he did.
But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cell phone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? Jobs’s presentations were live, however. It was one of the things that made his shows so captivating. But for those in the background, such as Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress. Grignon couldn’t remember the last time a Jobs show of this magnitude had gone sideways. Part of what made Steve Jobs such a legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But Grignon found it hard to recall the last time Jobs was so unprepared going into a show.
Grignon had been part of the iPhone launch-preparation team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. But he had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his ninety-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been rehearsing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing the Internet connection, freezing, or just shutting down.
“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all—kind of like a cred badge. ‘Fuck yeah, I get to hang out with Steve,’” Grignon said. Like everything else that surrounded Jobs, the preparations were as secret as a U.S. missile attack on Afghanistan. Those who were truly in felt as if they were at the center of the universe. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards twenty-four hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in or out without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. More security checkpoints needed to be cleared once visitors got inside. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off-limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple had hired for the announcement—from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound—sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.
“It quickly got really uncomfortable,” Grignon said. “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall [when he was done chewing you out].” Grignon said that you would always ask yourself two questions during one of these lectures: “‘Is it my shit that broke this time?’ and ‘Is it the nth time it broke or the first time?’—because that actually mattered. The nth time would frustrate him, but by then he might have figured out a way around it. But if it was the first time, it added a whole new level of instability to the program.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems, he would come after people like Grignon. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times and that each time something went wrong,” Grignon said. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”
The iPhone didn’t work right for a good reason; it wasn’t close to being finished. Jobs was showing off a prototype. He just didn’t want the public to know that. But the list of things that still needed to be done before the iPhone could be sold was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying degrees of quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge, others had scuff marks on the screen. Thus no one in the public was allowed to touch an iPhone after Jobs unveiled it, despite a day of press briefings and a whole exhibit set up for them in the convention center. The worry was that even the best prototypes wouldn’t stand close scrutiny, Grignon said. They’d look fine at a distance and for Jobs’s demo, but if you held one in your hand, “You would laugh and say, ‘Wow, this thing really looks unfinished.’”
The phone’s software was in even worse shape. A big chunk of the previous four months had been consumed figuring
