Retracement of the iphone in his book the one device. This year is the tenth anniversary of the iphone. Hes interviewed by New York Times reporter steve lohr. Host brian i read your book as a true creation story. One is apple has seen the turmoil that they went through to what ends up as the creation of the iphone. That is the history of the creation of each one of the technologies and those stories are knit together. Why did you take that approach and take us back to the start of the book project itself. Guest yeah well so the idea for the book really kind of began with the stark realization that the phone had integrated itself into its own life and the life of my peers. It was something i really didnt understand particularly well. I, you know a lot of us have that moment i think when we are abruptly and suddenly forced to go without it for a second in this case i was in a cab. When i was retrieving it, i was standing in light at the dmz and i had jettisoned my responsibilities for the day and immediately put off the meetings at work, put off any other obligation. Thats what you do when you lose your phone. Its kind of like a it started jelling my head like what is it about this one device that gives of this power . Theres little else i can imagine to force such a thing. And i sort of resolved to dig into this thing understand how it works and see if more than just a consumer product. I sort of started to realize there were two stories. There was this one story, the history of the phone itself and how it was developed at apple that was pretty carefully guarded by apple itself, the corporation which is very good at controlling keeping secretive its narrative and the other side of the story that might have been in the keynote presentation. In parallel to that its a story of how any technology has developed that requires much more vast timelines, much more input, much more complexity so i kind of wanted to look at both of them and see how one pulse from the other. In a way the chapters that are not about apple are about the development of this technological buffet line if you will but apple is able to come along and say we want that for a phone. We want multitouch. We will use this within ion battery because its the only thing that slender enough to run it. We are going to use a smart chip that uses very Little Energy but its also formidable process and then theres the story to how they integrated it which is the story of apple. Host the early on theres this breakdown moment of epiphany where you get your phone torn apart. Guest exactly. So that moment came early on because one of the very first things i did was i looked at this phone which is pretty much all screen. Okay we have got it to the first step is to find out whats actually in this thing so i took it to i fix fix it fix it whicha Company Based in san obispo. Host i didnt know that. Guest its a refurbished car dealership that they transformed and its the coolest place, and their mission is to kind of keep gadgets repairable and keep transparency about whats inside them alive because what apple wants to do is make us think of this thing is something that only they can provide and only they can fix, only they can have the power to sell, market and put it on the aftermarket that these guys are like no, its something you by yourself. It can be fixed and it can be tweaked if desired so i took it to them and they are very skilled breakdown technicians. The guys call the guys call that hardemon cheniere which is a great job title if ive ever seen one and he just started walking me through this. Youve got to be careful of these cables connected to the multitouch sensor and if you break down the phone is not going to work. The screen comes often you are looking at this the battery thats half the real estate and you can start reading through this whole world. That was kind of the moment that really sort of set off that epiphany that youre talking about. Okay theres a lot in here and that more or less if you will enable the content for the second track of the book. For. Host pence elope. Explain what it is and what it explains about apples culture. Guest the pencil lopezs signature screw that they patented and apple doesnt want just anybody to open up apple doesnt want just anybody to open up it was a classic steve jobs mantra. He was quoted in the biography is saying we dont want to let people into her stuff because they will just mess it up. That has sort of been instilled into apples entire process ever since. It was part and parcel with keeping everything small and compact but the pentelobe you can just go to your workbench in take a screwdriver in open up the phone. You have to track down the custom tool that is small enough to get into these little screws so you can open it up and it sends a message that it takes someone trained and skilled and its not for everybody. Basically they are trying anything perhaps indirectly but kind of to instill this idea that its to be bought and its to be upgraded every year. So it does say a lot about apple. Host more broadly you run out some themes and hear clearly and one of them is obviously and this goes back forever. Isaac newton the physicists is sad only because ive stood on the shoulder of the giant but the case you make in the book with scrupulous reporting is that you know this is particularly true for a product like the iphone. Elaborate on that point a bit and some of this is a marvelous invention. Its sedimentary layers in geology may build on each other. Part of why it took off as it did is because of the timing of all these things coming together meticulously. Help me out and help us out with what is so striking in the complexity of this product . Guest yeah so i fully believe thats one of the most important things in the book is that in this case, in the case of apple and the case of particularly steve jobs who led apple, that myth of the lone inventor resonated and its a compelling narrative and its a useful narrative for marketing a product. If you have somebody who is charismatic, clearly very smart, clearly a master of industry some unlike steve jobs can come and sell this product and forever be okay with it even as shade of the story. He hands on had a lot to do with it but the truth is even the iphone insofar as a developed at apple never would have happened without scores of people working aroundtheclock to make it happen. The tenth anniversary of the iphone is coming up and they all have pictures of one person, steve jobs. Hes holding a phone and hes on stage and he is a commanding presence and our brain, its easy for us to process that. The guy handed it down and now we have the iphone but exploring how these interlocking stories of innovation to place is so important because its not just on the scale of the breakthroughs that apple managed to do which they did manage to really further the art in a lot of important ways. On the engineering side did manage to get the technology called multitouch which allows you to do all those hand vocabularies that translate into computing. They manage to get in on the class and an interesting way that is been done before. Guy named josh strick on had a role in that in the past and the Interface Team all really did amazing work designing the human interface that sort of made the iphone what the iphone is. Its sort of, or guess its called the jingle of the iphone. Its so much more than that but its what makes it murmur a. Its what makes it the experience of the rubber banding effects. Host you didnt have to talk about it. All those trend lines we are talking about coming together the battery being small enough and being compact and lowpower Everything Else is at a point that those elements were apple worked and sold into furthering that part and this is how we are going to make it stand out and make it something that everybody wants to give. Apple does deserve an immense amount of credit for that but again part of the story is that the iphone was born as a software interaction paradigm behind steve jobs back. The Honorary Team that i documented the book is basically experimenting. It was fun. It was wild stuff. They had this crazy projector that they were using to attack different products together in what would become the iphone and steve jobs had nothing to do with that from the beginning. Once he saw it in a form that was convincing enough when the demos were good enough they were able to convince him to take it up but not before that. With the invention comes from so many different sources and i think its important based on the origin stories. Host it is the defining thing that people see. You might want to drill down a little bit on that one. Its who you describe in this company and the saga. Tell us that story because without it there is no iphone. Exactly. Posts that comes from matt. Guest it does. MultiTouch Technology itself i did try to trace as far back as i could and i visited and this guy named benson, a great name for a guy who was in technology. That was a fun little and though that i picked up in some of the first purported multitech to multiTouch Technology. Thats what the iphone does so well. It integrates the web in Touch Technology so you can touch your maps on line and you can move your pictures. That maintains that he developed some of the earliest multiTouch Technology decades ago and since it was public and patented it got swept up into the slipstream of technology that would wind up later in the iphone. The guy who put on the table so that apple could see it was Wayne Westerman who has this incredible story. He is a brilliant engineer from the midwest who comes from a family that is plagued by disability and he had a severe hand disability. When he was the ph. D. Student,. Host tapping on a keyboard with killing him. Guest exactly. Was trying to write his ph. D. Dissertation and he had to stop. He looked around at the market to see if there was any alternative hard keyboard and there werent any so he trained some of the thousands that he had been working with to recognize gestures and swiping and pretty soon he came up with this pad that one let him do his ph. D. And to seem like a Good Alternative for people who had a problem with their hands so instead of just always typing without lighter touch, you can do a lot of things with swiping and gestures and vocabulary was a lot larger them what we can do with the iphone today but he started manufacturing this product and it was beloved by a small percentage of users, people who have repetitive injuries and people who were into creative computing, editor, Music Software users who thought it was cool to swipe into little gestures. It was an opaque tab that you would use with next years mouse or keyboard. It wasnt on a screen yet but a Junior Engineer at apple just happened to bring one of these then. These guys that i mentioned earlier with this experimentation these Junior Engineers they said whats that . That literally became the focal point for their experiment and that is what was under the projector when they wheeled in a Projector Screen that combined this touch unit. They put literally a piece of paper over it in the team down the home screen of a magnet and it was software they could touch. That was a really sparked the entire trajectory. Host the great back story of his mother. He has a history knowing this in the family and its the university of delaware that really capitalized on it. Guest that was one of my favorite stories to dredge up. Hes still at apple so i could and interview him because he was behind the titanium curtain but i was able to get in touch with his sister who told me the family back story and its just fascinating how it really was one of those stories of overcoming adversity to produce something. Its not even just the iphone now. The same basic tech elegy is the android and its informing the language of how we talk to computers. Host i will just read a paragraph and ask you to elaborate. It again just a fascinating back story and details. They bankrolled the spanish empire empire for hundreds of years in the 16th century some 60 of the world silver was pulled out. By the 17th century and it turned it into one of the biggest cities in the world, 160,000 people local natives african slaves and spanish settlers making the Industrial Hub larger than london at the time. Warwick, and amount would swallow many of them. Between four and 8 Million People are believed to have perished there from silly us is freezing and starvation. You go down there for what reason . Guest well it turns out that apple sources some of its tune from his mind that used to bankrolled the spanish empire hundreds of years ago. Its the same place which was just incredible. Apple publishers where its and its suppliers get its medals and its sourcing its medal from amalgam and its tin mostly. Comes from there and the tin is used in sadr which holds the components in place and does a number of other things but its fascinating to me that this cuttingedge device, the thing that is so integral to how we think of the modern moment and whats ostensibly propels the future is rooted in the same line, sadly by children sometimes pulled out of the rock and its easy to disconnect the products to its origins as stuff that just comes out of the earth. I thought it was important to spend a chapter looking at where it really begins in the physical sense, not just its history or the idea of it but where the physical material comes from. Its not just bolivia and its not just tin, its tungsten and its cobalt for the battery and its lithium which is one of the more benignly mined materials. The drawback in nearby chile where they mind lithium cell its everywhere. There are materials being pulled from every continent on earth just about and they all sort of ease into the iphone. Host and you asked yourself to do and all an exercise about how much of the earth and water do you use to produce x number of iphone that we now have. Refresh my memory. It was a big number, right . Guest yeah it was a lot. Poster you have to tear up a grant to get a little bit. Guest was 75 c. Lows of order for every. 9 grams in the iphone so you are moving a lot of earth to do that and that means you are using a lot of toxic chemicals and he focused on the cyanide. You are producing all these byproducts. For every single one of these theres an exponential amount of earth being mined. Since i publish that part there than other estimates that are even worse that are even more and this was on the conservative side. Basically if you are thinking about taking aluminum out of the earth you have to have these huge operations to get the gold you are judging or in cyanide sometimes to remove the stuff. The tin is coming from the laborintensive by hand from a cooperative mining structure so there are all these different or or its having a big impact on the planet. Host how many miles did you log . Did you ever give that a rough calculation . Guess why didnt actually but i should. I should look at the iphone geotracker. Host lets go to china because you did visit the plant where these things are made and you got in and you are one of the few people that have done that. This guy posed as a contractor. Where you just sort of, there were supports opening. Guest i have to give the credit to my translator who is a journalist in shanghai and i think we were kind of imposing because we tried through the love board channels all day. We had been interviewing people all around. We were trying to arrange a meeting and we met a manager who manages an operation there who said they would mind taking a song that you need approval. He basically burned all day doing interviews trying to get in. Host its outside. Guest outside the gate. Host there is another shot here. Guest there was a sidewalk outside of it in a structure that you can walk over. Host give us the dimensions. This is x number, it goes on forever. What did it look like and its the size of the city. Guest from the outside its deceptive. Salt walled off and the wall goes on for pretty much as far as you can see. What ultimately happened after trying to to get in all day had to use the bathroom legitimately so badly. They said okay we will let this guy in. Maybe some genuine urgency or something and translated it was a bathroom that we could see. We will come right back. Host nobody tail view. Guest we have literally ran. And we got in the bathroom a deck around and we just ran and we ran and it really does think again. It feels like a city. We kept walking one direction and is kind of dilapidated and things are rusty. Its kind of like the docs of the edge of the city and people are playing a pickup game of basketball with their shirts on. It looks like a minor Chemical Spill and no one is really tending to it and its really a little rough so we turned around and started walking back in. In this regard, this place was filled with half a Million People, towering dormitories, giant factory blocks. You are just this tiny insignificant person navigating this huge giant machine of industry. Mika city it became more gentrified and more condensed. It got close to downtown and suddenly theres a center of commerce. There are cyber cafes and one of those little flappy things advertising. Host in the age range of the people as what . Guest 18 to 25. Host this is like the new england textile factories in america. It was 22yearold women. Its that kind of system. Guest not all but largely its people who came to rural areas and took money back komen became skilled workers and most of them dont last all that long bear. A lot of people say they can only take it for a year. The plan is to work there for a year, get a new job and get out. Some of them that i interviewed said they were in upper management positions and its too ugly the management culture, the Work Environment was too ugly. I sort of felt that. This place was immense on one scale but the more striking thing was that there was nothing in the entire factory that was designed to tailor or cater to the human spirit. It was all either you are working in a factory, you are paying to heat in the cafeteria and paying to shop at 7eleven. Theres nothing nice about it. There is no nice public area. Its all designed to squeeze the maximum value out of a person as possible and meanwhile you are wedged between factory blocks. I mean you know its something that i limit to my one drive. I spent an hour to an hour and a half inside their so i cant say i mean you know. I was a Foreign Correspondent for decades. Host used to be they were 10 applicants for ev