The Day that Steve Jobs Gave Us The iPhone

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. And to search for the American Stories podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Up next, a story about an American product that was released not so long ago.00:00:27
Speaker 2: One.

00:00:27
Speaker 1: You might be listening to this show on right now. Well, this product to change the world. It changed everything. Let’s take a listen.

00:00:40
Speaker 3: On January ninth, two thousand and seven, Apple co founder Steve jobs, already a legendary pitchman, put on what many considered the best business presentation in corporate history. Here’s technology commentator Charlie Brown.

00:00:57
Speaker 4: Steve Jobes was a masta at tasing new technology to people. And everyone turned up to Macworld thinking they were seeing a new iPod or a new Mac. He was showing them something vastly different, something new, and something that was going to change the world. And he did it like the master that he was.

00:01:21
Speaker 5: This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and a half years.

00:01:26
Speaker 3: At the Macworld conference in San Francisco, Jobs built up the narrative before he even mentioned a new product.

00:01:34
Speaker 5: Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. Nineteen eighty four, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just change Apple, it changed the whole computer industry. In two thousand and one, we introduced the first iPod, and it didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry. Well, today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class.

00:02:26
Speaker 3: Jobs was famous for adding one more thing at the end of his keynotes. In his two thousand and seven iPhone presentation, he put the twist at the beginning. The following excerpt is the most viewed and maybe the most memorable part of the iPhone presentation.

00:02:45
Speaker 6: The first one.

00:02:49
Speaker 5: Is a widescreen iPod with touch controls, the second.

00:02:57
Speaker 6: Is a revolutionary multifi, and the third.

00:03:06
Speaker 5: Is a breakthrough Internet communications device. So three things, an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator, an iPod a phone.

00:03:31
Speaker 6: Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device and we are calling it iPhone.

00:03:49
Speaker 5: Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

00:03:54
Speaker 3: Every great story has a villain or a conflict in need of a resolution. In the two thousands, se an iPhone keynote, Job showed several competing smartphones and pointed out their weaknesses, and then showed how the iPhone solved all their issues.

00:04:10
Speaker 5: Now here’s for smartphones, right, Motorola Queue, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, no ke E sixty two, the usual suspects, And the problem with them is really sort of in the bottom forty there. They all have these keyboards that are there whether you need them or not to be there. And they all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are the same for every application. Well, every application wants a slightly different user interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons just for it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six months from now. You can’t run around and add a button to these things.

00:04:48
Speaker 6: They’re already shipped. Well, how do you solve this? Hmm? It turns out we have solved it.

00:04:55
Speaker 5: We solved it in computers twenty years ago. We solved it with a bit map screen that could display anything we want, put any user interface up, and a pointing device. We solved it with the mouse. Right, we solve this problem. So how are we gonna take this to a mobile device. Well, what we’re gonna do is get rid of all these buttons and just.

00:05:19
Speaker 6: Make a giant screen. A giant screen. Now, how are we gonna communicate this?

00:05:26
Speaker 5: We don’t want to carry around a mouse, right, so what are we gonna do?

00:05:29
Speaker 6: Oh, a stylus? Right, we’re gonna use a stylus.

00:05:33
Speaker 5: No, who wants a stylus. They have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuh, nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus. We’re gonna use the best pointing device in the world. We’re gonna use a point device.

00:05:49
Speaker 6: That we’re all born with. We’re born with ten of them. We’re gonna use our fingers.

00:05:54
Speaker 3: It’s easy to forget how funny jobs could be. On stage. His iPhone launch presentation elicited a laugh from the audience fifty one times. Here’s one of those times. During the iPhone maps, pitch Starbucks.

00:06:09
Speaker 5: I’m gonna search for Starbucks, and sure enough, there’s all the Starbucks.

00:06:15
Speaker 6: Now I can get a list of Starbucks here, so I can pick.

00:06:20
Speaker 5: That one if I want, And I can even go look at that Starbucks and there it is.

00:06:25
Speaker 6: And let’s give him a call.

00:06:32
Speaker 1: Good morning.

00:06:35
Speaker 6: You.

00:06:35
Speaker 5: Yes, I’d like to order four thousand lattes to go please, No, just kidding, wrong number.

00:06:40
Speaker 6: Thank you?

00:06:41
Speaker 3: By bye.

00:06:43
Speaker 5: Okay.

00:06:44
Speaker 3: Today we look back and it all looks so easy. But the launch of one of the best selling products of all time was expected by many to go disastrously wrong and take Apple’s fortunes along with it. Here’s iPhone co creator Andy Grignan.

00:07:02
Speaker 2: Every single time he touched the screen, We’re waiting for the music to stop playing. We’re waiting for the browser to just go white. I mean, there’s all sorts of things that we knew could happen.

00:07:12
Speaker 5: I’ve got playlists here, I can go into my playlist. I’ve got artists, I’ve got songs.

00:07:17
Speaker 2: The stress level is through the roof. You’ve never seen behind stage a more angsty, miserable group of people.

00:07:28
Speaker 3: Job’s team is stressed for good reason. Up until this point, the iPhone had never made it without a glitch through all the trial tests, in practice presentations.

00:07:39
Speaker 2: We had a very careful path, and it’s called the Golden path that Steve had to follow. You had to do exactly these things and exactly this order, and if he didn’t, it could crash.

00:07:50
Speaker 3: What the audience didn’t know was to avoid these crashes. There are several iPhones and jobs as lectern with jobs discreetly switching between them. It would take a magician to figure out how he did it. Here’s magician Pendelet.

00:08:06
Speaker 2: He was doing switches.

00:08:07
Speaker 5: He would switch one iPhone for the other so we could show off different apps when they actually couldn’t change.

00:08:13
Speaker 3: But even with the multiple hidden iPhones, Andy Grignon and his team of engineers who watched backstage expected the worst. Grignon came prepared especially for that grand finale crank call to Starbucks.

00:08:29
Speaker 6: I could play with this for a long time.

00:08:30
Speaker 2: I just anticipated all this going wrong. So on might drive. I brought with me a bottle of Scotch. And what we decided to do is every one of us who was responsible for a certain part of the demo, whether it was playing some music, showing the maps, whoever responsible that part would take a shot. The problem was I’d been involved for all of them. By the time Steve does the big finale, I’m completely wasted. He’s got at this point, maps going, there’s pause music, all the software is lit up on this phone.

00:08:58
Speaker 5: So I’m going to search for Starbucks, and sure enough there’s all the Starbucks. Things could go just absolutely sign and I can even go look at that Starbucks, and there it is, and let’s give them a call.

00:09:09
Speaker 2: Maybe the whole thing was just going to just go black and then restart. We didn’t know. It was the first time any of us as a group saw just a perfect demn. I mean, we’d never seen the whole thing go off without a hedge.

00:09:23
Speaker 3: Five months after Steve Jobs presentation, as customers waited in line for days, the iPhone hit the shelves in the United States. The device is still Apple’s most important product in their arsenal of cultural and technological must have items. Today’s app economy is bigger than Hollywood, and WhatsApp, Snapchat, uber Tender and more are essential parts of modern culture, collectively used by hundreds of millions of people every day. But before the iPhone, none of that existed.

00:09:58
Speaker 1: And great work as a and thanks to the folks at Hillsdale College who, by the way, teach things like the fact that intellectual property rights, well they’re in the Constitution and they’re in Article one, and this innovation is not possible without that, and what free enterprise does for the world and for human progress. By the way, that clapping you kept hearing that was not your typical corporate meeting and corporate launch. Was it, folks, On this day in history in two thousand and seven, the iPhone is launched and change the world. This is our American stories.