Innovation At Work: A Back-room Story

I think Wired wrote this piece for me. "Apple spent rough $150 million building the iPhone" and this article tells some of that story.

I don't love it because it's about the iPhone: truth be told, I don't like the iPhone. I really, really want to like it. It really is beautiful. Completely stunning. And some of its tricks are amazing: visual voicemail & web browsing looks interesting (I haven't tried its web browsing and I'm not sure if it really will work). But it can't do Flash or Java (read: allow developers to program in a 2 common ways) or record video. And it's camera is low megapixel (I've redefined my minimum bar for camera mega-pixels since meeting a few people from Telefónica Spain who have 5 MP cameras on their mobile phone).

I do love the story of how the innovation happened. The iPhone is an amazing device and it's amazing how a company gets something that innovative built. From page 3:

"To ensure the iPhone's tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn't generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads — complete with goo to simulate brain density — and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone's performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod."

They did what it took to get it done. Wow.