{"id":901468,"date":"2026-04-25T00:29:46","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T05:29:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/25\/apples-biggest-product-in-its-50-year-history-surprised-the-engineers-who-designed-it\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T00:29:46","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T05:29:46","slug":"apples-biggest-product-in-its-50-year-history-surprised-the-engineers-who-designed-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/25\/apples-biggest-product-in-its-50-year-history-surprised-the-engineers-who-designed-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple\u2019s biggest product in its 50-year history surprised the engineers who designed it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Music <\/p>\n

\n

Apple had never built anything so complex. But it was at a crossroads.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were like, people are only going to carry one device. They\u2019re going to have a cell phone with music, or they\u2019re going to have an Apple product with music and communications,\u201d said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who co-created the iPod and helped lead the iPhone\u2019s early development. \u201cAnd it was like, \u2018Okay, what are we going to make?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Fadell and other Apple executives watched as Motorola<\/a> and Samsung <\/a>released new cellphones with built-in MP3 players. They questioned whether the iPod\u2019s days were numbered.<\/p>\n

The iPod was Apple\u2019s biggest product at the time. By April 2004, the iPod was outselling<\/a> the Mac and growing by more than 900% from the year before.<\/p>\n

So Apple got to work making its biggest success obsolete. To this day \u2013 the company\u2019s 50th anniversary \u2013 Apple has never made a more consequential decision.<\/p>\n

Apple had never made a product as complicated as the iPhone, which meant figuring out how to make components work together in ways they hadn\u2019t before, Fadell said.<\/p>\n

Rub\u00e9n Caballero, Apple\u2019s vice president of engineering from 2005 until 2019, recalls working long nights and weekends in the roughly two and a half years leading up to the first iPhone\u2019s launch.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI slept, many times, under my desk,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Among the biggest uncertainties was the interface. While touch screens existed long before the iPhone, Apple refined the technology and built software that worked smoothly enough to convince consumers it was worth ditching physical buttons. That took hundreds of people within Apple laboring over technical details like the screen\u2019s lamination and moisture rejection, according to a former Apple engineering leader.<\/p>\n

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The first iteration looked like an iPod that could make phone calls, according to Fadell, Caballero and Andy Grignon, a former Apple senior manager who worked on the first iPhone. It even had the iPod\u2019s click wheel.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we tried to make iPod plus phones, and those were failures,\u201d said Fadell. \u201cBecause the click wheel wouldn\u2019t allow us to text, wouldn\u2019t allow us to dial a phone number.\u201d<\/p>\n

But hardware was just one side of the story.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery app had to be rewritten from scratch,\u201d said Grignon. \u201cYou had now introduced a new way to interact with these apps with your fingers. Nothing was stable from the ground up, and so when it crashed, you\u2019re like, \u2018What, how?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The iPod\u2019s success kickstarted Apple\u2019s shift into portable consumer electronics in the early 2000s. Before the iPod, much of the company\u2019s product lineup consisted of laptops and desktops.<\/p>\n

That transition required Apple to essentially start from scratch, working with new suppliers and manufacturers while building new teams. The company simply didn\u2019t have the technology to build a device like the iPod, recalls Fadell.<\/p>\n

The iPod\u2019s success taught Apple a thing or two about staying ahead of the competition \u2013 a vital lesson in the highly competitive smartphone race ahead.<\/p>\n

Fadell said he pushed for a new iPod launch in time for Christmas every year , which helped set the tone for the iPhone\u2019s launch cycle.<\/p>\n

The former senior member of Apple\u2019s engineering team described the \u201crelentless grind\u201d of pushing out iPods.<\/p>\n

The popularity of devices like the T-Mobile Sidekick and BlackBerry 5810 in the early 2000s signaled that consumers wanted their phones to do more than make calls, text and snap photos. They wanted to take their online lives with them.<\/p>\n

But entering the phone business was a daunting task back then, even for Apple. Nokia and Motorola ruled the market. Carriers held tight control over marketing and distribution. And at $500, the first iPhone was significantly more expensive than your average phone.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you talk to pretty much anybody, you\u2019ll find that there\u2019s a common theme of: \u2018Did you know the phone was going to be as big of a deal as it is?\u2019 And the answer is none of us did,\u201d said Grignon, who said the phone was expected to be a \u201chigher-tier luxury product.\u201d<\/p>\n

The former senior engineering manager described those within Apple as being \u201cpretty surprised\u201d by the market\u2019s reaction to the first model.<\/p>\n

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\"music<\/picture><\/div>\n

Today, the iPhone is among the world\u2019s most popular smartphones, and there are more than 2.5 billion Apple devices in use globally. It\u2019s fundamentally reshaped culture, as CNN\u2019s Bill Weir explores in \u201c50 Years of Apple,\u201d a special report for The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper premiering on April 4.<\/p>\n

Even Grignon is surprised at how ubiquitous the iPhone has become.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy son, right now he\u2019s about to graduate high school, and he cannot get through his morning routine without his phone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That success has spawned an entire ecosystem of products like the Apple Watch and AirPods, all hinging on the iPhone\u2019s popularity. It\u2019s the device that will likely define Apple\u2019s legacy in the long term, says Caballero.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s that moment in history that people remember,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The fact that the iPhone hasn\u2019t substantially changed over its nearly 20-year existence is proof of its success, says Fadell.<\/p>\n

But he also believes the industry is in another \u201cexistential moment\u201d because of AI, and Apple\u2019s future could depend on how it adapts. Apple has been perceived to be behind companies like Google and OpenAI \u2013 which it\u2019s struck partnerships with \u2013 in AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cApple has to think differently than it did (over the last) 10 to 15 years,\u201d Fadell said. \u201cIt has to think about revolutionizing again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Music Apple had never built anything so complex. But it was at a crossroads. \u201cWe were like, people are only going to carry one device. They\u2019re going to have a cell phone with music, or they\u2019re going to have an Apple product with music and communications,\u201d said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who co-created […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":901469,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[131522],"class_list":{"0":"post-901468","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business-news","8":"tag-podcast-music"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}