The context of this story

Year: 2005
Products: iPod

Operating system OS X - iOS

All of the above tasks were important, but the operating system was also crucial to the success of the planned mobile phone. This was a belief that was not entirely common in 2005, as “smartphones” were not selling very well, while phones with single-purpose firmware were selling like hotcakes. However, Jobs needed his phone to have considerable potential for future expansion, flexibility in development, and thus the ability to respond to emerging trends. He also wanted the best possible compatibility with the Mac platform, as he was concerned that the company would become overwhelmed by the development of another operating system. As we have shown, software development has not been one of Apple’s strongest points in the long term.

The decision came in February 2005, shortly after a secret meeting with representatives of Cingular Wireless, to which Motorola was not invited. Jobs managed to convince Cingular that Apple would receive a share of the revenue generated by its own phone and persuaded Cingular to take the construction of a mobile network seriously. At that time, Jobs was already promoting the idea of downloading music from a mobile network, but Cingular representatives were pessimistic about the increased load that launching Internet downloads could generate. They argued based on their experience with ringtone and website downloads, and as it turned out, they underestimated the hype that Jobs was capable of generating with his device. This would soon come back to haunt them.

This marks the start of Project Purple 2, through which Jobs wants to move beyond the unsatisfactory cooperation with Motorola. The goal: Apple’s own mobile phone based on technologies that Apple has acquired or will rapidly develop, many of which (such as FingerWorks) Jobs had previously planned to use for the construction of a tablet that he wanted to bring to market. But he had to choose: either quickly launch a mobile phone with a combined iPod and thus save the impending iPod sales crisis, or fulfill his dream and launch a tablet. He couldn’t do both, because cooperation with Motorola would not guarantee him an iPod in a mobile phone, which was already quite obvious at that point, even though it would take another six months for the Motorola ROKR to hit the market. Jobs ultimately, perhaps surprisingly but very rationally, bet on saving the music market, postponed the launch of the tablet, and shifted all resources to Project Purple 2, which aimed to build a touchscreen phone with an iPod.

The decision to adapt the company’s Mac OS X operating system for mobile phones was influenced not only by the lack of other options, but also by the possibility of later convergence of devices. The growing computing power and memory capacity of mobile devices convinced Jobs that in the future it would be possible to offer applications on phones similar to those used on desktops and that it would be advantageous to rely on a single operating system core.

To speed up development, it was also decided that two independent teams would be created. The hardware team would be tasked with quickly designing the mobile phone itself, while the second team would focus on adapting the OS X operating system.

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