How to make an iPhone

Making your own mobile phone was not difficult in 2005. All you had to do was call an Asian factory, tell them what stickers to put under the display, and where to send the container. Apple worked with a number of factories that manufactured such mobile phones, but Jobs wanted to combine a mobile phone with an iPod. Although later official company lore denies it, the initial goal was really to create a synthesis of an iPod and a mobile phone, to enable music purchases directly via a mobile network without a computer, and thus break into the mobile phone ecosystem with the iPod.

This also led to various strange initial ideas on how to approach the design of the entire device. One such idea in 2004 was to retain the control wheel used on iPods. The arguments in favor were obvious: iPod users were accustomed to this type of control, and the company already had experience with it and could use the proven click wheel technology concept. In addition, the first landline phones were equipped with a rotary dial, so this method of control was not foreign to telephones.

However, it soon became apparent that in the 1990s, few Americans still remembered rotary dials, let alone found it easy to use them to write text messages or user names. It was still possible to find a user name from a list, but the touchscreen version of the rotary dial did not allow for comfortable typing of letters. It also turned out that Nokia had solved a similar puzzle some time ago, developing the 3650 model in 2002, on which the buttons were arranged in a circle instead of the traditional matrix of three buttons side by side. Users rejected the Nokia 3650 because it was very difficult to type on, and its quickly released successor, the 3660, humbly returned to the traditional matrix layout.

In addition, the control wheel had the same problem as the keyboard on the phone: it took up space on the display, and Apple was already planning to launch video on the iTunes Store at that time, so it needed its mobile phone to be able to play video comfortably.

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How to make an iPhone

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