![Steve Jobs]()
The INSIDER Summary
The INSIDER Summary- Steve Jobs was one of the most important innovators ever.
- But the story behind how he created the iPhone is completely unexpected.
- An Apple designer revealed that Jobs' hostility towards a Microsoft employee led to one of the most influential inventions ever.
Scott Forstall — a designer who led Apple’s iOS software division under Steve Jobs — has revealed the surprising history behind the company’s first touchscreen prototype, which would ultimately go on to inspire the iPhone.
Speaking candidly at an event on Tuesday, Forstall told how Jobs was driven on to create the device after growing tired of a loudmouth executive at Microsoft. The unnamed acquaintance, said to be the husband of a friend of Jobs’s wife, would continually bombard the Apple exec with braggadocio about Microsoft and what they were planning to do. That, ultimately, would prove a costly mistake.
“It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft,” Forstall said. “Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he’d come back pissed off.”
“He just shoved it in Steve’s face — the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like ‘let’s show them how it’s really done.'”
Buoyed by resentment and an almost pathological hatred of styluses, Jobs and his team got to work on creating the prototype of a working multitouch display. Said display, eventually, would go on to serve as a touchpoint for future iPhone designs.
“Steve said, ‘do you think you could take that demo that we’re doing with the tablet and the multitouch and shrink it down to something small enough to fit in your pocket?’ We went back to the design team and they took it and they carved out a corner of it.”
“Steve saw it and said ‘put the tablet on hold, let’s build a phone.’ And that’s what we did.”
Sucks to be the Microsoft dude. Now, here’s everything we know about the forthcoming iPhone 8.
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