Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple’s iPod iPhone”.
The iPhone as we know it was almost completely different, so as everybody stuck at home and I think, finding new hobbies, one that I found that I’ve enjoyed is this alternate history, researching technology that almost came to market things that could have been and maybe would have Changed the tech landscape, I don’t think any loom, larger and greater than the iPhone. That almost was what, if the iPhone that was announced in 2007, was drastically different. What if the phone that Steve Jobs showed the world was the other iPhone prototype the secret one? That was being developed in conjunction with the one that actually came to market. That’S a world that I really want to explore and also, if you want to see how he made that intro with motion VFX stay tuned to the end of the video on the most powerful transportable cellular phones, Stacy. Obviously, the phone is not a novel idea.
It’S existed for four decades and as technology advanced, it became inevitable that technology around us and the phone would eventually merge and no surprise companies, like Apple, were working on devices long ago. That sort of be that convergence of technology and communication. Your mother called again to remind you to pick up the birthday cake, so this is the Apple knowledge navigator. This is a concept that Apple was thinking about coming to market.
The technology was wasn’t even close to being ready to make this a real thing, but it’s already the start of what Apple was going to be working towards, and it was kind of similar to the iPhone now at least functionality it had an assistant, it could take Calls that a calendar door things it couldn’t really do was take pictures and absolutely not fit in your pocket. So how about this? This looks eerily similar to an iPad with an Apple pencil, except for that gigantic kind of 90 style phone sitting. On top again, he did just some of the concepts there were some wacky other ones too. You’Ve got a futuristic, looking flip phone one, you could wear on your wrist.
So obviously, these are all just concepts that we’re probably never going to come to the market, but it did show that Apple was full worth thinking about products that could eventually come to market, and certainly they were not alone in the space. Other companies were doing the same with interesting to see what their thoughts were, of what the future of electronics could go and where that went was ultimately the iPhone, but the iPhone that we ended up getting almost wasn’t the iPhone that was announced boom. That’S I have one right here, my pocket in fact there it is right there so to understand like why this is even a thing you got to flash back to the 2000s when the iPod was all the rage. Apple had a hit on their hands and they hadn’t really had a hit in a very long time, so it made sense them to leverage that design that uija familiars click wheel. People I’ve been used to for a mobile phone and sort of looking at now. The lens you know many many years in the future. It seems ridiculous that would ever be used for a phone, but the iPod was so popular back. Then it was in almost everybody’s pocket.
It was the de facto device for listening to music. The Apple just wanted to leverage that to be the de facto device for making phone calls. So most people know it, as you know, the iPod Classic, but that classic design was really what the iPod looked. Like I mean I remember, going in to Best Buy and picking if I wanted to get the Mac version of the iPod or the PC version of the iPod, there wasn’t just one and they were sold out.
I didn’t go back seemingly every day to actually get one he’s in stock. That’S how popular these devices were, that thought of having a thousand songs in your pocket was unheard of at the time and Apple did it so well, and the UI was so clean that sort of made this idea of music on the go something everybody could have Now there were other technologies at the time there were CDs, Sony had other technologies that were competing, but the iPod combined from UI storage, size and, of course, iTunes, which was so incredibly popular all into one device, just made it the tech device of the decade. So after the iPod, the iPhone wasn’t Apple’s first foray into phones. They actually teamed up with Motorola for device called the Motorola ROKR. It was a very forgettable candy bar phone, but it did give the ability to actually plug into your computer. Your laptop or desktop would recognize it as an iPod, so you could put your music on it had kind of an iTunes, ish type interface.
So you could keep your music with you on this phone. The device itself wasn’t very good. It couldn’t hold that many songs. I had a ton of crashed with it. This is before you could. Just you know, over-the-air update your phone.
What it shipped with was pretty much what you got for the duration that device. So all these crashes made it really hard device to actually love. So I go there and I just resumed my music right back to where it was well, I’m supposed to resume my music right back to where it was and beyond that I wasn’t a fan of the candy bar style phones back then I was all about the Flip phone life so having locked my phone and put it in my pocket, which I recognize now seemed silly because every phone is, is a rectangle wasn’t something I was that excited about. I tried it cuz, it was cool, but it’s very quickly found its way on eBay.
It was Apple kind of dipping, their toe in the water, and they did it again with the Motorola sliver. It was the same forgettable experience in a different form factor, but it did show that Apple was thinking about iTunes on mobile devices. This was very clearly not an Apple phone. It was a Motorola phone with some apple software on it and that partnership ended up being far from perfect and for most user is super frustrating, and it was very clear that Apple wanted something very different. You know when you look back now. It seems to make a lot of logical sense that the iPhone should have happened right like oh yeah.
We just popped out of our braids. It didn’t work that way. It kind of made sense that when Apple started internally working on a phone, they would ask the guy who was leading the iPod division to take on that monumental role. So Tony Fadell was that guy and he got working on a very weird type phone, so they leveraged what was already working for Apple at the time, the iPod. So what you got was a phone with things like the web. It can make phone calls, but it used the click wheel to navigate. It was a very strange, hybrid type device that ended up getting developed in conjunction with a touchscreen device that we ended up. Seeing so you could say, Apple was maybe hedging their bet, but there were two routes.
The first was to expand the iPod into a phone, and that was gon na be run by Tony Fadell or there’s a competing theory. And the competing approach was it to shrink Mac OS into a phone, and that was being run by Scott Forstall. And both teams were, I a doggy-dog ever gon na compete against each other for the best products that would ultimately make it to market so that the safer option totally seemed to be the iPod iPhone route and we’ve seen these prototype interfaces that use sort of a Touchscreen with a click wheel when using it like an iPod, it’s super different from the iPhone that we’re all used to and pretty much every phone we’re used to nowadays kind of think of it like the iPod video with a phone mode and a rotary phone built-in. Now very weird you know, but back then touchscreen phones were mostly resistive screens with styluses, so this would have seemed almost evolutionary to what folks already had at the time the iPod worked. Let’S just have your iPod make phone calls. You know you carry one device in your pocket.
Instead of having a carry to an apple could be that one device for everything you know now, where the phone is your internet device, it’s a communicator. It’S your music player. You watch video on it. It’S everything to you that wasn’t a world that was kind of yet conceived.
They were just trying to add a phone at something that already worked, so it made more sense for Apple to make that iPod version of the phone shrunken down Mac. Oh sir, OS 10 was so overly complicated. They had to perfect things like an on-screen keyboard, multi-touch complicated processor, more power that was needed to have all of that run smoothly, whereas the other route was kind of already proven. Apple was pretty aware that touchscreens were going to be the future, but releasing that kind of iPod phone first, while giving them another year or so to develop that shrunken down Mac. Os version would have made the most sense, but Apple was never really a company. I kind of followed what made the most sense.
They certainly took the road less traveled and it was a gigantic risk for them. So the exercise here is what would the mobile world be if that iPod iPhone had come out, and I think things would fundamentally be different now, but I did view that different. We would have eventually gone that touchscreen route, but Android is already being developed at the time as we developed to be more of a blackberry competitor, and perhaps we would have seen Android go down that physical keyboard ground, perhaps blackberry, would have kept working on those physical Keyboard phones and we’d have seen those designs to ground for a few more years, so perhaps by 2020 standards right now, we’ll be living in 2018 technology. As far as what touch we could capable of so be a little bit different, but I think it’d be fundamentally crazy from what we’ve got right now, but I don’t think the iPhone would be looked at as this huge paradigm shift in mobile device. If that iPod iPhone was what Steve Jobs took out on stage when he went out there and took a risk and took what’s kind of been dubbed the Golden Path, he had to do things in certain orders so that the phone wouldn’t crash onstage.
That was kind of big if that phone had crashed, that demonstration had failed if he deviated from that golden path. The mystique of the first generation of iPhone would have perhaps been tainted at least at launch, if not forever. Remember after the iPhone launched Steve Jobs had a lower prices. There were sort of things that were wrong with the device and Apple was able to weather those storms, but if it had failed on stage and how to do that, price adjustment, I’m not sure the. I thought would have been a huge success.
That Apple was was banking on and also to look forward like. What’S that next thing going to be, what’s that next giant device, that’s going to change, how we use electronics and change our world, and this taught me anything except we have no idea if you flash back to 2006 – and you said, what’s the future of mobile phones – Well, keep it what it said and iPod phone the idea of what the iPhone and Android were eventually going to be, I don’t think was anything most people could conceive of at the time. So I’m not sure I could even come up with an idea. Maybe it’s a combination of AR foldables, that’s only based on things that I know right now.
I don’t know the technology that Google’s got in their labs. Apple’S got in theirs, Microsoft’s rockin in theirs. Maybe there’s something crazy that I haven’t even thought of, and you guys have even thought of that’s going to fundamentally change this world and that’s part technology that gets me excited. Gets me sort of pumped up every day, will.i.am quarantined at home, excited to think about what is going to come next.
So we can go back in a few years and we can see if anybody was right. So if you guys got a kick out of that awesome intro, let you in on a heading secret. It’S actually way easier than you think. We just use a plug-in from this video sponsor motion VFX. They have hundreds of different effects and visuals that you can pick and choose for your videos to make you look like an editing master, so this one was made to obviously look like an iPhone and if our purposes, all we did was just a background color and Put on an iPhone home screen and in seconds we had something that were nearly would have taken us hours to render out and was way above my skill grade. We have motion VFX to thank for all of this. If you want to check out yourself, link is down below .