To paraphrase Steve Wozniak’s “virtually every [computer] machine is a ‘Macintosh’ now”, virtually every smartphone is an ‘iPhone’ now.

How did this happen? What really did Apple do differently from other mobile companies?

The most important thing is that although the iPhone as built upon the Newton, Palm and General Magic vision, Apple mostly started from scratch and didn’t limit itself to just improving an already existing and established set of specs currently available on the market. It chose a revolutionary approach instead of an evolutionary one.

In a 2017 Computer History Museum event, iPhone engineers remembered how much they were disappointed by the incremental updates strategy of the existing players.

In the video of the event, at 19:56 (to 24:16) you can hear Apple iPhone hardware engineer Hugo Fiennes stating: 

“I’ve been a big phone owner […]. I used to buy the latest release [thinking] ‘This is the one! This is the one! It’s gonna be… oh, it’s awful!’ [And I’ll] Sell it on eBay and buy another one. And I’ve been through many different ones. No one was really pushing the boat out (?) to what was really possibile. […] There was a lot of stuff there which… you looked at that stuff and it’s obvious that everyone else was just… they had to make some different variants of phones. It was just incremental. They were holding stuff back. And Apple had nothing to hold back. It was just ‘Go for it’. What’s the best stuff we can get? Let’s add a bit to that and push and push all of the chip vendors a bit harder. And the screen vendors and everyone a bit harder. And get this amazin thing. Nokia was just being incremental. Everyone was being incremental.”

Apple iPhone Software engineer Nitin Ganatra adds: 

“Every single time a new phone came out, for me anyway, I had this hope that ‘OK, this is actually gonna be the phone that I want to use. And they never were. It was because they _were_ very incremental. It’s a brand new year and Sony Ericsson now has this brand new phone… Last year’s was OK but, boy, they’ve done an year of learning! Let’s see what they’ve come up with now!’ And one year later it’s about like what they had released a year before.” 

Apple iPhone Software engineer Scott Herz (not so jokingly) quips: 

“Except that it had like a special key on the side that did somehting stupid!”

And Ganatra sums it up: 

“And it was slower than last year’s [model]. It probably had slightly worse battery life. And had this fuzzy screen that allegedly was color. You know, it was just bad in all this ways…”

The real secret wasn’t that Apple was working on the iPhone. It was its approach. They worked in secret and managed to surprise competitors and >pundits alike.

As iPhone engineer Nitin Ganatra remembers: 

“[The secrecy] was an impediment. Of course it was an impediment. But at the same time there was so much value there as well by having this secret and having it be. ‘Let the rest of the world think that in order to develop a phone you have to this incremental thing, right?’ And that’s what the industry looks like. Everybody’s gonna have effectively a dot one and they’re gonna take a whole year to come out with that. I think that that all served us very well in the end. Nobody knew what was coming. Nobody knew what we were working on. And if anybody had to guess they would think that it looks probably a lot like the Blackberries did at that time, or the Treos did at thet time. If you asked anybody, based on what had already happening in the phone industry before, they would think that we would have a very minor increment on top of the best phone that was there in 2006. Right? Because that was the pattern that everybody else was following. Why would we have anything better? I think those years of slow development in the phone industry also helped us too. In addition to keeping it secret, it helped us really make a big splash!”

Apple rethought the rules and wasn’t afraid to make bold choices, sometimes even taking steps back.

An example of this is how they took the keyboard away, making space for whichever UI was needed at any moment. 

Nowadays 99% of mobile “smart” phones have no keyboard/keypad.

Eventually Google, Motorola, Samsung or Nokia – which were and are also full of smart engineers – would have got a similar result, but they would have done it much, much later.

Apple’s advantage, which allowed them to leapfrog the competition, was in coming from a different market, thinking outside of the box and having executives who pushed a precise vision, free of market shares, needs, investors or other baggage.

Remember that in 2007, even tough Apple was riding on the gigantic success of the iPod, it was definitely an upstart in the mobile market, not an incumbent. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed at Apple’s strategy, while Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-chief executives and co-chairmen of Research In Motion (RIM), dismissed [Apple and the iPhone] as

“kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers”, adding that “in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.”

Palm CEO Ed Colligan, answering to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff commented that it wasn’t easy succeed mobile business:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone” adding that “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

And yet Apple succeeded. An important factor in Apple’ approach was exactly that it wasn’t part of that mobile market and that it was coming from a computer business mindset, not just a mobile one. Apple treated the iPhone like a computer, not like a phone: they even adapted their personal computer operating system, not the iPod OS or any mobile “firmware”. 

This later proved as a big asset, e.g. making native apps possible, or adapting the OS to other form factors, such as the iPad.

Lastly, Apple didn’t cater to telcos. Since day one the iPhone was sold both by mobile operators and by the Infinite Loop business, and it’s Apple that decides features, and provides and controls the software the device runs on and its updates. In 2018 this, unfortunately, is still one of iPhone (and iPad’s) strenghts and one of Android’s biggest problems.

Here’s a bit of information (and context) about the people who are standing together with Jobs as he’s showing off his sleek brand new cubic-shaped computer.

Unfortunately I’m not sure who the first person on the left is – for now –, but the second one on the left is definitely Rich Page. At Apple had a key role as engineer and developer, and worked on Lisa’s hardware and software. Most importantly he also was one of the NeXT founders, as are the other two persons that are closer to Jobs in the picture.

The first one is Dan’l Lewin. He was a marketing manager and was in charge of NeXT’s relations with Universities and in general of the education market the workstation was targeted to.

The man with the glasses near Lewin is famed Macintosh software developer Guy “Bud” Tribble. He was also one of the key people who developed NeXTSTEP and later the OPENSTEP API. For the record Tribble is now back at Apple, where he has the role of Vice President of Software Technology (and unofficially one of Infinite Loop’s “policy” supervisors).

Finally, the last person on the right is probably Peter Van Cuylenburg, who was NeXT’s COO, i.e. its Chief Operating Officer.

If you’d like to see more, please head on to Roman Moisescot’s All About Steve Jobs website. There’s an album full of photos and video stills from the 1988 event where, among others, you can see NeXT founder and Chief Financial Officer Susan Barnes and main investor Ross Perot. Somehow absent, though, is another founder, George Crow, who was also a Macintosh veteran, and who had the role of NeXT’s “Vice president of analog engineering”.

On September 1985 Jobs had chosen to leave Apple with other veterans of the Macintosh and Lisa teams. He had been ostracized in May after a failed board coup in which he opposed and lost against John Sculley, the former Pepsi Executive he brought to Apple in 1983 to “change the world” together.

The first machines were actually made available for testing in 1989, after which NeXT started selling them in limited numbers to universities with a beta version of the UNIX-based NeXTSTEP operating system installed. Initially the NeXT Computer, or The Cube, as it was nicknamed, was targeted at U.S. higher education establishments only, with a base price of 6,500 USD.
Later, in 1990. NeXT’s computers were released on the retail market, selling for $9,999. 

The NeXT Computer was widely reviewed in magazines, which lauded its hardware capabilities and the combination of UNIX underpinnings and polished Graphical User Interface, but also lamented the very high selling price. When asked if he was upset that the computer’s debut was delayed by several months, Jobs supposedly responded, “Late? This computer is five years ahead of its time!”

Under the hood of the black cube (made of magnesium and designed by german firm frogdesign, who Jobs had chosen and worked with at Apple) the workstation ran on the then new 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU. Actually the Motorola 88000 RISC chip was originally considered, and the NeXTSTEP system software was even ported to it (according to lead developer Avie Tevanian) but this CPU was not available in sufficient quantities. So it was panned in favor of the latest iteration of the 68×00 line. It was same chip chosen by Apple, but running at a higher frequency (40 MHz), for its top of the line Macintosh model, the Macintosh fx, released a few months later, and sold at an even higher price, 10,000-12,000 USD.

NeXT’s machine had undoubtedly impressive hardware specifications. It supported from 8 to 64 MB of RAM, had a 40 MB (swap-only), 330 MB, or 660 MB hard disk drive, and adopted a futuristic (and sleek) 256 MB magneto-optical (MO) drive as its removable storage system, though it was later ditched in favor of a more traditional and low cost floppy disk drive. The workstation came with an Ethernet connection by default and had top-notch graphic capabilities. It implemented a licensed on-screen version of Adobe’s professional graphical printing language PostScript, and could drive a 17-inch MegaPixel high resolution grayscale display, measuring 1120 x 832 pixels with total fidelity between monitor and printed page. At the time most PCs or Macs on the market were mostly limited to 640×480 pixel displays and two of the few notable exceptions were Apple’s Two Page Monochrome Display and Portrait Display.

Owing to its education and research targetting, The NeXT Cube was also the first computer to ship fitted with a general-purpose Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip, the Motorola 56001. The chip could be used to support sophisticated music and sound processing, offloading this work from the main CPU.

The NeXT Computer was succeeded by the NeXTcube, an upgraded cube-shaped model, released together with the NeXTstation, nicknamed “the slab”, housed in a low profile “pizza box” case form-factor. Finally, in 1992, NeXT launched “Turbo” variants of the two models, with a 33 MHz 68040 processor and maximum RAM capacity increased to 128 MB. 

Due to disappointing sales, high costs, and hardware development problems, NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993. Apparently, in four years only a meagre total of 50,000 NeXT machines was sold.

NeXT reached an agreement with Canon offloading its factory, hardware-design center, and 60 employees, and in the further years devoted all resources to its operating system and revolutionary software development offer, under the new name NeXT Software Inc.

Wozniak: “In the years 1980 to ’83, when the Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world, we didn’t advertise it once. Everybody else who was making products for it was advertising for it. All of our ads were for the Apple III, which never sold in that time frame. Because we were trying to make the Apple III the big business machine instead of IBM.

Livingston: That didn’t happen, right?

Wozniak: That didn’t happen. I think it was a total fallacy. I think we should have advertised the Apple II. If you’ve got the world’s best-selling computer, keep it going as much as it can. But the company kind of wanted the Apple III to win and the Apple II to lose. It was really weird because you’d walk into the company and everybody had an Apple III on their desk—nobody had an Apple II. The Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world, and the only guy working for it in the company was the guy reprinting the price list.“

I’ve done a bit of research and, not counting brochures, catalogs and magazine inserts, there are at least 16 (sixteen!) ads for the Apple ][ in the years Wozniak mentions. 

1980 Apple II Ben Franklin Ad
1981 Apple II & III Henry Ford Ad
1981 Apple II & III Thomas Edison Ad
1981 Apple II & III Thomas Jefferson Ad
1981 Apple II & III Thomas Jefferson Ad
1981 Apple II & III Orville Wright Ad
1981 “Optical Engineer” Ad
1981 “Baked Apple” Ad
1981 “Pepperidge Farm” Ad
1981 “Make Waves” Ad
1981 “Farmer Ron” Ad
1981 “Three Good Reasons” Ad
1982 “Great Carrots” Ad
1982 Apple “Personal Relationship” Ad
1982 Apple “One Bite” Ad
1983 Apple IIe Introduction Ad

The main source for this data is the wonderful MacMothership website, whose gallery of ads has a section which spans from 1980 to 1983.

Here’s an excerpt of the gallery, with only the ads dated 1981. I have circled in red the ones promoting the Apple ][.

It’s true, some of the ads advertise both the Apple ][ and the Apple /// and later on, in 1983, Apple’s promotional efforts were understandably focused on the Lisa but the fact is that Wozniak’s recollections are wrong. 

Although undoubtedly some Apple executives unfairly dismissed Woz’s masterpiece and treated it as their past (and Steve Jobs is among them), up until the end of the Eighties the Apple ][ had a very, very important role and Infinite Loop’s advertising clearly reflects that importance.

It was was a POSIX-compliant, “true” UNIX, licensed and based on AT&T UNIX System V Release 2.2, and later Releases 3 and 4 and BSD versions 4.2 and 4.3. 

It was quite expensive and ran only on top of the line 68K Macintosh models, such as the Macintosh II, Quadra and Centris series. The Macs not only had to be equipped with 68020, 68030 or 68040 processors but the operating system also needed a FPU and a PMMU, a paged memory management unit. 

Although you could just use the standard X windowing system, one of the bonuses of A/UX was that – while still being a UNIX-compliant system – it also provided the ability to run System 6 and System 7-era Macintosh-native software. One could have a terminal window with a shell running multiple commands and at the same time work on a document in Microsoft Word. 

The first release ran only a small percentage of the Mac application base, in particular third party software, which were programmed to access Mac hardware directly or in unofficial ways, and could only display one program onscreen at any one time. In the following versions – starting from 1.1 – compatibility was improved and an A/UX version of the Finder was also provided, further bridging the gap between the two operating systems.

Unfortunately Apple did not develop a version of its Finder-friendly UNIX operating system for the PowerPC CPUs, which the Macintosh platform switched to in 1994. The final version of A/UX, 3.1.1, was released in 1995 and, like all versions beyond 3.0, ran only on the Workgroup Server 95, an A/UX specific Macintosh model based on the Quadra 950. 

After this, for a few years Apple chose to sell its new servers, the Apple Network Server model 500 and 700 with a totally different UNIX operating system, a version of IBM’s AIX, which had no compatibility at all with Macintosh software, unlike other Apple solutions for the UNIX world.

Note: the A/UX screenshots are taken from http://www.aux-penelope.com/

The emulator was called MacWorks and its history went hand in hand with that of Apple’s ambitious, costly and ill-fated first foray into GUI computing, the Lisa. 

In April 1984, after Lisa’s sales languished for more than one year, and after the obviously more successful release of the Macintosh, Apple introduced MacWorks. It was a software emulation environment of the 64K Mac ROM and allowed the Lisa to run the Macintosh System Software and its applications (such as the bundled MacWrite and MacPaint).

MacWorks helped make the Lisa more attractive on the market, although it had some quirks and limitations. One of them was that it didn’t enable the emulated environment to access a hard disk. In the fall of 1984 Apple fixed this and introduced versions 2.0 & 3.0 of the package which allowed MacWorks to run from the Lisa’s internal Widget [hard disk] or from an attached external ProFile hard disk. 

Another quirk of running the Macintosh System on a Lisa was the differences between the respective bitmapped screens. The Lisa’s display was optimized for horizontal resolution, in order to be able to display 80 columns of text in an attractive font. The Lisa used a 720 by 360 pixel display, with pixels that were twice as high as they were wide. The Macintosh, on the other hand, had a display of 512 x 342 of square pixels, thanks to a very prescient and wise choice by the originator of the project, Jef Raskin. 

Unfortunately the MacWorks software didn’t try to compensate for the different resolutions, so data on screen was distorted vertically, almost “like looking at a fun-house mirror”, as stated by Andy Hertzfeld. A hardware solution to this problem was eventually made available, but this, as they say, is another story.

In January 1985, Apple re-branded the Lisa 2/10 as Macintosh XL and changed MacWorks’s name into MacWorks XL. It wasn’t enough to help sales and in April Apple gave up on the Lisa and sold a considerable number of inventory to Sun Remarketing, while thousands more were destroyed in a landfill in Utah. Sun Remarketing also bought the MacWorks XL emulator.

Later on Sun Remarketing developed (or rather outsourced the development of) MacWorks Plus, in order to provide application compatibility with the Macintosh Plus computer, adding support for an 800 KB 3.5-inch floppy disk and System software up through version 6.0.3. MacWorks Plus II then extended the support further, up to System 7.5.5, reaching the same limit of all 68000-powered Macintosh models.

The screenshot of a Lisa running MacWorks is taken from http://toastytech.com/guis/lisa3.html; the photo of the contents of the MacWorks package is taken from http://appletechlab.jp/blog-entry-860.html?sp and the MacWorks Plus II logo is from a Sun Remarketing User Manual.