Let there be iPhone

Today's piece is an insight from a very interesting article I came across in The New York Times written by Fred Vogelstein.

It recounts the inhuman toil of the team that produced the original iPhone in 2007. The person behind the tale is Andy Grignon, in charge of iPhone's internal radios during the time. Apple's smartphone market debut would be Steve's most important product since the original Macintosh. (Current annual revenues of the iPhone alone is larger than all of Microsoft's businesses combined.)

The massive effort that brought together the best engineers and designers in one highly secretive team can simply be described as phenomenal. Everyone who got offered a role pretty much accepted chronic sleeplessness, unnerving paranoia, and Steve's occasional cruel slander. All for a shot of greatness. They didn't even know what they were building at first!

And this presents in itself a predicament for us to ponder.

There is no debate that insane hard work is the most potent ingredient to perform the greatest magic. However, doing so will suck the life out of you. The iPhone team literally killed themselves to meet Steve's most fanatical demands. Then again, Apple had a solemn promise in return for all the hard sacrifice: Untold glory awaits those who will endure. But you have got to be brilliant the entire time or you're out.

Will you accept endless suffering if it meant taking part in the most promising magic trick yet?

Well, someone has to force everyone to drink when it's all over.

By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.” And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

Scotch? Exactly.