The One Device

Teardown

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs strode onstage at Macworld wearing his trademark black turtleneck, blue jeans, and white sneakers. Twenty minutes into his annual keynote speech, Jobs paused as if to gather his thoughts.

"Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything," he said. "Well, today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator…

"Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices; this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.

"Today," he added, "Apple is going to reinvent the phone."

Then it did.

"Where are. You from?"

"California. Loose angels. Holly would. And. You? Where are. You from? Shang hi?"

Nearly ten years after Jobs's promise, I'm barreling down the highway between the Shanghai Pudong airport and the city's commercial district, and the cabdriver keeps passing his device back to me over the plastic partition. We take turns speaking into a translation app.

"No. Not Shang hi. Hang zoo."

Smog softens Shanghai's neon glow. From here, the skyline is a Blade Runner screenshot: brilliant, contorted skyscrapers gracefully recede into a polluted haze.

Our digitally stilted but mostly comprehensible conversation veers from how his night's been (okay) to how long he's been driving a cab (eight years) to the economic conditions of the city (getting worse).

"The pry says keep rising. But. The way jays stay. Flat," a Siri-ish robo-woman's voice intones. When the cabdriver gets fired up, he slows down to crawl, still smack in the middle of the freeway, and cars speed by us as I clutch my seat belt.

"No where. To live." I nod, and he speeds up again.

Interesting, I thought, that my first conversation in Shanghai—where tens of thousands of skilled workers assemble and export the iPhone—was also made possible by the iPhone.

For hours, I'd been dying just to use my iPhone—a two-leg transatlantic flight with no wi-fi left me itchy and anxious; my phone was a simmering black hole in my pocket. You might know the feeling: that burning absence whenever you leave it at home or get stuck without a signal. Today, the phone is a lifeline. I felt like I had to find a connection to FaceTime with my wife and two-month-old son back home. Not to mention to catch up on email, Twitter, the news, everything else.

How did this happen? How did this one device become the new center of gravity, running our daily lives and enabling things that seemed like science fiction a decade ago—like putting a universal language translator in our pocket? How did it become the one device we need above all?

I was in Shanghai as part of yearlong effort to find out.

Radical, civilization-scale transformations aren't usually rapid and seamless. They tend to be one or the other. But smartphones took over the world quietly and completely in a matter of years, and we barely noticed. We went from having a computer in the household or at work to carrying one everywhere, along with internet access, live chat rooms, interactive maps, a solid camera, Google, streaming video, a near-infinite selection of games, Instagram, Uber, Twitter, and Facebook—platforms that reorganized how we communicate, earn, recreate, love, live, and more—in about the time span of two presidential terms. We is the U.S. population, in which smartphone ownership rose from about 10 percent in 2007 to 80 percent in 2016.

That transformation has turned the iPhone into the biggest star of the consumer-electronics world since—scratch that; it's the star of the entire retail world. No, even that undersells it. The iPhone might actually be the pinnacle product of all of capitalism to this point.

In 2016, Horace Dediu, a technology-industry analyst and Apple expert, listed some of the bestselling products in various categories. The top car brand, the Toyota Corolla: 43 million units. The bestselling game console, the Sony PlayStation: 382 million. The number-one book series, Harry Potter: 450 million books. The iPhone: 1 billion. That's nine zeros. "The iPhone is not only the bestselling mobile phone but also the bestselling music player, the bestselling camera, the bestselling video screen and the bestselling computer of all time," he concluded. "It is, quite simply, the bestselling product of all time."

It's in contention for most stared-at, too. According to Nielsen, Americans spend 11 hours a day in front of their screens. One estimate says 4.7 hours of that time is spent on their phones. (Which leaves approximately 5 waking hours for more traditional life-living: eating, exercising, and driving between the places where we look at screens.) Now 85 percent of Americans say that mobile devices are a central part of their everyday life. You may know you use your phone a lot, but according to a study conducted by British psychologists, you probably use it twice as much as you think you do. Which makes sense, given that we rarely let our phones leave our side—an attachment we've had with very few technologies. "It's almost vanishingly rare that we pick a new device that we always have with us," the historian of mobile technology Jon Agar says. "Clothes—a Paleolithic thing? Glasses? And a phone. The list is tiny. In order to make that list, it has to be desirable almost universally."

Meanwhile, that universally desirable device has made Apple one of the most valuable companies on the planet. What the tech press called the "Jesus phone" now accounts for two-thirds of the company's revenue. Profit margins on the iPhone have been reported to be as high as 70 percent, and as "low" as 41 percent. (No wonder Google's Android phones, which are now even more ubiquitous than iPhones, emulate them so closely they kicked off the industry's most vicious patent battle.) In 2014, Wall Street analysts attempted to identify the world's most profitable product, and the iPhone landed in the top slot—right above Marlboro cigarettes. The iPhone is more profitable than a relentlessly marketed drug that physically addicts its customers.

There's a dependency parallel here too. Like so many, I read news on my iPhone. I'm lost without Google Maps at my fingertips. I keep a constant side-eye on the device for notifications. I check Twitter and Facebook and chat on Messages. I write emails, coordinate workflow, scan pictures. As a journalist, I record interviews and snap publication-quality photos.

The iPhone isn't just a tool; it's the foundational instrument of modern life.

So how, and why, did I wind up in Shanghai, looking for the soul of the iPhone? It started months before—when I broke one (again). You know the drill. It slides out of your pocket, and a tiny crack branches into a screen-coating spiderweb.

Instead of buying a new one (again), I decided to take the opportunity to learn how to fix it myself—and find out what's behind the display. I'd been carrying this thing around for years, and I had no idea. So I headed to iFixit HQ, nestled in sleepy San Luis Obispo on the California coast. The company publishes gold-standard gadget-repair guides, and a mellow repair pro named Andrew Goldberg is its lead teardown engineer.

Soon, I was wielding its custom-made tool, the iSclack—picture a pair of pliers whose ends are fixed with suction cups—like a first-year med student. My iPhone 6 and its cracked screen sat between its jaws. I was hesitating: If I popped too hard, I could sever a crucial cable and kill my phone entirely.

"Do it quick," Goldberg said, and pointed to the device, which was beginning to pull apart from the suction. The lights of the workshop studio glared. I was actually sweating. I shuffled my feet, steadied myself, and snap—my trusted personal assistant cracked open safely, like the hood of a car.

"That was easy, right?" Goldberg said. It was.

But the relief was fleeting. Goldberg disconnects that cable and removes the aluminum plating inside. Soon my phone's guts are laid out before me on a stark little gadgetry operating table. And if I'm being honest here—it makes me weirdly uncomfortable, sort of like I'm looking at a corpse in the morgue. My iPhone, my intimately personalized life navigator, now looks like standard-issue e-waste—until you know what you're looking at.

The left side of the unit is filled with a long, flat battery—it takes up half the iPhone's real estate. The logic board, a bracket-shaped nest that houses the chips that bring the iPhone to life, wraps around to the right. A family of cables snake around the top.

"There's four different cables connecting the display assembly to the rest of the phone," Goldberg says. "One is going to be the digitizer that receives your touch input. So that works with a whole array of touch capacitors embedded in the glass. You can't actually see them, but when your finger's there… they can detect where you're touching. So that's its own cable, and the LCD has its own cable, the fingerprint sensor has its own cable. And then the last cable up here is for the front piece and camera."

This book is an attempt to trace those cables—not just inside the phone, but around the world and throughout history. To get a better, more tactile sense of the technologies, people, and scientific breakthroughs that culminated in a device that's become so ubiquitous, we take it for granted. The iPhone intertwines a phenomenal number of prior inventions and insights, some that stretch back into antiquity. It may, in fact, be our most potent symbol of just how deeply interconnected the engines that drive modern technological advancement have become.

However, there's one figure and one figure alone who looms over the invention of the iPhone: Steven P. Jobs, as his name is listed, usually first, on Apple's most important patents for the device. But the truth is that Jobs is only a small part of its saga.

"There was an extraordinary cult of Jobs as seemingly the inventor of this world-transforming gizmo, when he wasn't," the historian David Edgerton says. "There is an irony here—in the age of information and the knowledge society, the oldest of invention myths was propagated." He's referring to the Edison myth, or the myth of the lone inventor—the notion that after countless hours of toiling, one man can conjure up an invention that changes the course of history.

Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb, but his research team found the filament that produced the beautiful, long-lasting glow necessary to turn it into a hit product. Likewise, Steve Jobs did not invent the smartphone, though his team did make it universally desirable. Yet the lone-inventor concept lives on. It's a deeply appealing way to consider the act of innovation. It's simple, compelling, and seems morally right—the hardworking person with brilliant ideas who refused to give up earned his fortune with toil and personal sacrifice. It's also a counterproductive and misleading fiction.

It is very rare that there's a single inventor of a new technology—or even a single responsible group. From the cotton gin to the lightbulb to the telephone, most technologies are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working entirely independently. Ideas really are "in the air," as patent expert Mark Lemley puts it. Innumerable inventive minds are, at any given time, examining the cutting-edge technologies and seeking to advance them. Many are working as hard as our mythic Edisons. But the ones we consider iconic inventors are often those whose version of the end product sold the best in the marketplace, who told the most memorable stories, or who won the most important patent battles.

The iPhone is a deeply, almost incomprehensibly, collective achievement. As the pile of phone guts on the iFixit table attests, the iPhone is what's often called a convergence technology. It's a container ship of inventions, many of which are incompletely understood. Multitouch, for instance, granted the iPhone its interactive magic, enabling swiping, pinching, and zooming. And while Jobs publicly claimed the invention as Apple's own, multitouch was developed decades earlier by a trail of pioneers from places as varied as CERN's particle-accelerator labs to the University of Toronto to a start-up bent on empowering the disabled. Institutions like Bell Labs and CERN incubated research and experimentation; governments poured in hundreds of millions of dollars to support them.

But casting aside the lone-inventor myth and recognizing that thousands of innovators contributed to the device isn't enough to see how we arrived at the iPhone. Ideas require raw materials and hard labor to become inventions. Miners on almost every continent chisel out the hard-to-reach elements that go into manufacturing iPhones, which are assembled by hundreds of thousands of hands in city-size factories across China. Each of those laborers and miners are an essential part of the iPhone's story—it wouldn't be in anyone's pocket today without them.

All of these technological, economic, and cultural trends had to glom together before the iPhone could finally allow us to achieve what J.C.R. Licklider termed man-computer symbiosis: A coexistence with an omnipresent digital reference tool and entertainment source, an augmenter of our thoughts and enabler of our impulses. The better we understand the complexity behind our most popular consumer product and the work, inspiration, and suffering that makes it possible, the better we'll understand the world that's hooked on it.

None of this diminishes the achievements of the designers and engineers at Apple who ultimately brought the iPhone to market. Without their engineering insights, key designs, and software innovations, the immaculately crafted one device may never have become just that. But thanks in part to Apple's notorious secrecy, few even know who they are.

That culture of secrecy extends to the physical product itself. Have you ever tried to pry your own iPhone open to look inside? Apple would rather you didn't. One of the ways it became the most profitable corporation on the planet is by keeping us out of the morgue. Jobs told his biographer that allowing people to tinker with his designs "would just allow people to screw things up." Thus, iPhones are sealed with proprietary screws, called Pentalobes, that make it impossible to open up your own phone without a special tool.

"I've had people say, 'Oh, my phone, it doesn't last as long as it used to,'" iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens says. "And I'm like, 'You know you can swap the battery.' I swear to God I've had people say, 'There's a battery inside my phone?'" With the rise of slick, sealed smartphones, we risk happily swiping along as, to borrow Arthur C. Clarke's famous line, this sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic.

So let's open the iPhone up, to discover its beginnings and evaluate its impact. To bust the Jobs-Edison myth of the lone inventor. To understand how we got to iPhone.

Toward that end, I traveled to Shanghai and Shenzhen, and snuck into the factory where Chinese workers piece the phones together, where a suicide epidemic exposed the harsh conditions in which iPhones get made. I had a metallurgist pulverize an iPhone to find out exactly which elements lay inside. I climbed into mines where child laborers pry tin and gold from the depths of a collapsing mountain. I watched hackers pwn my iPhone at America's largest cybersecurity conference. I met the father of mobile computing and heard his thoughts about what the iPhone meant for his dream. I traced the origins of multitouch through a field of unacknowledged pioneers. I interviewed the transgender chip designer who made the iPhone's brain possible. I met the unheralded software-design geniuses who shaped the iPhone's look and feel into what it is today.

In fact, I spoke to every iPhone designer, engineer, and executive who was willing to do an interview. My goal is that by the end of this book, you'll glance into the black mirror of your iPhone and see, not the face of Jobs, but a group picture of its myriad creators—and have a more nuanced, true, and, I think, compelling portrait of the one device that pulled us all into its future.

A quick note on Apple: Investigating the iPhone is a paradoxical task. A parade of pundits, anonymous sources, and blog posts offer an endless stream of opinions about everything Apple does. A few flat cryptic words from an Apple press release often provides the "official" record. Apple grants next to no interviews with its staff, and the journalists who do get interviews are typically handpicked for their long-standing or friendly relationships with company. I am not one of those journalists—in fact, I'm not even much of a gadget geek. (While I've been on the science and tech beat for about a decade now, I've spent more time covering oil spills than product demos.) So, while I made Apple officials fully aware of this project from the outset and repeatedly spoke with and met their PR representatives, they declined my many requests to interview executives and employees. Tim Cook never answered my (very thoughtful) emails. To tell this story, I met current and former Apple employees in dank dive bars or spoke with them over encrypted communications, and I had to grant anonymity to some of those I interviewed. Many people from the iPhone team still working at Apple told me they would have loved to participate on the record—they wanted the world to know its incredible story—but declined for fear of violating Apple's strict policy of secrecy. I'm confident that the dozens of interviews I did with iPhone innovators, the talks I had with journalists and historians who've studied it, and the documents I've obtained about the device all helped render a full and accurate portrait.

That portrait will emerge on two tracks. The first puts you inside Apple to show how the iPhone was imagined, prototyped, and created by a host of unsung innovators—those who pioneered new ways of manipulating and interacting with information. These four sections start when you turn the page, and appear throughout the middle and at the end of the book—fitting, I think, as countless people gave rise to the one device, but Apple ultimately made the iPhone.

The second will follow my efforts to uncover the iPhone's raw source material, to meet with the minds and hands that made it possible around the globe. These chapters will start at Chapter 1, and proceed from examining the century-old origins of the idea of a "smartphone" to exploring the powerful technologies gathered under its hood, to investigating how all those parts are assembled in China, to visiting the black markets and e-waste pits where they ultimately wind up.

With that, let's make our first stop—Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, the heart of Silicon Valley.