The iPhone only Exists Because Steve Jobs 'Hated This Guy At Microsoft'

If it were not for a particular Microsoft executive, whom Steve Jobs apparently hated with passion, it is possible that Apple has never created the iPhone or the iPad.

Recalling the iPhone's birth story in a talk at the Computer History Museum in California, former Apple chief iOS Scott Forstall said, "The iPhone had a very tortuous route. We had been working on a tablet project.

"It started because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft. Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he would be upset.

The unnamed executive of Microsoft, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs's wife Laurene Powell Jobs, continually talked and boasted of the Redmond company's plans for tablets and pencils, so much so that Jobs decided to try and beat him .

After being bothered by the Microsoft executive at dinner for the tenth time, he was told that Microsoft was going to change the world with his tablet PC and stylus and that Apple should license it, Jobs lost his patience and, as Walter Isaacson Biography Jobs said: "Shit this, let's show you what a tablet really can be."

Even though the iPad has the Apple pen today, famous Jobs hated the needles. Forstall told Jobs as saying: "You do not use a stylus ... we are born with 10 needles."

During the development of the iPad, which began as a multi-touch tabletop prototype in which you could move the photos with your codename "purple project" fingers, Apple identified that smartphones were becoming a threat to their business Of iPod and thus divert efforts towards What was going to be the iPhone.

Forstall recounted Jobs saying: “‘Do you think you could take that demo that we’re doing with the tablet and the multi-touch and shrink it down to something small enough to fit in your pocket?’

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“We went back to the design team and they took it and they carved out a corner of it,” said Forstall. “Steve saw it and said ‘put the tablet on hold, let’s build a phone.’ And that’s what we did.”

The original iPhone wasn’t as well received by reviewers as you might expect at the time of its release in 2007, who were rating it against the number of clicks to get to certain things.

Forstall said: “It was being compared against other smartphones of the time, BlackBerry etc, according to the metrics people thought were important at the time.

“What they didn’t get was we were changing the entire paradigm. We were changing the entire way things were done.”

Initial sales were good, but not exceptional. After spending time with one in the real world, Forstall said he and the rest of Apple could see it was going to be huge one day.

Forstall also touched on his personal sickness in the early 2000s from an obscure virus, which was apparently cured when nothing else would do the trick by Jobs’s acupuncturist. Forstall, who was infamous at Apple for being the person who pushed the use of computer interfaces that appeared like real-life objects, also revealed he had “never heard of skeuomorphism” at the time.