According to Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president of design, the iPhone was almost scrapped completely because of its touchscreen - now a major selling point. Speaking today at the government’s business summit at Lancaster House, he said that making the touch-sensitive device work as a phone seemed an insurmountable problem.
“With the early prototypes, I would put the phone to my ear and my ear dialled a number," he said.
"The challenge is that you have to then detect all sorts of different ear shapes, chin shapes, skin colour and hairdos. We had to develop technology, basically a number of sensors, to inform the phone that ‘this is now going up to an ear, please deactivate the touchscreen’. That was one of the examples where we thought, ‘perhaps this is not going to work’.”
The iPhone eventually slipped through the net, but the designer said that Apple had given up on a number of "incredibly compelling" designs because of similar problems.
“On a number of occasions, we’ve been preparing for mass production and you realise you’ve been talking a little bit too loud about the virtues of something,” he said.
“That to me is always a danger, when I’m talking loud about something and I’m trying to convince myself. You have that horrible feeling, deep down in your tummy, that it’s okay but it’s not great.”