{"id":461315,"date":"2026-03-06T20:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T20:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/461315\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T20:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T20:18:09","slug":"the-iphone-almost-never-existed-and-it-took-one-annoying-microsoft-engineer-at-a-dinner-party-to-make-steve-jobs-will-it-into-being","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/461315\/","title":{"rendered":"The iPhone almost never existed and it took one annoying Microsoft engineer at a dinner party to make Steve Jobs will it into being"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you know that the iPhone as you know it almost never existed, and it took one annoying Microsoft engineer at a dinner party to make Steve Jobs will it into being? <\/p>\n

Before Apple\u2019s most iconic gadget changed the world in 2007, the company was actually chasing a very different dream behind closed doors.<\/p>\n

According to a new excerpt from David Pogue\u2019s upcoming book Apple: The First 50 Years, the road to the iPhone was full of experiments, dead ends, and one dinner conversation that seriously got under Jobs\u2019 skin.<\/p>\n

And without that moment, the device that now feels totally inevitable might never have happened at all.<\/p>\n

Click the star icon next to\u00a0supercarblondie.com\u00a0in\u00a0Google Search<\/a>\u00a0to stay ahead of the curve on the latest and greatest supercars, hypercars, and ground-breaking technology<\/p>\n

The iPhone almost never existed because Apple was building something else first<\/p>\n

Long before Apple had settled on a phone as its flagship gadget<\/a>, its teams were obsessed with rethinking how people interacted with screens.<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, designers including Duncan Kerr, Bas Ording, and Imran Chaudhri were experimenting with multi-touch technology.<\/p>\n

They were using a larger custom-built FingerWorks pad and a projector rig, creating the kind of pinch, stretch, and swipe gestures that now feel second nature<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Wikicommons<\/p>\n

The surprising part is that these experiments were originally meant to inspire a tablet<\/a>, not a pocket-sized device.<\/p>\n

Steve Jobs loved the potential, but the early tablet prototypes were too chunky, too heavy, and just not good enough to become a real product.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Wikicommons<\/p>\n

One Microsoft engineer annoyed Steve Jobs into inventing it<\/p>\n

The turning point came in late 2005, when Jobs attended a birthday dinner for a Microsoft engineer who would not stop talking about stylus-based tablets.<\/p>\n

Jobs later said he was so fed up after hearing the pitch again that he went home furious and decided Apple had to show the world what a proper tablet should look like, with fingers instead of a stylus.<\/p>\n

That moment reignited Apple\u2019s work on multi-touch hardware, but at the same time, the company was also waking up to a bigger threat: mobile phones were getting better at music, and that meant the iPod\u2019s dominance would not last forever<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Wikicommons<\/p>\n

Apple first tried teaming up with Motorola, but the disappointing result pushed the company toward making its own handset.<\/p>\n

Two secret internal concepts then battled it out, one inspired by the iPod and another built around multi-touch, and Jobs ultimately backed the more ambitious touchscreen idea.<\/p>\n

That decision turned into Project Purple, and the rest is tech history.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tDISCOVER SBX CARS:
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tThe global premium car auction platform powered by Supercar Blondie
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Did you know that the iPhone as you know it almost never existed, and it took one annoying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[2306,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-461315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-mobile","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}