Steve Jobs' team built a multitouch tablet first, in the early 2000s. When he saw inertial scrolling work, he realized the same technology could make a better phone, so they shelved the tablet to build the iPhone instead. After the iPhone succeeded, Apple returned to the tablet idea and created the iPad.
When you built this OS, this multi-touch gestural OS for fingers, you didn't do it in a tablet right away. You did it in the phone. What was the— I mean, did you consider doing a tablet when you did the iPhone, or, or was it just a natural progression? The iPhone came out, it was a big hit. I'll actually tell you kind of a secret. Okay. Okay.
I actually started on the tablet first. And I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display. And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display that we could type on, I could rest my hands on and actually type on? And about 6 months later, they called me in and showed me this prototype display. And it was amazing. And I gave it to one of our guys. This was in the early '90s. I mean, early 2000s. And I gave it to one of our other really brilliant UI folks. And he called me back a few weeks later, and he had inertial scrolling working. And a few other things. Now, we were thinking about building a phone at that time, and when I saw the rubber band inertial scrolling and a few of the other things, I thought, my God, we can build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet project on the shelf because the phone was more important. And we went, took the next several years, and did the iPhone. So then, and when we got our When we got our wind back and thought we could take on something next, pulled the tablet off the shelf, took everything we learned from the phone, went back to work on the tablet.
If you want to see how Steve Jobs started Apple, check out the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.
We had absolutely no idea what people were going to do with these things when we started out. Matter of fact, the two people it was designed for was Woz and myself, because we couldn't afford to buy it. Computer kit on the market.
