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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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The rumor is that the whole iPhone concept was actually the idea of one unnamed engineer at apple who worked on it in his spare time; apparently he had the idea at the same time as the folks at IG, probably it was kind of a natural evolution of the earlier devices. (You have to consider that the thing that made the iPhone such a success, the "app store", was not available from the beginning. The first devices had no official way of adding any software, but people quickly found hacks and added a debian-like package management to it. From there the first custom applications spawned and only then Apple understood the potential of opening the platform to third-party developers.)
Regarding the engineer, apparently he was fired by his supervisor for spending time on this "stupid" idea; but back in the day, Apple had the policy that everyone who was fired had to report to Jobs one last time, and then he showed him what he was working on and Jobs took it from there.