Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution

Behind the bitter rivalry between Apple and Google—and how it’s reshaping the way we think about technologyThe rise of smartphones and tablets has altered the business of making computers. At the center of this change are Apple and Google, two companies whose philosophies, leaders, and commercial acumen have steamrolled the competition. In the age of Android and the iPad, these corporations are locked in a feud that will play out not just in the marketplace but in the courts and on screens around the world. Fred Vogelstein has reported on this rivalry for more than a decade and has rare access to its major players. In Dogfight, he takes us into the offices and board rooms where company dogma translates into ruthless business; behind outsize personalities like Steve Jobs, Apple’s now-lionized CEO, and Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman; and inside the deals, lawsuits, and allegations that mold the way we communicate. Apple and Google are poaching each other’s employees. They bid up the price of each other’s acquisitions for spite, and they forge alliances with major players like Facebook and Microsoft in pursuit of market dominance. Dogfight reads like a novel: vivid nonfiction with never-before-heard details. This is more than a story about what devices will replace our phones and laptops. It’s about who will control the content on those devices and where that content will come from—about the future of media in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood.

*Please note that some of the links enced in this work are no longer active.

refer-For Evelyn, Sam, and

Beatrice

1 The Moon Mission

2 The iPhone Is Good Android Will BeBetter

3 Twenty-Four Weeks, Three Days, andThree Hours Until Launch

4 I Thought We Were Friends

5 The Consequences of Betrayal

6 Android Everywhere

7 The iPad Changes Everything—Again

8 “Mr Quinn, Please, Don’t Make Me

Sanction You.”

9 Remember Convergence? It’s Happening

10 Changing the World One Screen at aTime

expensive than most phones out there And itwas arguably less capable It ran on a slowercell/data network And it required users totype on a virtual, not a physical, keyboard.

To some critics, that meant the iPhone wasdead on arrival

If anything, Jobs undersold the iPhonethat day It truly was a breakthrough TheiPhone wasn’t really a phone, but the firstmainstream pocket computer that madecalls With its touchscreen, it did so manythings that other phones could never do thatconsumers overlooked its shortcomings.Consumers got used to the virtual keyboard,and Apple continued to make it better andbetter It cut the price to equal that of otherphones It quickly upgraded the slower cell/data radios to make its technology competit-ive It developed displays with unheard-ofresolutions It bought a chip design company

to make sure the iPhone was always the est device out there It rolled out a

fast-completely new version of the iPhone ware every year And it designed iconic tele-vision ads—as it had done for the iPod—thatmade consumers feel special about owningone.

soft-The subsequent frenzy of demand gaveApple and Jobs the leverage to turn thetables on the wireless carriers and start

telling them what to do More important, it

ignited a technology revolution that todaytouches almost every corner of civilization.The iPhone has become one of the most pop-ular cell phones of all time, selling more than

135 million units in 2012 alone It has come the platform for a new and hugelyprofitable software industry—phoneapps—that has generated more than $10 bil-lion in total revenues since starting five yearsago, in 2008 And the iPhone has becomethe source of an entire rethink of how hu-mans interact with machines—with their fin-gers instead of buttons or a mouse The

be-iPhone and its progeny—the iPod Touch andthe iPad—haven’t just changed the way theworld thinks about cell phones, they havechanged the way the world thinks aboutcomputers for the first time in a generation,arguably since the advent of the Macintosh

in 1984

Since 2010, when Jobs followed theiPhone with the iPad, the questioning hasgrown frenzied Who said our computer had

to sit under our desk or on our lap? Can’t itjust be a screen that fits in our pocket orpurse, or something we leave lying aroundthe house? Indeed, if you compare iPad sales

to sales of desktops and laptops, Apple isnow the largest PC maker in the world Itnow sells more iPads per quarter than Dell

or HP sells laptops and desktops Apple’stotal sales of iPhones, iPads, and iPodTouches now exceed 200 million devices ayear That’s about the same number of TVssold by all manufacturers every year and

about four times the number of cars soldworldwide All of this has turned Apple, thecorporation, into a colossus larger than evenJobs’s enormous ambitions Once on theprecipice of bankruptcy, in 1997, Apple today

is one of the most valuable and profitablecompanies anywhere

And yet Apple behaves like a corporationunder siege—because despite all this success,

it is From the moment in late 2007 thatGoogle unveiled Android—and its own plan

to dominate the world of mobile phones andother mobile devices—Google hasn’t just

tried to compete with the iPhone, it has ceeded in competing with the iPhone.

suc-Android took hold in 2010, and it has ploded in popularity since To Apple’s aston-ishment, there are now more smartphonesand tablets running Android software thanthere are iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touchesrunning Apple’s software, known as iOS In

ex-2012 there was even debate about whether

the iPhone was the most popular phone anymore During the third quarter of

smart-2012, some surveys said, Samsung sold moreAndroid-powered Galaxys than Apple soldiPhones

Apple ended the “who has the most lar smartphone” discussion at the end of

popu-2012, when it unveiled the iPhone 5 Butmore and more wonder whether this is evenrelevant anymore The differences betweenthe two platforms are narrowing by the day.Sure, they are different structurally Applemakes every inch of the iPhone—the hard-ware and the software (though the devicesare assembled in China) Google just makesthe software for Android phones It allowsphone manufacturers such as Samsung tomake the hardware But both platforms nowhave an equivalent number of pluses andminuses: Apple’s platform is a little easier touse, but it only offers three products—theiPhone, the iPad, and the iPod Touch

Google’s platform offers many more phonechoices, and often has the latest phone fea-tures ahead of Apple, but it lacks the polish

of Apple’s interface Still, both platforms arenow equally available among large carriersworldwide, and, with the exception of Applestores, they are available for purchase in thesame places

Seeing Apple’s market dominance lenged so swiftly and broadly was uniquelypainful for Jobs and remains that way for thecompany’s other executives Jobs thought,and Apple executives still think, that Googleand the Android community cheated to cre-ate their success They think that Google ex-ecutives stole Apple’s software to buildAndroid, and that Android’s largest phonemaker, Samsung, copied Apple’s designs tobuild its supersuccessful Galaxy phones.They feel betrayed Apple and Google weren’tjust business partners when the iPhone wasunveiled in early 2007 They were spiritual

chal-allies—the yin and yang of the technology volution This was one of the closest alliances

re-in American busre-iness Apple made greatdevices Google made great software.Google’s founders considered Jobs to be amentor Google’s then CEO, Eric Schmidt,sat on Apple’s board of directors They had acommon enemy: Microsoft Together theyplanned for a long and prosperous marriage

Then, as can happen in a marriage, the lationship frayed Secrets were kept Prom-ises were broken And the two went to war.When Jobs died in October 2011, there washope that the dogfight would feel less likepersonal betrayal and quiet down—thatApple’s new CEO, Tim Cook, would take theemotion out of the battle and find a way tosettle it But if anything, Apple has gotten

re-more aggressive and nasty toward Google

since then It still has dozens of patent suits in at least seven countries pendingagainst the Android community—mostly

law-against Samsung and Motorola (owned byGoogle) In the summer of 2012, it took theunheard-of step of having its fight with Sam-sung, Google’s top distributor of Androidphones, tried in front of a jury in San Jose Itwon a $1 billion judgment, though that is be-ing appealed In September 2012 Applestopped selling the iPhone preloaded withGoogle Maps It replaced the app with one ofits own, despite wide consumer complaintsthat the app was inferior Apple is believed to

be working on a video service to competewith YouTube, which Google owns

Apple has even begun replacing someGoogle search technology in the iPhone withsearch technology from its old enemy, Mi-crosoft Now when you use Siri, the iPhone’svoice recognition feature, Apple’s newestsoftware no longer uses Google search In-stead, she queries Microsoft’s Bing searchengine, which has been clawing at Google for

a decade over search market share To get

Siri to use Google’s search, you have to cifically ask her to “search Google” beforeeach request Google is still the defaultsearch engine inside the iPhone’s webbrowser But for those with long memories,the idea that Apple would dump any Googletechnology for Microsoft’s—when Microsoftwas the bitter enemy of both for so long—is

spe-an astonishing development

Google’s public posture in its fight withApple has consistently been “Who, us? We’rejust a bunch of geeks out to change theworld.” But in its quiet, nerdy way Googlehas fought back ferociously It defied Apple’sdemands that it remove software fromAndroid phones or face patent lawsuits Itemployed tactics to make Jobs look like anunhinged tyrant And it bought the cellphone maker Motorola for $12.5 billion in

2012, its largest acquisition by far It said theonly purpose of the purchase was to buy Mo-torola’s patents It said it would be easier to

fight a litigious opponent like Apple if itowned the company that invented the mod-ern cell phone and all the patents associatedwith that That’s true, but the claim hid an-other equally powerful reason: the acquisi-tion means that Google will always be able tomake phones to compete with Apple no mat-ter how successful Apple is with its lawsuitsagainst other phone and tablet manufactur-ers The purchase also gives Google leverage

in case new challengers emerge

Last, Google now finds itself doingsomething most thought it would never do: it

is making its own consumer electronics fromscratch to compete with Apple devices in theliving room Google has all the pieces notonly to hook users on cell phones running itsAndroid software, but to reach themwherever they go, inside or outside theirhomes

* * *

Usually, the story of two companies and theirpowerful leaders going at it makes a greatmagazine piece and little more Company Xattacks company Y Company Y fights back.One wins One loses But this is a much big-ger tale than that It’s hard to imagine amore revolutionary object than the object thetwo companies started fighting over: thesmartphone The smartphone has funda-mentally changed the way humans get andprocess information, and that is changingthe world in ways that are almost too large toimagine Ponder the individual impacts ofthe book, the newspaper, the telephone, theradio, the tape recorder, the camera, thevideo camera, the compass, the television,the VCR and the DVD, the personal com-puter, the cell phone, the video game, andthe iPod The smartphone is all those things

in one device that fits in your pocket It isradically changing the way we learn inschool, the way doctors treat patients, the

way we travel and explore Entertainmentand all media are accessed in entirely newways That sounds like something Jobsmight have said at one of his famous productlaunches But it is not an exaggeration.

What this means is that Apple versusGoogle isn’t just a run-of-the-mill spatbetween two rich companies It is the defin-ing business battle of a generation It is aninflection point, such as the moment whenthe PC was invented, when the Internetbrowser took hold, when Google reinventedweb search, and when Facebook created thesocial network In this massive reexamina-tion of how technology, media, and commu-nications intersect, two of the most powerfulcompanies in the world to dominate thatnew landscape are in open warfare

Yes, invariably this reminds you of ous fights among entrepreneurs in SiliconValley, such as Apple versus Microsoft in the1980s or Microsoft versus Netscape in the

previ-1990s But the stakes are infinitely highernow In the 1980s personal computing was anascent market, and both Apple and Mi-crosoft were new companies In the 1990speople saw the potential of the Internet, es-pecially in a device that fit in your pocket.But wireless bandwidth was still too slowand expensive Today, 1.8 billion cell phonesare sold worldwide every year, and in five toten years most of them are going to besmartphones No one knows how big the tab-let market is going to be yet, but the tablet isalready becoming an important new techno-logy for people to read books, newspapers,and magazines, not to mention watch TV orplay video games In other words, the stakes

of this battle are infinitely higher than anyearlier struggles

It’s not just that there is a lot more money

to be made and lost in the Apple/Googlefight than in previous Silicon Valley battles.It’s that the fight feels—to the players, at

least—like a winner-take-all situation Why?Because they’re not just fighting over whichside has the hottest devices, they’re battlingfor control of the online stores and com-munities these devices connect to—the so-called cloud A lot of what we buy via Apple’siTunes store—apps, music, movies, TVshows, books, etc.—doesn’t work easily onAndroid devices or at all, and vice versa Andboth companies know that the more moneyeach of us spends on apps and other mediafrom one store, the less likely we are toswitch to the other They know we will ask,

“Why rebuy all that content just to buy anAndroid phone instead of an iPhone?” Manycompanies have free apps that work on bothplatforms, but even having to redownloadthem, and re-set them up, is enough to keepmany users from switching In Silicon Valleyparlance, it’s a platform war Whether yourexample is Microsoft with Windows and Of-fice, eBay with auctions, Apple with the iPod,

Amazon with books, Google with search, orFacebook with social media, history suggeststhat the winner in fights like this gets morethan 75 percent of the market share, whilethe loser struggles to stay in that business.

This is a big deal In the coming yearsmost of what we consider informa-tion—news, entertainment, communica-tions—will get funneled through eitherApple’s or Google’s platform Doubt me? It’salready happening We now spend as muchtime connected to the Internet as we dowatching television, and more and more ofour access to the Internet comes throughsmartphones and tablets Think about howmuch time you spend staring at your phone

or tablet now—not just responding to email,reading the news, tweeting, facebooking,watching a video, playing games, or surfingthe web Include the seconds you spend in el-evators, standing in line, at stoplights, in therestroom too Now ask yourself this

question: Who controls what you see on yourtelevision? Your cable company Who con-trols what you see on your smartphone? Ul-timately, it is Apple and Google.

I remember when, as a contributing editor

for Wired, I first started thinking about the

mobile revolution At that time the selling phones worldwide came from Nokia,RIM (which makes the BlackBerry), SonyEricsson, and Motorola Then the iPhonewas announced It quickly seemed inevitablethat Apple and Google would end up fight-ing Few agreed with me An editor friend ofmine said the idea seemed preposterous.How could Apple and Google compete whenthey were in entirely different businesses? heasked Technically he was right Apple makesmoney selling the devices it creates Googlemakes money selling online advertising.What he and many missed is that those arenow only means to a much bigger end Bothcompanies see themselves as becoming new

top-kinds of content distributionengines—twenty-first-century TV networks,

if you will They won’t make content as the

TV networks do today; but their control ofhuge global audiences, and their enormousbalance sheets, will enable them to have abig impact on what gets made and who seesit

This may seem counterintuitive It’s hard

to imagine the geeks at Apple or Google

pro-ducing Mad Men But makers of movies and

TV shows essentially care about only twothings: How much is their project going tocost? And how many people are going to seeit? No two companies have more reach thanApple and Google Fewer still have moremoney Together they controlled $200 bil-lion in cash alone by mid-2013 That’s notonly enough to buy and/or finance an unlim-ited amount of content for their audience;it’s actually enough to buy most of Holly-wood The market capitalizations of News

Corp., Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS totalthat much combined Although most peopledon’t think of Apple and Google as entertain-ment giants, Apple through iTunes controlsroughly 25 percent of all music purchasedand 6 to 10 percent of the $18 billion homevideo market Meanwhile, Google is invest-ing millions of dollars in original program-ming for YouTube, which is already a videodestination for tens of millions of consumersaround the world.

This isn’t to suggest that there won’t beenormous room for new and old companies

to build substantial businesses of their own

in this new world In early 2013 Netflix ted 30 million subscribers, as many as HBO.Two years ago it looked to be a company thatmight not make it Studios jacked up theprice of their content to unaffordable levels.Movie and TV-show selection fell and cus-tomers started to leave So Netflix—a techno-logy company based in Los Gatos, not a

boas-Hollywood studio—started financing its ownprogramming Its first stab at this, the series

House of Cards, with Kevin Spacey, has been

an enormous hit Amazon and Microsoft aregetting production facilities up and runningtoo Meanwhile, Facebook, with more than 1billion members—half the Internet—has be-come a favorite stop for Hollywood agentslooking to use this giant global audience asanother way to finance and distribute theirclients’ work

But despite the power of Facebook,Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft, at the mo-ment they all still have to largely go throughtwo companies—Apple and Google—to get tothe increasingly massive audiences usingsmartphones and tablets for their news, en-tertainment, and communications What thismeans is that the Apple/Google fight is notjust a story about the future of Silicon Valley

It is about the future of media and nications in New York and Hollywood as

commu-well Hundreds of billions of dollars in enue are at stake, and for at least the nexttwo years, and probably the next five, thesecompanies, their allies, and their hangers-onwill be going at it full bore.

rev-* rev-* rev-*

In many ways what is happening now is whatmedia, communications, and softwaremoguls have been predicting for a genera-tion: The fruits of Silicon Valley’s labor andthose of New York and Hollywood are con-verging This is as close to tragic irony inbusiness as one ever gets For two dec-ades—the 1980s and 1990s—a procession ofcelebrated media executives marshaled thebest technology they could assemble to posi-tion themselves for the new world they sawcoming They spent hundreds of billions ofdollars buying one another to bulk up Buttheir timing was so off, their innovations

were so bad, and their mergers were so astrous—such as AOL’s purchase of TimeWarner in 2001—that by 2005 convergencehad become a discredited idea, and fewdared to mention the word.

dis-Where did all these very smart and verywealthy people go wrong? They had thewrong devices in mind The media and com-munications tycoons all predicted that theconvergence would happen on the personalcomputer—that their equipment supplyingtelevision programming, such as set-topboxes, would ultimately control our personalcomputers too The software ty-coons—largely Microsoft and BillGates—predicted that it would be personalcomputers that would take over our televi-sion sets Instead, the touchscreen smart-phone and touchscreen tablet are driving allthe changes—two devices that hadn’t beeninvented until recently The problem withthe television is that it is a lousy device to do

any kind of work on The problem with the

PC is that it is a lousy device to consume tertainment on The smartphones and tab-lets, because they are portable and so easy touse, are turning out to be the perfect blend ofboth You’d never pull out a laptop to play agame or watch a movie when you’re standing

en-in len-ine or sitten-ing en-in the back of a cab But we

do that with our smartphones and tablets allthe time We accept the trade-off of screensize for portability because, unlike with pre-vious portable devices, there are no othercompromises we need to make Theirscreens, while small, are actually sharperthan those of most televisions Their batter-ies last all day They turn on immediately.They are connected to wireless networks thatare fast enough to stream movies And theyare powerful enough to effectively run thesame applications as every other machine wehave

* * *

By the end of this book you’ll have a good

idea who I think is winning the Apple/

Google fight But you’ll also develop enoughrespect for what each side has had to gothrough just to stay in the game that youmight feel bad rooting for either side One ofthe things that I didn’t expect when I took onthis project was how hard it is to conceiveand build the products that Steve Jobs liked

to casually pull out of his pocket onstage.Whether you are an Apple engineer, a Google

engineer, or any engineer, building products

that change the world isn’t just work It’s aquest It leaves its participants not only tiredthe way all jobs sometimes do but mentallyand physically exhausted—even traumat-ized—at the end Part of Jobs’s appeal as aleader and a celebrity was that he success-fully hid all this from public view He madeinnovation look easy Now he is gone And,

as you’ll see in the following pages, there aremany engineers at both companies who wantthe rest of the world to know what changing

the world really has been like Before there

could be the smartphones and tablets we allnow buy and take for granted, there wasyelling, screaming, backstabbing, dejection,panic, and fear over what it would take to getthose projects off the ground and into con-sumers’ hands They want you to understandwhat the iPhone and Android projects werelike at the beginning—and so that is wherethis book will start

280 to locals, it is one of the best places inSilicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoonspeed-testing his Ferrari and one of the

worst places for cell phone reception ForAndy Grignon in his Porsche Carrera, there-fore, it was the perfect place for him to bealone with his thoughts early on January 8,2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route towork He was a senior engineer at Apple inCupertino, the town just west of Campbell.His morning drive typically covered sevenmiles and took exactly fifteen minutes Buttoday was different He was going to watchhis boss, Steve Jobs, make history at theMacworld trade show in San Francisco.Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put acell phone inside their iPods so they couldstop carrying two devices in their pockets.Jobs was about to fulfill that wish Grignonand some colleagues would spend the night

at a nearby hotel, and at 10:00 a.m the lowing day they—along with the rest of theworld—would watch Jobs unveil the firstiPhone

fol-Getting invited to one of Jobs’s famousproduct announcements was supposed to be

a great honor It anointed you as a player.Only a few dozen Apple employees, includingtop executives, got an invite The rest of thespots were reserved for Apple’s board of dir-ectors, CEOs of partners—such as Eric Sch-midt of Google and Stan Sigman atAT&T—and journalists from around theworld Grignon got an invite because he wasthe senior engineer for all the radios in theiPhone This is a big job Cell phones do in-numerable useful things for us today, but attheir most basic they are fancy two-way radi-

os Grignon was in charge of the equipmentthat allowed the phone to be a phone If thephone didn’t make calls, connect withBluetooth headsets, or connect to Wi-Fisetups, Grignon had to answer for it As one

of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d ated two and a half years of his life—often

dedic-seven days a week—to the project Few served to be there more than he did.

de-But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feelexcited He felt terrified Most onstageproduct demonstrations in Silicon Valley arecanned The thinking goes, why let bad In-ternet or cell phone connections ruin an oth-erwise good presentation? Jobs’s presenta-tions were live, however It was one of thethings that made his shows so captivating.But for those in the background, such asGrignon, few parts of the job caused morestress Grignon couldn’t remember the lasttime a Jobs show of this magnitude had gonesideways Part of what made Steve Jobs such

a legend was that noticeable product-demoglitches almost never happened But Grignonfound it hard to recall the last time Jobs was

so unprepared going into a show

Grignon had been part of the iPhonelaunch-preparation team at Apple and later

at the presentation site in San Francisco’s

Moscone Center But he had rarely seen Jobsmake it all the way through his ninety-minute show without a glitch Jobs had beenrehearsing for five days, yet even on the lastday of rehearsals the iPhone was still ran-domly dropping calls, losing the Internetconnection, freezing, or just shutting down.

“At first it was just really cool to be at hearsals at all—kind of like a cred badge

re-‘Fuck yeah, I get to hang out with Steve,’”Grignon said Like everything else that sur-rounded Jobs, the preparations were assecret as a U.S missile attack on Afgh-anistan Those who were truly in felt as ifthey were at the center of the universe FromThursday through the end of the followingweek, Apple completely took over Moscone.Backstage it built an eight-by-eight-foot elec-tronics lab to house and test the iPhones.Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofafor Jobs Then it posted more than a dozensecurity guards twenty-four hours a day in

front of those rooms and at doorsthroughout the building No one got in or outwithout having his or her ID electronicallychecked and compared with a master listthat Jobs had personally approved More se-curity checkpoints needed to be cleared oncevisitors got inside The auditorium whereJobs was rehearsing was off-limits to all but

a small group of executives Jobs was so sessed with leaks that he tried to have all thecontractors Apple had hired for the an-nouncement—from people manning boothsand doing demos to those responsible forlighting and sound—sleep in the building thenight before his presentation Aides talkedhim out of it

ob-“It quickly got really uncomfortable,”Grignon said “Very rarely did I see him be-come completely unglued It happened Butmostly he just looked at you and very directlysaid in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You arefucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will

be because of you.’ He was just very intense.And you would always feel an inch tall [when

he was done chewing you out].” Grignon saidthat you would always ask yourself two ques-tions during one of these lectures: “‘Is it myshit that broke this time?’ and ‘Is it the nthtime it broke or the first time?’—because thatactually mattered The nth time would frus-trate him, but by then he might have figuredout a way around it But if it was the firsttime, it added a whole new level of instability

to the program.” Grignon, like everyone else

at rehearsals, knew that if those glitchesshowed up during the real presentation, Jobswould not be blaming himself for the prob-lems, he would come after people likeGrignon “It felt like we’d gone through thedemo a hundred times and that each timesomething went wrong,” Grignon said “Itwasn’t a good feeling.”

* * *

The iPhone didn’t work right for a good on; it wasn’t close to being finished Jobs wasshowing off a prototype He just didn’t wantthe public to know that But the list of thingsthat still needed to be done before theiPhone could be sold was enormous A pro-duction line had yet to be set up Only about

reas-a hundred iPhones even existed, reas-all of them

of varying degrees of quality Some had ticeable gaps between the screen and theplastic edge, others had scuff marks on thescreen Thus no one in the public was al-lowed to touch an iPhone after Jobs unveiled

no-it, despite a day of press briefings and awhole exhibit set up for them in the conven-tion center The worry was that even the bestprototypes wouldn’t stand close scrutiny,Grignon said They’d look fine at a distanceand for Jobs’s demo, but if you held one inyour hand, “You would laugh and say, ‘Wow,this thing really looks unfinished.’”

The phone’s software was in even worseshape A big chunk of the previous fourmonths had been consumed figuring out whythe iPhone’s processor and its cell radiowouldn’t reliably communicate This hugeproblem was akin to a car with an enginethat occasionally doesn’t respond to the ac-celerator, or wheels that occasionally don’trespond to the brake pedal “It almostbrought the iPhone program to a halt,”Grignon said “We had never seen a problemthis complicated.” This was ordinarily not aproblem for phone makers, but Apple’s ob-session with secrecy had kept Samsung, themanufacturer of the phone’s processor, andInfineon, the maker of the phone’s cell radio,from working together until Apple, in des-peration, flew teams of engineers from eachcompany to Cupertino to help fix theproblem.

Jobs rarely backed himself into cornerslike this He was well-known as a master