Apple Spent Over $150 Million To Create The Original iPhone (AAPL)
Fred Vogelstein has a must read story on the creation of the iPhone in the New York Times Magazine.
It’s chock full of great little details, and you absolutely should read it. Here’s one of many little nuggets from the story.
According to a senior Apple executive, the company likely spent over $ 150 million to develop the original iPhone.
Considering how important the iPhone is for Apple, this seems like nothing for the company to spend. But, it’s still a fairly big number.
Apple invested more in the iPhone than money, though, reports Vogelstein. It also put its best people on the project.
“Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work,” says Vogelstein. If the iPhone were a dud, it put the whole company at risk because this is the only thing it was really working on.
And choosing top engineers caused a rift within Apple. The iPhone was a top secret project, with only the best of hte best working on it.
Andy Grignon, a hardware engineer in charge of the radios in the iPhone told Vogelstein, “It was a big ‘[expletive] you’ to the people who couldn’t get in [to work on the iPhone]. Everyone knows who the rock stars are in a company, and when you start to see them all slowly get plucked out of your area and put in a big room behind glass doors that you don’t have access to, it feels bad.”
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