POETRY: I HAVE FALLEN IN THE DEPTH OF YOUR EYES

Walking in slow motion,
Gazing at Her wavering hair
fluctuating loosely in the wind-
The sensual scent of apple-pear
filling the very pores of His nose.
With a pounding heart
He steps closer,
closer to what stands before Him.
How clumsy He feels
for Oh, dreaded are those stretched toes!
Those sagging Sabre parts!
Faithfully He tries to carry on
when from over the way,
A screech leaps His melting heart.
"Must I forego my pursuit?" shortly He pondered
for "Never!" remarked the Princess...
Linked two glassy eyes.

2

In the still of the night I wrestled with my mind
 to not let my heart control my innermost feelings
  that come from deep within.
In the still of the night I saw the shadow of your
  face, though very glim.
  My heart wondered where you had been.
I reached out to touch you and hold you when
   at last I realized it was just the rustling of
   the leaves from the blowing of the wind.
In the still of the night as my eyes started to weaken
    the tears from my eyes and heart fell.
    I reached out for you and called your name but to
    no avail... again it was the still of the night.
In the still of the night I looked around the corner with a
    glimmer of hope that it was your voice I had heard
     but again it was the whisper of the wind calling my name.
In the still of the night I hold you my darlin' and I am holding
      you so tight. But when the dawn breaks and I am wide
       awake I realize in all my grief...
it was just a dream that was in the Still of the Night



3

All five senses in a relationship count
We have them all, if you want to know:

The mouth gives the romantic talks
 The nose smells the rocky fragrance
  The ear listens to the heart
   The mouth gives the love message
    And the eyes can tell you
    that the inside counts the most

But the Sixth sense is built between us
It is a strong bond that we use to overcome obstacles
It is not an individual work
But the hard work of two peaceful beating hearts
Giving faith and hope to why we have senses.


4

If only you could feel the love
I feel inside my heart
From the moment I first saw you
You gave me quite a start

This feeling is one I wish to share
It can't be held inside
How easily you've touched my soul
And left me filled with pride

There're many things we say we love
But this one's quite real
I feel I'm overflowing
With the love for you I feel

I know you only as a friend
But I sense you're so much more
Like I've walked with you
On that distant sandy shore

If only you could realize
What your friendship's done for me
An escape that's really needed
And a chance to feel I'm free.



5

How much time does it take
to pick up the phone or a pen
and let someone know
there is a piece of thought
that has become known?

There's a moment to be taken
to let that someone know
that this precious moment
was meant to be conveyed
with the best of one's ability...

in love




6

Every time I think of you,
I get a smile on my face.
One that warms me from the inside out,
And puts my heart at rest.

Every time I have a dream,
I see your face again,
It beckons me to come closer,
But disappears before I?m there.

Every time I imagine you,
A bird whistles a song,
A tune that gives you hope,
And the strength to go on.

And every time I talk to you,
I feel so out of sorts,
Just like a little boy,
With so little self-control.


7

I have fallen in
The depth of your eyes
You've seen the nakedness of my soul
You've stripped away my disguise

You've opened the door
To see the coffin in my heart
You got to me fast
A perfect shot in the dark.

You know my ins
You know my outs
You know my fears
You know my doubts

Being with you
Is like having a twin
Destined to be together
Our love will never end


8

I wish 
For a moment 
I could Travel 
to the deepest corners 
of your soul 
If just for a glimpse  
Of your true self 
Understand your feelings 
Mind and body 
To be one with your heart 
Your silent cries 
I would hear 
Expel your worries & fears 
And bask in wonders 
Your thoughts 
Can only provide 
I wish 
For a moment 
I could hold your essence 
The very inner glow 
That attracts me 
And weakens my soul 
Leaving me vulnerable 
To your sweetest words 
Spellbound 
By your beauty 
I wish for a moment 
I could stop 
The sands of time 
Embrace all 
That is you 
Give up my life 
For a minute of yours 
And indulge in your presence 
For evermore 
For soulmates 
We are destined 
By love 
I wish 
For a moment 
I could wish 
I would wish 
I would wish you

ARTICLE: THE BIRTH OF THE IPHONE..And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’ By FRED VOGELSTEIN

And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

By FRED VOGELSTEIN

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cellphone reception. For Andy Grignon, it was therefore the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on Jan. 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly 15 minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cellphone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 a.m. the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.

Grignon was the senior manager in charge of all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cellphones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic, they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the device didn’t make calls, or didn’t connect with Bluetooth headsets or Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life — often seven days a week — to the project.

Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down.

“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all — kind of like a cred badge,” Grignon says. Only a chosen few were allowed to attend. “But it quickly got really uncomfortable. Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] 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.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times, and each time something went wrong,” Grignon says. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”

The preparations were top-secret. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage, it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards 24 hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple hired — from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound — sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.

Grignon knew the iPhone unveiling was not an ordinary product announcement, but no one could have anticipated what a seminal moment it would become. In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. They transformed the stodgy cellphone industry. They provided a platform for a new and hugely profitable software industry — mobile apps, which have generated more than $10 billion in revenue since they began selling in 2008. And they have upended the multibillion-dollar personal-computer industry. If you include iPad sales with those for desktops and laptops, Apple is now the largest P.C. maker in the world. Around 200 million iPhones and iPads were sold last year, or more than twice the number of cars sold worldwide.

The impact has been not only economic but also cultural. Apple’s innovations have set off an entire rethinking of how humans interact with machines. It’s not simply that we use our fingers now instead of a mouse. Smartphones, in particular, have become extensions of our brains. They have fundamentally changed the way people receive and process information. Ponder the individual impacts of the book, the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, the tape recorder, the camera, the video camera, the compass, the television, the VCR and the DVD, the personal computer, the cellphone, the video game and the iPod. The smartphone is all those things, and it fits in your pocket. Its technology is changing the way we learn in school, the way doctors treat patients, the way we travel and explore. Entertainment and media are accessed and experienced in entirely new ways.

And yet Apple today is under siege. From the moment in late 2007 that Google unveiled Android — and its own plan to dominate the world of mobile phones and other mobile devices — Google hasn’t just tried to compete with the iPhone; it has succeeded in competing with the iPhone. Android has exploded in popularity since it took hold in 2010. Its share of the global smartphone market is approaching 80 percent, while Apple’s has fallen below 20 percent. A similar trend is under way with iPads: in 2010 the iPad had about 90 percent of the tablet market; now more than 60 percent of the tablets sold run Android.

What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is headed. When Jobs died in October 2011, the prevailing question wasn’t whether Tim Cook could succeed him, but whether anyone could. When Jobs ran Apple, the company was an innovation machine, churning out revolutionary products every three to five years. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he had another breakthrough coming — a revolution in TV. But under Cook, nothing has materialized, and the lack of confidence among investors is palpable. Apple product announcements used to routinely send its stock soaring. When Cook presented the latest smartphones in September, the iPhone 5c and the iPhone 5s, Apple’s stock fell 10 percent. A year ago the company’s stock price was at $702 a share, making Apple the world’s most valuable corporation. Today, it’s down more than 25 percent from that peak.

Comparing anyone with Steve Jobs is unfair. And during his two years as Apple’s chief executive, Cook has taken pains to point out that Jobs himself made it clear to him that he didn’t want Cook running Apple the way he thought Jobs would want to, but the way Cook thought it should be done. It hardly needed to be said. When you look back at how the iPhone came to be, it’s clear that it had everything to do with the unreasonable demands — and unusual power — of an inimitable man.

It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn’t go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous. A production line had yet to be set up. Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs.

The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

But even when Jobs stayed on the golden path, all manner of last-minute workarounds were required to make the iPhone functional. On announcement day, the software that ran Grignon’s radios still had bugs. So, too, did the software that managed the iPhone’s memory. And no one knew whether the extra electronics Jobs demanded the demo phones include would make these problems worse.

Jobs wanted the demo phones he would use onstage to have their screens mirrored on the big screen behind him. To show a gadget on a big screen, most companies just point a video camera at it, but that was unacceptable to Jobs. The audience would see his finger on the iPhone screen, which would mar the look of his presentation. So he had Apple engineers spend weeks fitting extra circuit boards and video cables onto the backs of the iPhones he would have onstage. The video cables were then connected to the projector, so that when Jobs touched the iPhone’s calendar app icon, for example, his finger wouldn’t appear, but the image on the big screen would respond to his finger’s commands. The effect was magical. People in the audience felt as if they were holding an iPhone in their own hands. But making the setup work flawlessly, given the iPhone’s other major problems, seemed hard to justify at the time.

The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running offstage so the wireless signal wouldn’t have to travel as far. And audience members had to be prevented from getting on the frequency being used. “Even if the base station’s ID was hidden” — that is, not showing up when laptops scanned for Wi-Fi signals — “you had 5,000 nerds in the audience,” Grignon says. “They would have figured out how to hack into the signal.” The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the United States. Japanese Wi-Fi uses some frequencies that are not permitted in the U.S.

There was less they could do to make sure the phone calls Jobs planned to make from the stage went through. Grignon and his team could only ensure a good signal, and then pray. They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high. “If the radio crashed and restarted, as we suspected it might, we didn’t want people in the audience to see that,” Grignon says. “So we just hard-coded it to always show five bars.”

None of these kludges fixed the iPhone’s biggest problem: it often ran out of memory and had to be restarted if made to do more than a handful of tasks at a time. Jobs had a number of demo units onstage with him to manage this problem. If memory ran low on one, he would switch to another while the first was restarted. But given how many demos Jobs planned, Grignon worried that there were far too many potential points of failure. If disaster didn’t strike during one of the dozen demos, it was sure to happen during the grand finale, when Jobs planned to show all the iPhone’s top features operating at the same time on the same phone. He’d play some music, take a call, put it on hold and take another call, find and e-mail a photo to the second caller, look up something on the Internet for the first caller and then return to his music. “Me and my guys were all so nervous about this,” Grignon says. “We only had 128 megabytes of memory in those phones” — maybe the equivalent of two dozen large digital photographs — “and because they weren’t finished, all these apps were still big and bloated.”

Jobs rarely backed himself into corners like this. He was well known as a taskmaster, seeming to know just how hard he could push his staff so that it delivered the impossible. But he always had a backup, a Plan B, that he could go to if his timetable was off.

But the iPhone was the only cool new thing Apple was working on. The iPhone had been such an all-encompassing project at Apple that this time there was no backup plan. “It was Apple TV or the iPhone,” Grignon says. “And if he had gone to Macworld with just Apple TV” — a new product that connected iTunes to a television set — “the world would have said, ‘What the heck was that?’ ”

The idea that one of the biggest moments of his career might implode made Grignon’s stomach hurt. By 2007 he’d spent virtually his entire career at Apple or companies affiliated with it. While at the University of Iowa in 1993, he and his friend Jeremy Wyld reprogrammed the Newton MessagePad to wirelessly connect to the Internet. Even though the Newton would not succeed as a product, many still regard it as the first mainstream hand-held computer, and their hack was quite a feat back then; it helped them both get jobs at Apple. Wyld ended up on the Newton team, while Grignon worked in Apple’s famous R. & D. lab — the Advanced Technology Group — on videoconferencing technology.

By 2000 Grignon had found his way to Pixo, a company started by a former Apple software developer that was building operating systems for cellphones and other small devices. When Pixo’s software ended up in the first iPod in 2001, Grignon found himself back at Apple again.

By then, thanks to his work at Pixo, he’d become prominent for two other areas of expertise besides videoconferencing technology: computer radio transmitters (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) and the workings of software inside small hand-held devices like cellphones. Grignon moves in an entirely different world from that inhabited by most software engineers in the valley. Most rarely have to think about whether their code takes up too much space on a hard drive or overloads a chip’s abilities. Hardware on desktop and laptop computers is powerful, modifiable and cheap; memory, hard drives and even processors can be upgraded inexpensively; and computers are either connected to electrical outlets or giant batteries. In Grignon’s area of embedded software, the hardware is fixed. Code that is too big won’t run. Meanwhile, a tiny battery — which might power a laptop for a couple of minutes — needs enough juice to last all day. When work on the iPhone began at the end of 2004, Grignon had a perfect set of skills to become one of the early engineers on the project.

Now, in 2007, he was emotionally exhausted. He’d gained 50 pounds. He’d put stress on his marriage. The iPhone team discovered early on that making a phone didn’t resemble building computers or iPods at all. “It was very dramatic,” Grignon says. “It had been drilled into everyone’s head that this was the next big thing to come out of Apple. So you put all these supersmart people with huge egos into very tight, confined quarters, with that kind of pressure, and crazy stuff starts to happen.”

Remarkably, Jobs had to be talked into having Apple build a phone at all. It had been a topic of conversation among his inner circle almost from the moment Apple introduced the iPod in 2001. The conceptual reasoning was obvious: consumers would rather not carry two or three devices for e-mail, phone calls and music if they could carry one. But every time Jobs and his executives examined the idea in detail, it seemed like a suicide mission. Phone chips and bandwidth were too slow for anyone to want to surf the Internet and download music or video over a cellphone connection. E-mail was a fine function to add to a phone, but Research in Motion’s BlackBerry was fast locking up that market.

Above all, Jobs didn’t want to partner with any of the wireless carriers. Back then the carriers expected to dominate any partnership with a phone maker, and because they controlled the network, they got their way. Jobs, a famed control freak, couldn’t imagine doing their bidding. Apple considered buying Motorola in 2003, but executives quickly concluded it would be too big an acquisition for the company then. (The two companies collaborated unsuccessfully a couple of years later.)

But by the fall of 2004, doing business with the carriers was starting to seem less onerous. Sprint was beginning to sell its wireless bandwidth wholesale. This meant that by buying and reselling bandwidth from Sprint, Apple could become its own wireless carrier — what’s known as a “mobile virtual network operator.” Apple could build a phone and barely have to deal with the carriers at all. Disney, on whose board Jobs sat, was already in discussions with Sprint about just such a deal to provide its own wireless service. Jobs was asking a lot of questions about whether Apple should pursue one as well. The deal Apple ultimately signed with Cingular (later acquired by AT&T) in 2006 took more than a year to hammer out, but it would prove easy compared to what Apple went through just to build the device.

Many executives and engineers, riding high from their success with the iPod, assumed a phone would be like building a small Macintosh. Instead, Apple designed and built not one but three different early versions of the iPhone in 2005 and 2006. One person who worked on the project thinks Apple then made six fully working prototypes of the device it ultimately sold — each with its own set of hardware, software and design tweaks. Some on the team ended up so burned out that they left the company shortly after the first phone hit store shelves. “It was like the first moon mission,” says Tony Fadell, a key executive on the project. (He started his own company, Nest, in 2010.) “I’m used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering.”

Jobs wanted the iPhone to run a modified version of OS X, the software that comes with every Mac. But no one had ever put a gigantic program like OS X on a phone chip before. The software would have to be a tenth its usual size. Millions of lines of code would have to be stripped out or rewritten, and engineers would have to simulate chip speed and battery drain because actual chips weren’t available until 2006.

No one had ever put a multitouch screen in a mainstream consumer product before, either. Capacitive touch technology — a “touch” by either a finger or other conductive object completes a circuit — had been around since the 1960s. Capacitive multitouch, in which two or more fingers can be used and independently recognized, was vastly more complicated. Research into it began in the mid-1980s. It was well known, though, that to build the touch-screen Apple put on the iPhone and produce it in volume was a challenge few had the money or guts to take on. The next steps — to embed the technology invisibly in a piece of glass, to make it smart enough to display a virtual keyboard with autocorrect and to make it sophisticated enough to reliably manipulate photos or Web pages on that screen — made it hugely expensive even to produce a working prototype. Few production lines had experience manufacturing multitouch screens. The touch-screens in consumer electronics had typically been pressure-sensitive ones that users pushed with a finger or a stylus. (The PalmPilot and its successors like the Palm Treo were popular expressions of this technology.) Even if multitouch iPhone screens had been easy to make, it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, like on-screen keyboards and “tap to zoom,” were enhancements that consumers wanted.

As early as 2003, a handful of Apple engineers had figured out how to put multitouch technology in a tablet. “The story was that Steve wanted a device that he could use to read e-mail while on the toilet — that was the extent of the product spec,” says Joshua Strickon, one of the earliest engineers on that project. “But you couldn’t build a device with enough battery life to take out of the house, and you couldn’t get a chip with enough graphics capability to make it useful. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out just what to do.” Before joining Apple in 2003, Strickon had built a multitouch device for his master’s thesis at M.I.T. But given the lack of consensus at Apple about what to do with the prototypes he and his fellow engineers developed, he says, he left the company in 2004 thinking it wasn’t going to do anything with that technology.

Tim Bucher, one of Apple’s top executives at the time and the company’s biggest multitouch proponent, says part of the problem was that the prototypes they were building used software, OS X, that was designed to be used with a mouse, not a finger. “We were using 10- or 12-inch screens with Mac-mini-like guts . . . and then you would launch these demos that would do the different multitouch gestures. One demo was a keyboard application that would rise from the bottom — very much what ended up shipping in the iPhone two years later. But it wasn’t very pretty. It was very much wires, chewing gum and bailing wire.”

Few even thought about making touch-screen technology the centerpiece of a new kind of phone until Jobs started really pushing the idea in mid-2005. “He said: ‘Tony, come over here. Here’s something we’re working on. What do you think? Do you think we could make a phone out of this?’ ” Fadell says, referring to a demo Jobs was playing with. “It was huge. It filled the room. There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it.” Fadell was aware of the touch-screen prototype, but not in great detail, because it was a Mac product, and he ran the iPod division. “So we all sat down and had a serious discussion about it — about what could be done.”

Fadell had strong doubts about shrinking such an enormous prototype so much and then manufacturing it. But he also knew better than to say no to Steve Jobs. He was one of Apple’s superstars, having joined the company in 2001 as a consultant to help build the first iPod, and he didn’t get there by being timid in the face of thorny technological problems. By 2005, with iPod sales exploding, he had become, at 36, arguably the single most important line executive at the company.

“I understood how it could be done,” Fadell says. “But it’s one thing to think that, and another to take a room full of special, one-off gear and make a million phone-size versions of that in a cost-effective, reliable manner.” The to-do list was exhausting just to think about. “You had to go to LCD vendors who knew how to embed technology like this in glass; you had to find time on their line; and then you had to come up with compensation and calibrating algorithms to keep the pixel electronics from generating all kinds of noise in the touch-screen” — which sat on top of the LCD. “It was a whole project just to make the touch-screen device. We tried two or three ways of actually making the touch-screen until we could make one in enough volume that would work.”

Shrinking OS X and building a multitouch screen, while innovative and difficult, were at least within the skills Apple had already mastered as a corporation. No one was better equipped to rethink OS X’s design. Apple knew LCD manufacturers because it put an LCD in every laptop and iPod. Mobile-phone physics was an entirely new field, however, and it took those working on the iPhone into 2006 to realize how little they knew. Apple built testing rooms and equipment to test the iPhone’s antenna. It created models of human heads, with viscous stuff inside to approximate the density of human brains, to help measure the radiation that users might be exposed to from using the phone. One senior executive believes that more than $150 million was spent creating the first iPhone.

From the start of the project, Jobs hoped that he would be able to develop a touch-screen iPhone running OS X similar to what he ended up unveiling. But in 2005 he had no idea how long that would take. So Apple’s first iPhone looked very much like the joke slide Jobs put up when introducing the real iPhone — an iPod with an old-fashioned rotary dial on it. The prototype really was an iPod with a phone radio that used the iPod click wheel as a dialer. “It was an easy way to get to market, but it was not cool like the devices we have today,” Grignon says.

The second iPhone prototype in early 2006 was much closer to what Jobs would ultimately introduce. It incorporated a touch-screen and OS X, but it was made entirely of brushed aluminum. Jobs and Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, were exceedingly proud of it. But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well. “I and Rubén Caballero” — Apple’s antenna expert — “had to go up to the boardroom and explain to Steve and Ive that you cannot put radio waves through metal,” says Phil Kearney, an engineer who left Apple in 2008. “And it was not an easy explanation. Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t.”

Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”

The iPhone project was so complex that it occasionally threatened to derail the entire corporation. Many top engineers in the company were being sucked into the project, forcing slowdowns in the timetables of other work. Had the iPhone been a dud or not gotten off the ground at all, Apple would have had no other big products ready to announce for a long time. And worse, according to a top executive on the project, the company’s leading engineers, frustrated by failure, would have left Apple.

Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired. In some cases, before a manager could ask you to join the project, you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement in his office. Then, after he told you what the project was, you had to sign another document confirming that you had indeed signed the NDA and would tell no one. “We put a sign on over the front door of the purple dorm” — the iPhone building — “that said ‘fight club,’ because the first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club,” Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software until last October, testified in 2012 during the Apple v. Samsung trial. “Steve didn’t want to hire anyone from outside of Apple to work on the user interface, but he told me I could hire anyone in the company,” Forstall said. “So I’d bring them into my office, sit them down and tell them: ‘You are a superstar in your current role. I have another project that I want you to consider. I can’t tell you what it is. All I can say is that you will have to give up nights and weekends and that you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”

One of the early iPhone engineers says, “My favorite part was what all the vendors said the day after the unveiling.” Big companies like Marvell, which made the Wi-Fi radio chip, and CSR, which provided the Bluetooth radio chip, hadn’t been told they were going to be in a new phone. They thought they were going to be in a new iPod. “We actually had fake schematics and fake industrial designs,” the engineer says. Grignon says that Apple even went as far as to impersonate employees of another company when they traveled, especially to Cingular. “The whole thing was you didn’t want the receptionist or whoever happens to be walking by to see all the badges lying out” with Apple’s name on them.

One of the most obvious manifestations of Jobs’s obsession with secrecy were the locked-down areas on the company’s campus — places that those not working on the iPhone could no longer go. “Steve loved this stuff,” Grignon says. “He loved to set up division. But it was a big ‘[expletive] you’ to the people who couldn’t get in. 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.”

Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance.

And no one outside Jobs’s inner circle was allowed into Jonathan Ive’s wing on the first floor of Building 2. The security surrounding Ive’s prototypes was so tight that some employees believed the badge reader called security if you tried to enter and weren’t authorized. “It was weird, because it wasn’t like you could avoid going by it. It was right off the lobby, behind a big metal door. Every now and then you’d see the door open and you’d try to look in and see, but you never tried to do more than that,” says an engineer whose first job out of college was working on the iPhone. Forstall said during his testimony that some labs required you to “badge in” four times.

The pressure to meet Jobs’s deadlines was so intense that normal discussions quickly devolved into shouting matches. Exhausted engineers quit their jobs — then came back to work a few days later once they had slept a little. Forstall’s chief of staff, Kim Vorrath, once slammed her office door so hard it got stuck and locked her in, and co-workers took more than an hour to get her out. “We were all standing there watching it,” Grignon says. “Part of it was funny. But it was also one of those moments where you step back and realize how [expletive] it all is.”

When Jobs started talking about the iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007, he said, “This is a day I have been looking forward to for two and a half years.” Then he regaled the audience with myriad tales about why consumers hated their cellphones. Then he solved all their problems — definitively.

As Grignon and others from Apple sat nervously in the audience, Jobs had the iPhone play some music and a movie clip to show off the phone’s beautiful screen. He made a phone call to show off the phone’s reinvented address book and voice mail. He sent a text and an e-mail, showing how easy it was to type on the phone’s touch-screen keyboard. He scrolled through a bunch of photos, showing how simple pinches and spreads of two fingers could make the pictures smaller or bigger. He navigated The New York Times’s and Amazon’s Web sites to show that the iPhone’s Internet browser was as good as the one on his computer. He found a Starbucks with Google Maps — and called the number from the stage — to show how it was impossible to get lost with an iPhone.

By the end, Grignon wasn’t just relieved; he was drunk. He’d brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. “And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great.”

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: I LOVE YOU LIKE THE MOON AND THE SUN

I never compared anything to the oceans until I met you. Now seas are everything holding me back. Unsurpassable, boundless; The distance from here to where you are. Ships and souls and the vast blue nothingness that separates us both. Waves and tides and storms; everything that keeps my hands just out of reach of yours. Everything that’s stopping me from whispering hungry fingertips across bare flesh.

This is what I’m thinking as I listen to your voice.

Your laugh is echoing in my ears. I need to be with you. I need to feel your heartbeat against mine. But I am here. I am here and you are there. And there is still too far away…

I don’t want you to ever leave me again. I’m sick of this drowning feeling I get whenever I’m forced to let go of your hand. I know it won’t be long until I see you again, so I’ll pretend that I don’t need you desperately. I’ll pretend that I wasn’t curled up into a ball, listening to your voice, biting my lip and fighting back tears. I’ll pretend I don’t clench my fists to fill the empty spaces between my fingers. I’ll pretend I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you. I….I miss you. I miss you so much it’s stifling.

After you kiss me, your scent stays on my skin even after we’ve gone our separate ways. I love it. I close my eyes and I can still feel you. I’m reliving that moment over and over again.

I love you like the moon and the sun.  The way she mocks his light. She hides in his rays, wishing to absorb him into herself.

I love you in a way that is urgent. Like at any moment you will be taken away from me. Like all of this is a dream and soon I will have to wake up because how could something so perfect be allowed to exist? I will be forced to go back to my mundane life and the memory of our love will only exist in whispers and shadows. It will become one of those dreams that are amazing while you have them. You play them over and over again in your mind so as not to forget. But you do anyway. All of a sudden that dream is pushed away into some unexplored corner of your mind, forgotten until you are reminded of it months or even years later. By then it is only a fleeting thought. Most of it is blurry and it’s a strain to remember what the dream was even about.

I’m terrified that one day I will wake up and you won’t be mine anymore. You will be gone and I will be left with only memories. The heat from your skin permanently burned into my fingertips. Gone. Over. Two words I never want to hear pass your lips. I know that I will love you forever. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Maybe if I believed in soulmates, you would be it for me.

Maybe we’re just kids recklessly in love. We may not know anything about life or growing up but there is one thing I know for sure. You are the love of my life and I never want to leave your side.

I hate this feeling. When I’m away from you, everything is brutal. I miss you. 

I’ve burrowed myself into this corner, The thing about isolation is, it’s lonely. It makes you think about everywhere else you’d rather be. I’d rather be in your arms. But I know that’s near impossible. And I hate that. I keep trying to force the thought of you from my mind, but I can’t. When I miss you, I miss you like a child misses their mother. Sad and alone. All they can do is cry and scream their mother’s name until she comes back home.

That’s how I feel. I feel like curling up into this corner and whispering your name as if that’ll make you appear. I need you. I feel so incomplete without you. I wish I could stay in your arms forever, where it’s warm and safe. I want to bury my face into your chest and never have to worry about anything ever again. You’re my home, baby. You’re my whole world.

I love you,

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: YOUR HEARTBEAT BECOMING THE ONLY LULLABY I'LL EVER NEED

 Dear Soulmate

Above anything else, I am terrified. Above my love for you. Above the sheer bliss I feel when I’m with you. Above everything, above it all.

I’d rather die than let you go. So why am I entertaining that thought…why am I holding on to it? In your eyes, in your voice, in your touch there is no you. You don’t exist. Everything is clear. And when I am away I miss your presence. Every time I become certain of my decision, something is done to rock that certainty. I still love you…so deeply it hurts to think about. You will never understand how deep…how strong my love for you is. You will never…you have never loved me as much as I love you. If you had never did what you did…I would have loved you forever. I would have never let go. And that scares me. I love you too much.

Regardless of what has happened, you are still the beautiful woman who I gave my heart to. I don’t regret that decision. I need you to understand that I still love you as much as I always have. But this isn’t about me telling you how much I love you. You already know that. I spill my guts out to you daily; the good, the bad, and the horrendous. Now it’s your turn. Spill your guts out, love. Show me everything.

Once upon a time, I compared falling in love to facing a monster. Well the same can be said about letting go; it’s like facing a monster. It’s called “falling in love” for a reason. Once you fall, you’re kind of stuck. You don’t mind at the time because at the bottom of this well is someone who is just as stranded as you are. Until they find a way out…then you’re on your own. Unlucky for you, you haven’t the slightest clue as to what to do. It’s cold and dark. You are lonely. You are scared. Then, when you finally do make it out, you’re never truly out. You still bear the scars and have the memories. You never leave the same as you were before. Darkness does that to you. Darkness changes you.

You know what’s really scary? How fast emotions can change. How fast feelings can disappear.

I’ve always wondered, in the course of a relationship, at what point does love die?Is it sudden; an abrupt revelation? Or is it gradual? Does it die a little more each day until it has turned into a whisper? How does one even begin to fall out of love? The thought seems so..unfathomable. But in reality I’ve seen it happen too many times to count.

How can you go from promising someone forever, to hating them? How do you hate someone you once loved? Was the love an illusion? It’s hard for me to wrap my head around. See, people will tell you that heart break is just a part of life. Divorce is practically encouraged in today’s society. What happened to “‘Till death do us part.”? Did everyone just conveniently skip that part?

"I do….for right now."

"I love you….for right now."

This letter was more questions than anything else, but it’s just something that’s been weighing on my mind. Something I’m confused about. But know this, when I say I love you, it’s not an I love you for right now. It’s an I love you right now, today, tomorrow, next week, and for the rest of my life.

My mom says a man’s love is dangerous. When he loves, he loves with everything. He’d willingly give up everything for his woman; she becomes his whole world. You know what? She’s right.

I wish there was some way I could show you just how much I love you. Saying it isn’t enough. I can’t think about you without smiling, without feeling this…heaviness settle in my chest. I can’t say your name without tasting you. I can’t write these letters without having to pause to collect my thoughts.

There’s this…suffocating feeling I get whenever you’re not near me. And now that summer is gone I know that this drowning feeling is here to stay. So I’m acquainting myself with it; familiarizing myself with this ache that will frequent itself in my thoughts. Like I’m a dying patient and your an oxygen mask; I need you to breathe. I’m dying for you to hold me. I love your voice. I love your eyes. I love your smile. I hang on to every word you say. I know that all of this is such a cliche, so that’s why I write it here because it’s the only way I know how to get all of this out.


I have that odd-one-out feeling in every given situation. I’m an afterthought. I have to inject myself into everything and I feel like I’ve done that with you. xxxxxx said it best; I feel like a speck of dust. Harmless and invisible until I fling myself into your eyes and force you to see only me. I’m so terrified that eventually you’re going to get irritated and claw at your eyes until I’ve been dislodged.

I guess I’m…jealous? I don’t want to call it that because I don’t think it’s jealousy… I just get filled with disdain and grief whenever I see you with your friends, solely because you look so natural. You fit. I suppose that’s your “where I belong”. And I hate that because I know I could never fit. People are like puzzle pieces; you look for the people who look like you. But see….I haven’t found anyone who looks like me. I’m that one little piece at the bottom of the toy box, practically forgotten. No one knows what the hell I go to but I’m kept around because maybe, just maybe, you’ll find my matching set.

So I hate your friends. They’re all really really lucky. They’re around you more. They’ve known you longer. They’re your matching set and I can never be part of that.

That’s fine though. I only love you as much as anyone my age could love someone. But it’s only love…

I know I’m going to be restless tonight. I’m dead tired but sleep isn’t inviting me. Instead I’m wishing the heat from your skin still echoed through every part of my body. I’m wishing I still felt your breath on my neck. The memory of your kiss still burned into my thoughts. I can still taste you on my tongue and suddenly you seem miles and miles away. To far to reach by any means.

This is how I think. Silently wishing I was in your arms; my head on your chest feeling the steady rise and fall of your lungs. Completely taking in the fact that you’re here and you’re real and you’re mine. You’re mine and I am yours…Falling asleep in your arms…

Your heartbeat becoming the only lullaby I’ll ever need.

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE..WHEN YOU ARE GONE

When you have gone, I think about what we have done. My skin remembers the passion in your kiss, the impression of your teeth and the flick of your tongue. The memory of your touch haunts me. The wanting comes in waves, huge and torrential. The onslaught is stifling.

You are the first person that has ever done this to me; the first person to twist my stomach into knots, to make me feel like I can’t exist without you. Your touch makes my knees go weak. My body aches for you. What I wouldn’t give to be next to you tonight. I want to fall asleep with your skin pressed into mine. I want to feel your heart beating and your breath on my neck. I want you to hold me in your strong arms, where I know I am safe; where nothing can touch me.

It’s usually around this time that I start to reflect on my day; I start to piece the bits and fragments of the time we shared together into memories that I treasure. It’s been getting harder and harder for me to write here. That’s because what we share together is too precious and perfect for me to capture accurately. My feelings are so hard to put into words. Even now, I’m racking my brain, trying to come up with a strong enough diction to paint a picture of what I feel for you. But I’ll try anyway…

I’m lying here on my bed and my brain is doing that thing again - that thing where it takes a memory of you and amplifies, magnifies, copies, and basically overloads my mind with nothing but you. Now my chest hurts and I have this overwhelming urge to cry because it’s times like these when I want you next to me so badly it physicallyhurts. I literally ache for you. And I wonder if you ever feel this way too. I wonder if you hurt like I do… I wonder if without me you feel like you can’t breathe. I wonder if without me you can’t sleep. I wonder if you have to fight to get me off your mind. Because I do.

I wonder if you’ve ever wanted to scream, “Come back!” because the sight of me walking away was too much to bear. I do…I want to run after you. I want you to hold me and never let go. I want to never leave your side because without you I can’t breathe, I can’t sleep, I can’t function. I can’t be without you.

I am so in love with you. Completely..utterly…totally infatuated with you. I need you so much…I love you so much more than you will ever know..Longing is a cruel thing. I have never felt anymore in love with you than when you are not around. The memory of your lips has never felt as good as when you’re not around for me to kiss. The memory of your embrace has never felt as warm as when I cannot experience it. I’ve never felt so lonely…

I write these letters to tell you how much I love you; to tell you how much you make my guts hurt. I write these letters to tell you that you’re everything that drives me mad and the only thing that is keeping me sane. I obsess over every sentence. I look up big, passionate words in the thesaurus and painstakingly reread every sentence after it’s written. Every word is weighted because it’s all for you. Once I’ve finished, I hesitate, and an internal argument ensues about whether or not I really want to post the letter. But I always do. This is the only way I know how to let you know just how much you mean to me.

Now I can’t stop trying to imagine life without you. And of course these thoughts make my heartbeat accelerate. My breathing gets quick and shallow, my stomach swims to my throat and I can’t stop shaking. I’m used to the anxiety attacks, but they’ve rarely been this extreme.

There’s a physical ache matched with an emotional counterpart when I imagine this. I feel as if something was stolen from me; something precious and irriplaceable. I told you my biggest fear is being left again. Now I’m terrified. I miss you when you’re not even gone. Then I start to think, maybe all this time I’ve been trying to hold onto something that was never mine to begin with. These thoughts can get depressing fairly quickly so I tell them to go away. They listen. (Most of the time anyway.)

I know it makes no sense to torture myself this way, especially because I don’t know what is or isn’t supposed to happen. Nor do I know what tomorrow and everyday after it is going to bring. I try not to stress myself out over things that haven’t happened yet, but it’s hard. Everything is that much more brutal especially since I realized just how fast you can go away. Especially since I realized that life just sucks without you.

I barely survived the first time with my heart and limbs intact. I’m not saying I’ll die without you but I damn sure would like to…In my heart and in my mind I’m still wrapped up to you. You’ve got my heart strings wound so tightly around your fingertips; my heart can’t so much as beat without me thinking about you. Your John Hancock is permanently engraved on my tear ducts.

This is what moving on feels like. It feels like peeling back my skin inch by inch; tearing it all off until the muscles and veins beneath are revealed. Once the skin is completely removed, I’m thrown into a bathtub full of alcohol and fitted with artificial skin, like in some twisted science fiction movie. Yeah. Like that.

Is is bad that I feel like I need you to tell me what to do? I feel like I need you to tell me where to go from here. Is it okay to move on? To let go? I feel like I need your permission; like a dog to it’s master.It’s revolting. Dependency is disgusting. 

I made a promise to myself long before I met you, that I would never watch myself fall to pieces over something so meaningless as a woman One woman. I didn’t see the point in stressing myself out over something that could be so easily replaced. So why am I hurting myself over you? Why did I allow myself to break the one promise I swore I’d keep? Don’t fall in love. Sounds easy enough, right? And it was pretty easy. I had a policy with woman: don’t get attached. When she begins to occupy more space in your head than usual push her back. Always remember, you’re in control of her emotions not the other way around. But with you….I don’t know…it felt wrong to toy with you. And maybe a small part of me wanted to try having an actual relationship for a change. So I allowed you in, and honestly, after a while I had a panic attack and wanted to end us right then and there. I let my guard down with you, and believe me, that was no easy thing for me to do. I trusted you.

I wish I could get past you. I wish I could get you out of my head. Every time I get close to moving on you fabricate yourself inside my mind and almost guiltily, I return to my cubicle of suffering. Of course I have no one to blame for this but myself. You didn’t put yourself inside my head, and you most definitely aren’t forcing me to stay stagnant. But my God, you might as well be.

LOVE LETTER/PERSONAL: DEAR SOULMATE...THE WANTING

Dear Soulmate 


The thought of you drives me to you just as much as it drives me away. I miss you terribly. Every part of me aches to hear your voice - to be near you, but I know the re-exposure will be painful. See, once I accustom myself to being away from you, I can make it day to day. But once I let myself give in to you again, I will have to start the process all over. I will have to endure the fresh waves of longing as they crash over me, threatening to pull me under. Then, when I finally make it to the shore, you will call me back into the sea…and I will oblige because no angry waters will ever keep you from me. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop me from hating this feeling of seemingly never-ending longing.

A lifetime of you is not enough, but it is more than I deserve. Therefore, I never let myself forget the power of your essence, the thrill of your touch nor the heaven in every word you say. So I think you should probably come closer and press your skin against mine. I’ll brush my lips across your ear and whisper, “I love you so much more than anything.” You’ll close your eyes. I’ll listen to the soft rush of your breath, feel your chest rise and fall against my body and I’ll try not to breathe…

I want us to stay like this forever. I want us to be invincible forever - so far above the world…nothing can touch us. We’ll become intertwined, you and I.I love you like stop motion; deliberately and in small increments. Every little bit of you I allow myself comes with a price. I’ve learned I must pace myself with you. I’m easily addicted and you are a poison. Murder has never been this delicious…or voluntary.

I guess I’ll start with your scent. Other than the memory, it is the most prominent reminder of what we have done. I held you closer than anyone would ever guess; the smell of your skin on my skin confirms this. It’s almost teasing me, every whiff makes me shiver with pleasure. I feel a smile creep onto my face and now I’m reliving that moment. My body is remembering every touch. Every line your fingers traced across my skin is permanently burned into my mind.

I love your body. I love even more that it’s all mine; you’re all mine. And I love that you can make me feel this way. I close my eyes and I feel your arms around me, your breath on my lips, your heartbeat pounding against my chest. I taste you on my tongue and I feel you when I am inside of you. The word that comes to mind is bliss. But the pleasure of the memory is short lived. It is now replaced by a dull ache; a beacon leading me to you, telling me the time we spend together is never enough and sooner or later I need to find myself at home in your arms. I know I won’t be sleeping well tonight. My mind is too busy thinking about you for sleep to invite me in….and the wanting comes in waves.

PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE EIGHT LETTERS

Dear Soulmate

This is all for you. There are thousands and thousands of words in these letters and every single one of them belongs to you. I thought that if I could form the perfect letter, the perfect paragraph or sentence I would be able to convey to you just how much I adore you. But in the hundreds of thousands of words I still haven’t done that. I still don’t know how to craft the perfect sentence structure and choose the perfect diction and word order to adequately express how much you mean to me, how much I need you, how much I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe I’ve been over-thinking it. Maybe the perfect sentence has already been formed. Maybe the only way to sum it all up is in three words; eight letters. 

I love you.

Insatiable. Nothing compares - everything else is just a pathetic substitute. My loneliness cannot be fed with human interaction. It cannot be forgotten with intoxication. My thoughts cannot be quieted with loud music. I cannot be comforted with blankets or pillows - they are not you. They do not compare to you laying next to me…so warm.

Waking up is always the worst. After my dreams have been cluttered with you, to wake up with you not by my side is unbearable. What’s worse is I’m getting used to it…and I hate it.

No one ever told me how to do this - how to be with someone. I never thought it would be possible for someone like me, not with all my rages, imperfections, melodramatic tendencies and especially not with my fears.

Then I met you. Life is funny that way. You promise yourself you’re never going to do this or that and suddenly you find yourself breaking those promises willingly. I promised myself never to fall in love..well…look where that got me.

You gave me a bravery I have never known. You have given me courage and strength to fight the only fear I could not face on my own - the fear of love. I’ve watched every relationship I have ever known crumble to the ground when the foundation was shaken. No one attempts to fix what’s broken anymore, they just abandon it. I’ve watched it happen time after time, even in my own life. It’s the reason why I never believed in things like love, marriage, or forever. It was all a lie, a work of cinematography and poetic bullshit. But you changed that. You gave me hope. When I look at you I see my future. when I look at you I get a glimpse of forever. I still get scared, but as long as I’m with you I will always have that glimmer of hope.

I hate when people are right about things I don’t want them to be right about. I hate when I have to write things I never wanted to write about. I have to, though. You see…writing it all down is the only way things make sense to me; the only way I can come to terms with truths I never wanted to face.

No one will ever love you as much as I do. Unfortunately, that love makes me stingy - selfish. If I can’t have you when I want, I fear my mindset resembles that of a five year old brat in a supermarket crying and banging my head against the floor until blood comes out of my ears and my mother finally concedes and buys me the candy I wanted so badly. But…that makes me feel clingy. If I had it my way, you’d never leave my side but…then you’d get tired of me. I know you would because I get tired of myself. The everyday blase experience of my presence would bore you right out the door. So unconsciously I put distance between you and I when we are together. I mean after all, the last thing I want to be is….clingy. I don’t want to follow you around like a lost puppy. I don’t want to beclingy. I don’t want to wait up for you or go out of my way to be next to you even though…I do. Even though I know I must bore you, even though I am, I don’t want to be clingy because there’s always the constant fear that you are going to leave me…again.