The iPhone changed forever how mobile phones looked and worked, and it all began with Steve Jobs’ wanting to get rid of the mechanical keyboards that early mobile computing devices had.
In a revealing moment captured years after the iPhone’s launch, Jobs explained how Apple’s most transformative product came to life through an unexpected pivot. What makes his account particularly fascinating is the revelation that the iPhone wasn’t originally meant to be a phone at all—it started as a tablet project. Jobs’ recollection offers a rare glimpse into the serendipitous nature of innovation, where one breakthrough can suddenly illuminate an entirely different path.
The story begins with Jobs’ frustration with existing input methods. “I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multitouch glass display,” he explained. “And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multitouch display that I could type on, I could rest my hands on and actually type on.”
The Apple team took up the challenge, and their work would prove revelatory. “About six months later, they called me in and showed me this prototype display,” Jobs recalled. But the real magic happened when he handed off the prototype for further development.
“I gave it to one of our other really brilliant UI folks,” Jobs continued. “He called me back a few weeks later and he had inertial scrolling working. When I saw the rubber band inertial scrolling and a few of the other things, I thought, oh my God, we can build a phone outta this.”
That moment of realization changed everything. “I put the tablet project on the shelf and we went and took the next several years into the iPhone,” Jobs said.
The implications of this origin story extend far beyond Apple’s product roadmap. Jobs’ account reveals how innovation often emerges not from a linear path but from unexpected connections—how solving one problem (typing on glass) can suddenly reveal solutions to entirely different challenges (reimagining mobile phones). The decision to shelve the tablet project in favor of the iPhone proved prescient; when Apple eventually returned to the tablet concept with the iPad in 2010, they did so with years of multitouch refinement from the iPhone’s development and success. This strategic sequencing—phone first, tablet later—allowed Apple to dominate both categories in ways that might not have been possible had they pursued them simultaneously. The BlackBerry, Palm Treo, and other keyboard-centric smartphones that dominated the mid-2000s would soon become relics, displaced by the touchscreen revolution that Jobs’ team had unlocked. Today, the multitouch interface is so ubiquitous that it’s difficult to remember a time when typing on glass seemed like an impossible dream rather than an everyday reality.