The Convergence Converges

Right in the middle of Lenovo’s X300’s journey to the marketplace, something had happened that signaled the dawn of a new era in mobile computing—and, to some people, raised questions about the future role of laptop PCs. The event was Apple’s launch of the iPhone. This was Apple’s first entry into the up-and-coming segment of portable computing called smartphones: mobile telephones that also did a bunch of other fun or useful things, including instant messaging, music playing, e-mail, and Web browsing. It was plain to see that the iPhone was a portable computer. Also, while the concept of a smartphone had been around since the early 1990s, Apple’s introduction of the iPhone was to smartphones what the advent of the Apple’s Macintosh was to desktop PCs in 1985. It took a powerful idea and turned it into a wonderful device.

Apple’s loyal fans were ecstatic. They lined up by the thousands at Apple stores starting three days ahead of the June 28, 2007 release date. “This is this generation’s Woodstock. They’ll remember where they were on this day 20 years from now,” predicted John Sculley, the former Apple CEO. At the Apple Store in the ultrahip SoHo section of Manhattan, which is essentially an upscale, open-air shopping mall, the line of people waiting to get into the store wound around a whole city block. This was a Friday afternoon, and the earliest of the early birds had staked out their spots at the front of the line on Tuesday. By Friday at 5:30 p.m., many were sunburned and bleary eyed. They sat in folding beach chairs or on the pavement surrounded by suitcases, sleeping bags, umbrellas, yoga mats, and articles of clothing. Up front were some celebrities who had bought places in line: comedienne Whoopi Goldberg, with her dreadlocks, and movie maker Spike Lee, in his ever-present Yankees cap.

As the 6 p.m. opening time drew near, people who filled a closed-off Prince Street crushed in close around the front door of the Apple Store. A phalanx of bouncers with bulging muscles and black t-shirts blocked their way. Somebody in the street shouted “It’s an historic event!” At 6, the huge crowd counted down from ten to one and gave a huge “whoop!” as the doors opened and the first group of shoppers rushed in. People in the crowd held video cameras and camera phones over their heads to record the event, and some of those who filed in videoed themselves as they went. A group called iPhonelaunch.TV was videoing everything and streaming it live on the Internet. A young woman in the crew explained breathlessly: “We have been taping all day and we’ll be taping all night.”

Inside, dozens of Apple Store employees lined up alongside the steps that led to a first landing and then upstairs again to the main floor. They applauded as the customers filed in and dashed up the stairs. Minutes later, when the first happy customers came bounding down the steps with their $600 purchases in little black bags, the clerks gave them ovations, and, outside, the crowd would cheer. It was like the scene at the finish line of the New York City Marathon, where exhausted but triumphant runners are egged on by a wildly enthusiastic crowd.

A young woman in the street laughed at the goings on. Rosina Genao, a 34-year-old fashion buyer, was on her way home from work in the garment district, but stopped to see what the commotion was about. “I live next door, and I wouldn’t wait 15 minutes on line for this,” she said. But, it turns out, her attitude wasn’t a reflection on the desirability of the iPhone itself—just the notion of waiting in line for one. Would Rosina buy an iPhone after the lines melted away? “Yeah, for sure,” she said.

This was Steve Jobs’s genius. Apple products on his watch had only occasionally been true technology innovations. What he was really good at was glomming onto important tech advances by others, understanding the wants of customers, designing products that were easy to use and pleasing to the eye, and then marketing the hell out of them. The essence of his marketing message was simple and hard for many people to resist: you’re smarter, hipper, and more creative than other people, so buy an iPhone, iPod music player, MacBook laptop, and so on. For many, buying Apple products was like a Catholic taking communion or a sugar addict eating cake.

What was so great about the iPhone? To be sure, it packed plenty of features, including a cell phone, music and video player, personal organizer, e-mail program, and Web browser. But other smartphones from the likes of Nokia and Samsung offered all of that—plus better networks with faster downloading and Web browsing. Some of them even had global positioning technology packed in so you could orient yourself via maps on their displays. The iPhone didn’t have that. What it had was great software that made it extremely easy to use and delighted consumers with little flourishes—like the fact that you could turn “pages” on the roomy 3.5-inch (88.9-millimeter) screen by flicking the screen with your finger. Instead of the mechanical keys that were popular on other smartphones, you typed by touching graphical keys on the display. Some particularly reverential or sarcastic people called it the “Jesus phone.”

The iPhone launch was arguably Steve Jobs’s finest performance ever in three decades under the PC big top. He and pal Steve Wozniak had started Apple in 1976 and, for nearly a decade, Jobs had been the company’s visionary leader and marketing genius while Wozniak, an engineer at heart, had gradually faded from view. Jobs made his mark as a consummate product developer and marketer with the Macintosh, which he introduced with great fanfare in 1984. The PC was a good tool for individuals, but it was hard to use. The Macintosh was a revelation—with its mouse, graphical user interface, and pleasing shape. For the first time ever, people fell in love with their computers. In spite of the success of the Macintosh, the volatile Jobs was pushed out in 1985 in a power play engineered by John Sculley, whom he had lured to run Apple from Pepsi in 1983 with the challenge to help change the world. During Jobs’s decade-long exile from Apple, he continued to develop his skills as a design tastemaker, first with the elegant black, pizza-box-shaped NeXT Computer and then with Pixar Animation Studios, maker of the delightful movies Toy Story, Cars, and Monsters, Inc.

By the time Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 with the company’s acquisition of NeXT, he had developed truly exquisite taste. He put it to use in collaboration with Apple’s skillful design chief, Jonathan Ive. Together they produced one stellar design after another, including iMac, where they integrated the display and electronics of the PC in a curvaceous, candy-colored body; iBook notebooks, which were colorful and curvy; and the first MacBooks, which replaced iBooks in 2006 and, with their simple, squared-off forms, resembled the original ThinkPad design concept. The duo truly hit their stride with iPods, the tiny music players that borrowed their rounded-off shapes from the work German designer Dieter Rams did for the consumer electronics and appliance maker Braun.

Jobs and Apple proved once and for all that design mattered in the computer business, and that woke up the rest of the industry. Yet while a number of products from the likes of Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and ASUSTeK stood out, and while Lenovo kept renewing its strong ThinkPad design, the rest of the PC world couldn’t seem to catch up with Apple. There were plenty of excellent designers around. Apple didn’t have a monopoly on them. The only explanation for this phenomenon was Jobs himself.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, during his banishment, Apple was chaotic. Donald Norman, the user-centric design guru and Northwestern University professor, who headed Apple’s Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) in the mid-1990s, tried to impose discipline. He set up a process requiring product marketers, engineers, and industrial designers to work together as a team from the beginning of projects. When Jobs returned in 1996, everything changed. Apple was in deep trouble; in danger of going out of business. He fired hundreds of people, including Norman and most of ATG. And he imposed a new discipline, which was basically the discipline of Steve. “Steve was just a nasty person, which is exactly what Apple needed,” said Norman. “He had a strong commitment to do things one way. If you disagreed, tough.” The wrath of Steve was to be avoided at all costs. Wired magazine, in its January 2008 issue, recounted an early demonstration of a prototype of the iPhone that was so bad that Jobs terrified his engineers not by throwing one of his usual tantrums but just by staring at them and saying levelly, “We don’t have a product yet.”

Jobs waited for mobile phone and handheld computer technology to become robust before he produced his own smartphone. In that way, he had avoided a lot of the hard work that had to be done to make smartphones work well, and, in essence, skipped to the head of the line after the rest of the industry had completed that job.

The smartphone was, truly, a long time coming. What could be more natural than combining contacts, calendaring, and e-mail, with a mobile phone? Yet, here, the challenges that confront all portable computer developers are compounded. It had proved difficult to produce small, single-purpose mobile phones that worked seamlessly across networks and country borders, and delivered good voice quality and uninterrupted calling. Now try to pack all of that in a very small package with e-mail, Web browsing, and the rest to create the Swiss Army knife of computing. The early efforts produced Rube Goldberg-esque machines that were too big and didn’t work as advertised.

The first of these experiments was the Simon Personal Communicator. This venturesome yet deeply flawed gadget was created jointly by BellSouth and IBM, and had its beginnings at the Comdex computer industry trade show in Las Vegas in 1992. That was a time of soaring ambitions for the former Bell operating companies, including BellSouth. In 1991, the U.S government had given them permission to offer online information services. Dan Norman, who had only recently been promoted to set up and run BellSouth Cellular’s R&D lab, had conducted a series of marketing focus groups with customers in Georgia and Florida to find out what new services they wanted. One of the things they were interested in was combining phones with computers. (IBM had recently introduced a laptop with a cell phone attached, so the idea was in the air.) So Norman was on the lookout for technologies that bridged between the telephone and computer industries when he attended Comdex that November. And he wasn’t disappointed. A group of IBM PC division engineers was showing off a prototype of a product they were developing that was code-named Angler. It combined paging and global positioning technology, so people could fetch maps from over the airwaves. Next, they told him, they planned on adding cell phone calling.

Norman loved trying new things. Shortly after he went to work for AT&T in 1983, he landed an assignment with AT&T AMPS, the first cell phone business in the United States. This was even before AT&T’s first cellular networks were switched on. So being on the ground floor of risky new ventures didn’t frighten Norman. He arranged meetings with IBMers in Boca Raton, Florida, and, within a matter of months, they agreed to codevelop a product that would combine e-mail, fax, and phone. IBM supplied the electronics, screen, and handset housing. Norman’s R&D engineers helped out with some of the software, and BellSouth agreed to market the product nationwide to wireless carriers. Neither of the two companies had ever designed a mobile handset, so they brought in Mitsubishi to engineer the cell phone electronics. Ultimately, Simon included a mobile phone, a pager, e-mail, a calendar, an address book, a calculator, and a pen-based sketchpad.

There were the inevitable delays. IBM discovered problems with faxing when it conducted manufacturing tests in early 1994. But, amazingly, given the fact that three large companies were collaborating on a product that had never been tried before, BellSouth shipped the first models to customers in August 1994—a little more than a year and a half after Norman had stumbled upon Angler.

The first reviews were raves. Journalists and industry analysts were hungry for products that bridged between industries in those days, so they tended to overlook obvious flaws and accentuate the positive. You could do things with Simon that no device had done before. Some people loved the nifty touch screen, and their ability to press a button to switch from the landscape to portrait view on the oblong display. But, the fact was, Simon was a brick. It, literally, looked like a small black brick, and, at 20 ounces, it weighed too much to be very useful as a phone. Customers started feeling muscle fatigue after a few minutes of holding Simon to their ears. Beyond the size and weight, the device had a long list of deficiencies: battery life was short, only 30 minutes of talk time; it could receive e-mail, not send it; and; while you could receive a fax, reading it was another matter: it was nearly impossible. Initially, Simon cost $1,800, though BellSouth quickly dropped the price to $800. IBM produced 18,000 of them before word came to shut down the production line. In spite of all of Simon’s flaws, Norman believes that the product was doomed by a flaw it didn’t even have: handwriting recognition. You could draw on the Simon screen with a stylus, but that was it. The machine was not equipped to recognize handwriting. Yet, with the disaster of Apple’s Newton fresh in the minds of consumers, those bad feelings rubbed off on other daring new digital products. The Newton phenomenon was toxic. “We didn’t have handwriting recognition, but people thought we did,” says Norman.

The Simon project was so fraught with bad feelings that nobody tried designing a smartphone again for years. Norman himself came up with a plan for a high-quality mobile phone with a touch screen and address book, but he couldn’t get anybody to build it. Still, he’s proud of what he and his colleagues did. After the iPhone was launched, he said: “I’m way past the point of complaining, but IBM and BellSouth were the first companies to mash all that stuff together and prove it could work.”

The person who finally figured out how to make a good smartphone was also the guy who had done the same with PDAs: Jeff Hawkins. He had realized in the summer of 1998, when he and Dubinsky started Handspring, that the era of the stand-alone PDA would soon draw to a close. The big opportunity in the future would be in combining computers and telephones. “This thought depressed me,” says Hawkins. “We were the leader in handhelds, but we had to get into the phone business, which was dominated by huge companies. We were a little nothing. But we had no choice. If we didn’t build a smartphone, we’d be out of business.” In 1998, it was too early for Handspring to develop a smartphone, however. For such devices to take off, they needed good wireless data networks, and those didn’t exist yet. Also, at the time, handset makers designed their own chips. Handspring didn’t have the resources to do that. So, in the meantime, Hawkins, he commissioned a mobile phone ad-on for Visor, the company’s first handheld, but the VisorPhone was a flop. It was just too ungainly.

The technology landscape was changing rapidly, though. Carriers deployed new and improved networks, and a handful of independent companies that specialized in designing electronics for handsets started producing high-quality chips that Handspring could use in its products. So, as 2000’s boom for handhelds turned into 2001’s bust, Hawkins set about designing a new product that combined a mobile phone, Web browser, e-mailer, and organizer in a single compact device—the Handspring Treo.

The first Treo was something of a proof of concept. It was a flip phone, meaning you lifted the front cover to reveal the tiny keyboard and monochrome screen. This was the first time Hawkins and his team had used a keyboard, and it took a while to get it right. The keys had to be shaped just so, or else people using the device would depress more than one key at once. They also had to offer just the right amount of resistance to touch, so users knew by feel when they had successfully keyed in a letter or number. Hawkins decided that, since Treo had a keyboard, they could dispense with Graffiti, his system for writing on the screen in digital shorthand. But he got resistance from the marketing team, and, ultimately, Handspring shipped two versions. There wasn’t much demand for the version that included Graffiti, though.

The introduction of the Treo 180 in early 2002 set off a race among the world’s mobile handset makers to produce better and better smartphones. By then, with the market for handhelds swooning, Handspring had been bought by Palm, and Hawkins and crew produced a second smartphone that was a bona fide hit, the Treo 600. It was a color model with a so-called candy-bar design (no flip-up cover). The keyboard was also improved. Hawkins had discovered through experimentation that if you provided a strong backlight for a keyboard, people could find the keys much more easily and type faster. With brighter backlighting in subsequent models, Palm initially produced smaller keyboards—and thinner devices—than its rival, RIM, which had quickly followed Hawkins into the smartphone market.

Suddenly, mobile phones were emerging as the dominant portable gadget. At least they were getting most of the hype. And, based on the number of machines sold, mobile phone handsets were far outpacing sales of laptop computers. In 2007, for the first time, more than one billion handsets were sold in a year. That compared to about 100 million laptops sold. While the vast majority of those handsets were traditional mobile phones, devices that combine phone calling, entertainment, and computing were becoming more common. Handsets classified as smartphones came in at around 100 million in 2007, and analysts expected 250 million or more to be sold by 2010.

For the world’s road warriors, the smartphone was a truly wonderful device. Jim Steele, president of worldwide sales at the on-demand software company Salesforce.com, spent an average of 200 nights away from his home as he hopped around the world visiting customers and salespeople. Before he got his first BlackBerry, when he was traveling on business, he’d call his secretary on his cell phone as soon as he landed at an airport and have her read his e-mail over the phone. If she wasn’t in the office, he was just out of luck. He’d race to his hotel room and get online via his laptop. Steele was never a huge fan of laptops, though. Best to say he tolerated them. The reason was he had never mastered touch typing. He hunted and pecked, and not very rapidly. So when the BlackBerry came along it was a revelation to him. He found that he could type with his thumbs on the BlackBerry faster than he could type with his index fingers on a laptop. For a while, he carried a cell phone and his BlackBerry, but when RIM got its mobile phone technology right, he switched to an all-in-one. He could make calls, do e-mail, and get on the Web via one very small device.

The BlackBerry smartphone became a crucial tool for Steele and the entire Salesforce.com sales and management team. Thanks to always being in touch with one another, they could share information, confer, and make decisions rapidly. A huge deal that Salesforce.com signed with Citicorp in late 2007 shows just how instrumental the smartphone had become. They had been negotiating with Citi executives for several months about supplying the financial company with an online service for bank employees who managed money for wealthy customers. At last, it was time for a final push on what would be
Salesforce.com’s largest deal in its ten-year history. Over a period of two days, sales managers Wayne Like, Dave Orrico, and Dave Rudnitsky camped out at Citi office in Manhattan negotiating the fine points of the deal. These sessions would last from 9 a.m. to 10 or 11 at night. They’d duck out of meetings and, standing in hallways, sent e-mails to Steele, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and other company executives asking for their advice or approval of terms and conditions. Finally, on November 2, only a few last details remained. Steele was traveling in Europe. He weighed in via his BlackBerry from the airport in London and then again when he landed in Germany two hours later. That evening, when he and a customer were dining on wurst in a Frankfurt restaurant, Steele felt his BlackBerry vibrate in his pocket. Anticipating news on the Citi deal, he excused himself and checked his mail. An alert had come over notifying all top Salesforce.com executives that the Citi contract had closed. Steele shouted, “Yes! Yes!” and pumped his fist, startling his guest and other diners. If not for his ability to be in touch with his colleagues nearly constantly, the last phase of the deal-making process might have dragged on for weeks or even months. Instead, it was done in 48 hours.

This revolution in mobile communications gave rise to a raging debate in 2007 and 2008: which was the more important portable device, the laptop or the smartphone? Advocates for both sides weighed in. But, in the end, the fight was silly. It was the gadget-junkie version of medieval monks jousting over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. There would be uses where a smartphone would win hands down, such as phone calling, text messaging, basic e-mailing, and quick-and-dirty Web browsing. But if you wanted to create something, whether writing a letter or longer e-mail, prepare a presentation, edit photographs or video, or even read a long e-mail, the notebook PC was still the best device for those uses—and it looked like it would remain so for the foreseeable future.

So, as Lenovo’s X300 came to market, there were two hugely successful portable devices—the notebook PC and the mobile phone. But would people also want to use other gizmos that were smaller than a notebook PC but larger than a smartphone? The idea: offer businesspeople something very small—pocketable, in some cases—that’s an alternative to carrying a laptop around town or on a short business trip. Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Fujitsu, and Vulcan Portals had all come out with such products, which were called “tweeners” by some people.

Palm’s Jeff Hawkins had his own twist on the concept. During a digital products conference in May 2007 he strode onstage to show a prototype of his latest brainstorm: Foleo. It was an ultracompact computer with a twist. Palm was positioning the sleek clamshell device, which it planned on selling for $499 after a rebate, as an alternative to carrying a larger, conventional laptop. It offered a nearly full-size keyboard, a 10-inch (254-millimeter) display, and a selection of applications including a word processor and spreadsheet. It ran the Linux operating system. Hawkins believed it would be most useful when people also carried smartphones, like Treos or BlackBerrys, and transferred e-mail to Foleo when they were in sit-down mode. “It’s a companion to your phone and companion to you,” he said during a briefing at the time.

Yet it wasn’t clear if there would be a lot of demand for tweeners. Most of the new machines, including the Foleo, were too large to fit into a pocket or not capable enough to replace a notebook PC. The priciest topped $2,900—far more than the average subnotebook. And Hawkins’s demonstration of the Foleo, impressive as it was in some respects, left the computing cognoscenti scratching their heads: were people really looking for a companion to their phone? Would hard-core business types choose a computer that runs Linux rather than Microsoft’s Windows? “The yet-another-device philosophy doesn’t carry, so to speak, and it’s sure as hell not the future of mobile computing,” sniffed blogger Ryan Block on the popular Engadget technology Web site.

Perhaps Block’s comment was prophetic. Three months later, Palm announced that plans to ship Foleo had been suspended indefinitely. The company had just been taken private in a leveraged buyout by the private equity firm Elevation Partners, and it was conserving its resources. The top priority was completing a new operating system that would be optimized for combining mobile telephony and computing. So engineers were shifted from the Foleo project to work on the new operating system. Palm’s move was a blow to Hawkins, who had dreamed of making a device like Foleo for more than five years. He tried to shrug it off, though. “I think it’s likely we’ll ship it someday,” he said at the time. “I still think the concept is one of the best I ever came up with.”

By then, Hawkins was sitting on the sidelines of portable computing. He was a senior advisor to Palm rather than a regular employee. He spent most of his time developing theories of how the brain works, which he had laid out in a 2004 book, On Intelligence. He and Dubinsky had started a new company, Numenta, to develop computing products based on his neuroscience theories. The idea was to create software that, like the brain, knows nothing at the beginning of its existence, but which learns from what it experiences and builds a model of the world based on that knowledge. The software was designed to address problems that have been difficult for traditional computers to master, such as pattern recognition—the stuff Hawkins’s father was working on with the dolphin and that Hawkins himself had wrestled with the handwriting recognition software at Palm. In his spare time, Hawkins built wooden boats.

It seemed like yet another chapter had begun in the saga of portable computing. Palm’s market share was dwindling, and Apple and the iPhone were ascendant. In October 2007, Apple announced an important strategic shift that positioned iPhone as more than just a nifty device that teenagers would die for. Jobs would allow independent software makers to create applications that could run on iPhones. This was the strategy that had helped make Microsoft’s Windows the world’s dominant PC operating system. Now Apple was in the game, too. The iPhone would be a “platform” for others to build upon, like Windows for PCs and like Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software for smartphones. Apple had taken the early lead in the personal computing era only to be overtaken by Microsoft, with its superior business plan of building an ecosystem of other companies around its products. Now, Apple was back. And, if that wasn’t enough excitement for the portable computing crowd, Google, the Web search engine giant, was getting into the mobile phone business, too. It announced in November 2007, just as Lenovo’s Kodachi was going into its premanufacturing test phase, that it was creating a package of software, called Android, that handset makers could use to run their next-generation mobile phones. Google also created an alliance of companies, called the Open Handset Alliance, dedicated to using and promoting the software. Its goal was to rival the smartphone technology made by Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, and RIM.

Meanwhile, the tech industry was left to wonder what Apple’s Jobs would come up with next. Even though dozens of reporters wrote about Apple regularly, the company had a knack for keeping its secrets under wraps. The company’s purchase of a small chip design firm, P.A. Semi, for $278 million, in April 2008, suggested that it had huge ambitions for its smartphone business. P.A. Semi specialized in designing processor chips that required little electrical power—and so were well suited for a device like the iPhone. It looked like Apple planned on becoming more vertically integrated—reversing a long-term trend in the computer industry. In the early years, computer companies had done everything for themselves—designing and making chips, manufacturing circuit boards and computers, and writing their own operating systems and applications. But, over the years, most companies had shifted. They gave up on being vertically integrated, instead buying hardware and software components from others. Apple had resisted. While other PC companies relied on Microsoft for their operating systems and other companies for applications, Apple kept designing its own software. And, though it bought microprocessors from others, including Intel and Motorola for PCs and ARM for iPhone, it kept designing some of the specialized chips that went into its machines.

With the purchase of P.A. Semi, it looked like Apple would take control over its own fate in microprocessor technology for smartphones and other handheld devices. As these machines become ever smaller, more and more of their capabilities are placed on fewer chips. And, continuously, more and more is added to the microprocessor chip itself. That means devices can be smaller and less expensive. So it looked like Jobs aimed to take the lead in the next generation of hardware miniaturization. Or maybe not.

An anecdote from 2001 gives a hint of just how inscrutable Steve Jobs could be. Remember Steve Capps and Michael Tchao of Apple Newton fame? Capps had left Apple in 1995 and went to work for Microsoft. Tchao ultimately found his way to Nike, where he became general manager of Nike TechLab, which focused on integrating digital technology with Nike’s athletic shoes. In 2001, both were entrepreneurs-in-residence at Ignition, a Seattle-based venture capital firm. They had some ideas for improving the technology in smartphones and were casting about for a way to put them to use. They thought Apple should get into the mobile phone business, and hoped that, if it did, the company would license some of their technology.

Capps and Tchao believed there was an opening for Apple because the mobile phone industry wasn’t doing a good job of serving its customers. The smartphones that were just then coming to market didn’t work well with Web sites. What the industry needed was a disruptive force like Jobs, they thought. They figured that Apple could produce a great user interface and great mobile services coupled with great software—which would enable it to revolutionize the mobile phone industry.

The two friends felt the idea of Apple getting into the phone business was obvious, and suspected that Jobs was probably already working on it. So they arranged to meet with him at Apple’s offices. They discussed the state of the cell business and some generic ideas for improving the customer experience on mobile phones. But, ultimately, after a wide-ranging discussion, Jobs said he wasn’t interested. He didn’t seem to understand the phone business. Or maybe he was just pretending not to. Tchao remembered Jobs saying: “Why would we get into this business? We don’t know this space. What could we add?’” Well, it turned out that Apple could add quite a lot. Six years later, Jobs introduced iPhone, and a new era in portable computing was begun. “One thing Steve is incredibly good at is not necessarily being first to enter a space, but entering at the right time in the right way,” says Tchao.

In late 2008, Apple and the rest of the tech industry seemed poised for a new wave of innovations. Some of the new capabilities that would come to portable computing were predictable—driven by relentless improvements in chips and networks. Others were unknowable. They were still inchoate dreams in the heads of countless designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. But their time, too, would come.

Copyright Steve Hamm, 2008