„On the Origin of the iPhone“
Fadell left Apple in November 2008, and founded Nest Labs in 2010. The personal animus between him and Forstall was famous within the company. The kernel of the widely-held but incorrect notion that Fadell backed the embedded Linux OS project for the iPhone starts and ends with their political rivalry within Apple. If the embedded Linux project had won out, Forstall — whose expertise and experience were entirely on the Mac OS X side, dating back to his days as an early employee at NeXT — likely would have been out of the picture for the phone project, and the iPhone’s software might well have fallen under Fadell’s purview. So: Fadell and Forstall were rivals, there was a bake-off between two projects to produce an OS for a phone, Forstall spearheaded one of them, ergo Fadell must have backed the other. Sounds good. And then that one throwaway paragraph in the 2011 Businessweek profile of Forstall said it was so, and a myth was born.
It even makes sense that if Fadell had championed the embedded Linux/iPod OS effort, that he’d downplay/retcon his role in hindsight, given how spectacularly successful the decision to base the iPhone OS on Mac OS X turned out to be. But even putting Fadell’s own version of events aside, it just doesn’t add up. Sakoman and Rubinstein, who did spearhead the embedded Linux OS effort, left Apple in late 2005/early 2006, when the iPhone project was taking off inside the company. At that same time Fadell was promoted to the company’s very short list of senior vice presidents and put in charge of the iPhone’s hardware engineering. Fadell and Forstall might not have liked each other, but they were the hardware yin and software yang of the iPhone’s creation — winners both, but also neither to last long within Apple.
Für die „history buffs“ (unter uns) skizziert John Gruber die zeitliche Entstehung des iPhone OS-Projektes (Codename: Purple), beschreibt wie (schnell) die Wahl für das Betriebssystem fiel und welche Personen hauptverantwortlich darüber stritten daran mitwirkten.