Reading the article, I think even Apple thought it was just a case of taking existing parts and smashing them in a case - until they actually tried doing it.
A lot of the stuff Apple had problems with is almost certainly routine for the big existing phone players like HTC, Samsung, Nokia... I mean, Jobs and Ive didn't even realise that metal cases block radio waves, which is basically common knowledge. Many of their problems seem self-imposed in general - for example:
"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."
Apple could apparently get away with this, but I expect their development techniques would have killed lesser companies. Maybe, in some alternative universe where things worked out just a little differently, the iPhone killed Apple too rather than being their biggest success.
I wonder if this sort of "encapsulation" you describe Apple did could have been one of the reasons why they succeeded in building an amazing product? It seems counter-intuitive at first, but isn't it a possibility that encapsulation works well outside of software as well?
I'm sure this can't be what you intended, but it sounds as though you just said that developing something like the iPhone is a matter of routine for companies like HTC, Samsung and Nokia, and that Apple only found it hard because of poor technique.
Some things are always hard, but doing them for the first time is harder.
Building buildings is always difficult, but if you've done it ten times before, you know a lot of the caveats. If you're doing it for the first time, you'll go slower due to more learning-by-doing.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
> Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.)
(It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)
Well I think it's obvious what he meant ... If true, tripping over obvious, common knowledge things like what materials block RF signals is not something you would see major cell phone players doing.
I love articles like this, even though the people who need to read them the most don't have the attention span for them :-)