Apple vs Samsung: Scot Forstall’s testimony

Image Credit: Apple 

This is Part 11 of our coverage of the Phil Schiller and Scot Forstall testimony in the Apple vs Samsung trial. These snippets are from The Verge live blog from the court room.

Scott Forstall’s testimony highlights:

• OS X – “So, the goal of an operating system is to run all of the machine. Basically, drive the machine. And we wanted an operating system that could last for another 20 years. The operating system that Apple had at the time didn’t have those legs.”

•  In 2003 the team wanted  make “a beautiful tablet without a keyboard, without a hinge, where you have to fold it like a laptop.” In 2004, they had a conversation about phones, and they all felt they hated their phones. “Could we use the technology we were doing with touch that we’d been prototyping for this tablet, and could we use that for a phone… So we took that tablet and took a small scrolling list… We built a small corner of it as a list of contacts…. You could tap on the contact, it would slide over and show you the information… It was just amazing. We realized that a touchscreen of the size that would fit in your pocket would be perfect for these phones.”

•  The iPhone OS software team: “So this was a real challenge. Steve gave me a difficult constraint, and that constraint was — he didn’t want, for secrecy reasons, for anyone outside of Apple to work on the user interface… So I had to find people within Apple to work on that. But he told me I could move anyone within the company to that team.”

•  Bringing “superstars” into his office and tell them “We’re starting a new project. It’s so secret I can’t even tell you what that project is. I can’t tell you who you will work for… What I can tell you is that if you accept this project you… will work nights, you will work weekends, probably for a number of years.”

•  Forstall says “We wanted to build a phone for ourselves. We wanted to build a phone that we loved; that was really a computer in your pocket in some ways.”

•  They would use colours for product code names — as we heard earlier, “Purple” was the name of the original iPhone — and the development building for the device was called the Purple Dorm. “Very much like a dorm, people were there all the time… It smelled something like pizza, and in fact on the front door of the Purple Dorm we put a sign up that said ‘Fight Club’… because the first rule of that project was to not talk about it outside those doors.”

• “I remember as we built the iPhone I spent a lot of time using the early prototypes myself. I would use them to send all my emails, to browse the web. Basically anything I could do on the prototype I would do on the prototype instead of the computer.” He then challenged the team to implement the double-tap feature that we saw when the iPhone was announced in 2007.

• A 2011 email from Eddy Cue, in which Cue forwarded an article about a journalist dumping their iPad for a 7-inch Galaxy Tab. Cue writes “Having used a Samsung Galaxy [Tab], i tend to agree with many of the comments below… I believe there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one. I expressed this to Steve several times since Thanksgiving and he seemed very receptive the last time.”

• “I never directed anyone to copy anything from Samsung.” Why not? “We wanted to build something great, and we thought we could build something better than anyone had built. There was no reason to look to them on this.”

Source: The Verge