Joe: The raw materials in your thousand-dollar iPhone are worth about one dollar. But that dollar comes from some of the most dangerous places on Earth. Today, we're tearing down the story behind the world's most famous device, and it's not what you think. Lewis: Wow, one dollar. That's a wild starting point. Where are we getting this from? Joe: This comes from our deep dive today into The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant. And what's incredible about Merchant is that he's not just a tech writer; he's an investigative journalist who literally traveled the globe—from mines in Bolivia to factories in China—to trace every single component back to its source. The book became a national bestseller precisely because it tells the story no one else was telling. Lewis: So he's not just reviewing the tech, he's uncovering its entire life story. Okay, I'm in. Where do we start with a story that big? Joe: We start by dismantling the biggest myth of all: that Steve Jobs invented the iPhone.

Lewis: Okay, that’s a bold claim. The image of Jobs on stage in 2007, holding up that first iPhone, is basically modern scripture. You’re telling me he wasn't the inventor? Joe: He was the ultimate curator, the master editor, the greatest showman in tech history. But an inventor? The book makes a powerful case that almost every piece of technology in the iPhone existed long before Apple put it all together. Lewis: Like what? Give me an example. Joe: How about the smartphone itself? Merchant takes us back to 1993. Fourteen years before the iPhone. An IBM engineer named Frank Canova Jr. is working in a lab in Florida. He has this vision for a device that combines a phone with a computer. It has a touchscreen, it has apps—like a calendar, an address book, a notepad—and it can even connect to the internet to send and receive emails and faxes. Lewis: In 1993? That sounds exactly like a smartphone. What was it called? Joe: It was called the Simon Personal Communicator. And it was real. They sold about fifty thousand of them. It was this chunky, gray brick, but it worked. You could tap the screen with a stylus to check your calendar or sketch a note. It was the first smartphone. Lewis: Why have I never heard of it? Why didn't it take over the world? Joe: It was ahead of its time. The internet was still nascent, the cellular networks were slow, and the battery life was terrible. It was a brilliant idea in a world that wasn't ready for it. But the point Merchant makes is that the idea of a smartphone wasn't born in Steve Jobs's head. It had been floating around for over a decade. Lewis: That's fascinating. It’s like the ghost of a past failure haunting the iPhone’s success. What about the most iconic feature, the multitouch screen? Surely Apple invented that. Joe: Ah, the multitouch story is even wilder. Jobs famously stood on stage and said, "We have invented a new technology called multitouch." And it was a phenomenal moment. But the book reveals that's a brilliant piece of marketing. Lewis: Come on. You're telling me pinch-to-zoom existed before the iPhone? Joe: The roots of it did. Merchant traces it back to some unexpected places. One of the earliest functional multitouch screens was developed in the 1970s at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Lewis: The place with the giant particle accelerator? What on earth did they need a touchscreen for? Joe: To control the Super Proton Synchrotron! An engineer named Bent Stumpe needed a better way to manage the complex controls for this massive machine. He couldn't have thousands of physical buttons. So he designed a capacitive touchscreen with programmable buttons on a screen. It was a direct, physical way to interact with complex data. Lewis: So the ancestor of me scrolling through Instagram was used to manage particle physics. My brain just did a little flip. Joe: And it gets better. The specific gestures, the kind of multitouch we know, were pioneered by a small company called FingerWorks, founded by a guy named Wayne Westerman. He was a PhD student who developed the technology to help with his own repetitive strain injuries from typing. His company made these amazing multitouch trackpads. Lewis: Let me guess. Apple bought the company? Joe: Exactly. In 2005, Apple quietly acquired FingerWorks and all its patents. Westerman and his co-founder went to work for Apple. So when Jobs unveiled multitouch, he was unveiling a technology that Apple had acquired and brilliantly refined, not one they had invented from scratch. Lewis: That completely changes the story. It makes Jobs seem less like a wizard and more like an incredibly smart, incredibly ruthless orchestra conductor. He didn't invent the instruments, but he knew exactly how to make them play a symphony that no one had ever heard before. Joe: That's the perfect analogy. And that's the core argument of the book. The iPhone isn't a miracle; it's a convergence. It’s a masterpiece of curation and integration. But the creation myth of the lone genius, as powerful as it is, obscures this much more interesting, collective history.

Lewis: Okay, so Apple didn't invent the core technologies, but they perfected them and packaged them brilliantly. How did that happen inside Apple? Knowing their reputation for secrecy, I can't imagine it was a smooth, collaborative process. Joe: You are absolutely right. It was the opposite of smooth. It was a brutal, secret war inside Apple. And this brings us to the second major idea in the book: the internal 'bake-off' that forged the iPhone. Lewis: A bake-off? Like a reality TV cooking show, but with engineers? Joe: Pretty much. In 2005, Jobs knew Apple had to make a phone. The iPod was their cash cow, but phones were starting to play music, and that was an existential threat. So he set up two secret, competing projects to design the phone. They were codenamed P1 and P2. Lewis: And who was running these teams? Joe: P1 was run by Tony Fadell, the "father of the iPod." His project was the safe bet. The idea was to take an iPod, with its famous click wheel, and bolt a phone onto it. It would leverage the iPod's brand and user familiarity. You'd use the click wheel to scroll through numbers and dial. Lewis: I'm already getting carpal tunnel just thinking about texting on a click wheel. What was P2? Joe: P2 was the moonshot. It was led by Scott Forstall, who ran the Mac OS X software division. His team's goal was to take the powerful, complex Mac operating system and shrink it down to run on a mobile chip, all controlled by a revolutionary multitouch screen. This was the project that built on the work of the ENRI group and the FingerWorks acquisition we just talked about. Lewis: So it's like two different movie studios were told to make a Batman movie. One pitches a safe sequel with the same actor, and the other pitches a dark, gritty, and incredibly risky reboot. And Jobs was the studio head watching the dailies? Joe: Exactly. And the pressure was immense. Merchant describes the project headquarters, a locked-down building on Apple's campus they called the "Purple Dorm" because it smelled like a dorm room. Engineers were working around the clock. The book is filled with stories of the personal cost—people getting divorced, burning out completely. One engineer said, "The iPhone is the reason I'm divorced." They all knew the future of the company was riding on this. Lewis: That's intense. So how was the winner chosen? What was the turning point? Joe: It came down to user experience. The P1 team, the iPod phone, built a working prototype. And it was clever. You could scroll through contacts with the wheel, and it felt familiar. But then they tried to dial a phone number. Or worse, type a text message. It was a nightmare. You'd have to spin the wheel endlessly to select each letter. Lewis: Oh, I can just picture it. Like playing an old arcade game to send a simple "lol." Joe: Precisely. Tony Fadell himself admitted it was a terrible experience. Meanwhile, the P2 team, the touchscreen team, was making breakthroughs. They created a demo of inertial scrolling—where you flick the screen and it keeps moving, then gently bounces at the end. That "rubber band" effect. It felt magical. It felt intuitive. Lewis: And that was it? The magic of the scroll won? Joe: That was the moment the tide turned. When the executives saw the two demos side-by-side, the choice became obvious. The click wheel was a clever hack on an old interface. The touchscreen was the future. So, the P1 project was killed, and Apple went all-in on the risky, ambitious, Mac-based touchscreen phone. The internal war was over, and the iPhone as we know it was born from that conflict.

Lewis: It's an amazing story of pressure and innovation. But you started this whole conversation by talking about the 'one dollar' of raw materials. That feels like a completely different universe from the high-pressure design labs in Cupertino. Joe: Exactly. And that's the final, crucial piece of this story that Merchant uncovers. The iPhone isn't just 'Designed in California.' It's mined and made all over the world, often at a staggering human and environmental cost. Lewis: This is the part of the story we don't see when we unbox that pristine new phone. Where did Merchant go to find this out? Joe: He went to the source. One of the most powerful sections of the book is his journey to a mountain in Bolivia called Cerro Rico. It's been mined for silver and other minerals for over 500 years, first by the Spanish colonizers and now by local miners. It's a place that has literally consumed millions of lives. Lewis: And what does this mountain have to do with the iPhone? Joe: It's a major source of tin. And tin is used to make the solder that holds all the components on the iPhone's logic board together. Merchant describes going into these mines. They're not high-tech operations. They're terrifying, unstable tunnels where miners, some of them children, work with primitive tools, chewing coca leaves to stave off hunger and exhaustion. Lewis: That's just... devastating. Joe: It gets darker. He describes how the miners have a deity they worship inside the mountain, a devil-like figure called El Tío. They leave him offerings—cigarettes, alcohol, coca leaves—praying he will protect them from the constant threat of cave-ins and toxic gas, and that he'll reveal a rich vein of ore. It's a world away from a sleek Apple Store, but it's directly connected to it. Lewis: That's incredibly powerful. It completely reframes the device. It's not just a piece of tech; it's a collection of stories, and some of them are really dark. He also went to China, right? To the factories? Joe: Yes, he investigates the infamous Foxconn factories, where hundreds of thousands of workers assemble the iPhones in grueling, repetitive shifts. He talks about the suicides that led to nets being installed outside the dorm buildings. He also travels to Inner Mongolia, where the mining of rare earth metals—essential for the phone's screen and haptics—has created a vast, toxic, radioactive lake. Lewis: So that one dollar of raw materials you mentioned at the start... it's not a simple financial cost. It represents a massive externalized cost, paid by people and the environment far away. Joe: That's the heart of it. Merchant isn't necessarily saying Apple is uniquely evil; he's showing that this is the reality of our globalized supply chain for almost all modern electronics. But because the iPhone is the one device, the most successful product of all time, it becomes the ultimate symbol of this system. Lewis: It makes you wonder, what can we even do about it? As a consumer, it feels overwhelming. Joe: And the book doesn't offer easy answers. It acknowledges that Apple has made some efforts to audit its supply chain and remove conflict minerals. But the system is so vast and complex that full transparency is almost impossible. The book's goal, I think, is to force us to see the whole picture. To understand that the magic of the device in our hands is enabled by a very real, and often very harsh, world of labor and extraction.

Joe: So when you put it all together, the iPhone isn't one device; it's a multiverse. It's a convergence of forgotten history, a product of intense internal conflict, and a symbol of our complex, often brutal, global economy. Lewis: It's so much more complicated than the simple, elegant object itself. The book's real power seems to be in pulling back the curtain on that simplicity. Joe: Absolutely. Merchant's real achievement is showing us that this sleek, simple object is one of the most complicated things humans have ever made. It connects a physicist at CERN in the 70s, a burnt-out engineer in Cupertino, and a teenage miner in Bolivia. They are all part of its secret history. Lewis: It makes you look at the phone in your hand completely differently. It's not just about the next feature update or a slightly better camera anymore. It's about the weight of all those stories. Joe: Exactly. And that's the question the book leaves us with: now that we know the secret history, what does this device truly represent to us? Lewis: A powerful question. We'd love to hear what you think. Find us on our socials and share your thoughts after hearing this. Does it change how you see your phone? Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.