[mauvehaus]

When the iPhone was just a rumor, I suggested that making it with a touch wheel like the iPods of the time would be a great opportunity to bring back rotary dialing. This was soundly rejected by all present.

Thanks to this, all I need to do is set up a Linux box so I can have that classic rotary vibe!

[herodotus]

Actually, you were not alone: https://www.patentlyapple.com/2010/12/apple-wins-patent-for-...

Steve Jobs was one of the inventors listed on this patent. As it happens, I and another Apple colleague filed an almost identical patent at around the same time. So, for a while, Apple owned two patents for simulating a rotary dial on a touch wheel. (My patent was eventually allowed to lapse. Steve's has been renewed).

I have to say that I had had a bit too much to drink at a dinner in SF when I suggested this idea to my colleague. I was thinking of the old pinball game that had really good physics making it feel amazingly real. I thought that the crucial part was doing the dialing physics in such a way that users could quickly dial any digit with the right gesture.

I was not disclosed on the iPhone when I came up with this idea, but my colleague sent the idea off to the patent committee and they agreed to it! They must have laughed when they saw the similarities to Steve's patent (which was still in progress too). We did have some big differences with Steve's, so it wasn't a duplicate. That being said, I think they wanted to boost the number of patents related to the iPhone as part of the initial marketing. (Steve said that there were already "over 200 patents" for it when he introduced it.)

[mauvehaus]

I love this so much. Both for the fact that people inside Apple had this idea, and for the fact that I may have also been more than one beer into the evening when I floated the idea as well!

[spicybright]

That would have been a hilarious timeline if they just upgraded ipods with cell networking, at least for one model.

Then you can use this for typing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

[gaudystead]

It's wild how that video came out 16 years ago and basically ends with "we'll see if Apple will make computers for business users and not just dicking around", and now in the current day, I'm working at a place where an update was sent out to our Macbook users that bricked the ones running an M1 chip, but not the M2 or M3 models.

It almost feels _impressive_ how hard macOS still is to integrate into an enterprise setting, and maybe they're okay with it just being a running joke for the past two decades that their computers don't do as well in a business context...

[jmb99]

Maybe it depends on the business, but I’ve been using Mac’s in an enterprise environment for my entire career with 0 issues. And yes, fully managed devices, not just “here’s a Mac have fun.” If your company can’t test updates before rolling them out, it doesn’t matter whether your shop is Mac, windows, or something else. I mean hell, if you’re all on Apple Silicon MacBooks, there’s probably only what, 6-8 different SKUs to test? Not like windows shops where you might have a few generations of Dell/Lenovo/HP workstations and/or laptops, each of which will have its own distinct problems.

[afandian]

And this a year or two before. Reflects how new some of these ideas seemed at the time.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGGOn-H7s3Q

[VladVladikoff]

I bet there is an app that lets you rotary dial on the touch screen to make calls.

[woleium]

iirc apple are/were very protective of the phone interface and would not allow apps that replace it.