Apple’s biggest product in its 50-year history surprised the engineers who designed it | CNN Business

Apple had never built anything so complex. But it was at a crossroads. “We were like, people are only going to carry one device. They’re going to have a cell phone with music, or they’re going to have an Apple product with music and communications,” said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who co-created the iPod and helped lead the iPhone’s early development. “And it was like, ‘Okay, what are we going to make?’” Fadell and other Apple executives watched as Motorola and Samsung released new cellphones with built-in MP3 players. They questioned whether the iPod’s days were numbered. The iPod was Apple’s biggest product at the time. By April 2004, the iPod was outselling the Mac and growing by more than 900% from the year before. So Apple got to work making its biggest success obsolete. To this day – the company’s 50th anniversary – Apple has never made a more consequential decision. Apple had never made a product as complicated as the iPhone, which meant figuring out how to make components work together in ways they hadn’t before, Fadell said. Rubén Caballero, Apple’s vice president of engineering from 2005 until 2019, recalls working long nights