This is the excruciating amount of work it took to develop the first iPhone

The first iPhone was launched back in 2007. The development for it began in 2004. And the story has it that iPhone employees worked two straight weeks, round-the-clock and made it one of the most successful pieces of gadget in the world.

While there have been stories of certain Apple employees being taken away to work on the ‘secret project’ that was to be the iPhone, a new story has the employees who worked to make the iPhone saying that they worked two weeks straight and stayed in a hotel near Apple’s headquarters. One employee even joked they put in 168 hours a week - out of 168 possible hours.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Scott Forstall, in charge of the iPhone operating system, said, “There was a time in 2005, I think it was, we'd been doing a lot of designs, but the designs weren't quite there yet. It didn't feel complete. And Steve came to one of our design meetings and said 'This isn't good enough. You have to come up with something so much better.'”

In fact, Jobs was so hell-bent on seeing his idea through that he threatened to give the project away to another team.
But after the agonising two weeks of working, when Jobs finally did see the end product, he was blown away.

Greg Christie, former VP of user interface at Apple, said, “The first time [Jobs] saw it he was completely silent. He didn't say a thing. He didn't gesture; he didn't ask a question. He sat back, and said, show it to me again. And so we go through it again, we go through the whole thing again, and Steve is pretty much blown away by the demonstration. It was great work. Our reward for doing a great job on that demonstration was to kill ourselves over the next two and a half years.”

What they did see was endless lines outside outlets selling iPhones. 
 

• iPhone
• Steve Jobs
• Apple