Tony Fadell Concepts

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell · 2 May 2022 · 411pp · 119,022 words

with me. But I also realize that what motivates me may not be what motivates my team. The world is not made up entirely of Tony Fadells (and let us all be grateful for that). There are also normal, sane people with lives and families and lots of things they can and

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the internet and music and TVs could come together. The MP3 player makes me chuckle. The ad for pets.com makes me laugh out loud. Tony Fadell I was going to get it right this time. We were going after the world’s biggest players. We were going to challenge Sony. But

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and, 345 culture of, 258, 348, 353 design thinking and, 267, 283 Distinguished Engineer, Scientist or Technologist (DEST) program, 47 external heartbeat of, 147–48 Tony Fadell at, xviii, 19, 55, 69, 78, 80, 81, 82, 84–86, 91, 93, 96, 117, 136, 163, 237, 303, 320, 374 Andy Hertzfeld at, 2

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, 208 Future Shape, xix, 365, 374 GAP, 341 Gelsinger, Pat, 321–22 General Magic Bill Atkinson and, 2–3, 12, 27, 165 culture of, 46 Tony Fadell as engineer at, xvi–xvii, 2–3, 6, 7, 10–11, 13, 21, 24, 27, 35, 96, 129–30, 208, 327, 374 failure of, 3

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, 20–25, 27 individual contributor’s perspective, 26–27, 28, 29, 30, 31–33 Philips competition with iPod, 121 culture of, 36–37, 209, 258 Tony Fadell as CTO at, xvii, 18, 36–37, 45–46, 58, 61, 77, 81, 88, 89, 96, 125, 129–30, 209, 374 as partner and investor

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customer of, 58–61, 130 team schedules for, 144–45 Philips Nino, launching of, xvii, 38, 39–40, 39, 90 Philips Strategy and Ventures Group, Tony Fadell’s launching of, xvii, 40 Philips Velo customer panels for, 58–60 launching of, xvii, 37–40, 38, 90 project schedule for, 145 Pichai, Sundar

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personal problems and, 82 storytelling and, 83–84, 235 as strategy for dealing with assholes, 71, 73, 84–85 transition of, 76–81, 235 RealNetworks, Tony Fadell’s digital music player with, xvii, 41, 77, 80, 87, 332 reinvention, in Silicon Valley, xii risks of early adulthood, 6, 8, 9–13 political

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fiber management, printing, binding, or recycling, I’m ready to hear about it. And fund it. Get in touch at tonyfadell.com. About the Author TONY FADELL started his thirty-plus-year Silicon Valley career at General Magic, the most influential startup nobody has ever heard of. Then he went on to

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, you won’t realize how much you have learned until the finish.” —Randy Komisar, general partner, Kleiner Perkins and author, The Monk and the Riddle “Tony Fadell takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride, revealing what it’s really like to work in Silicon Valley and simultaneously providing a compelling instruction manual

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an amazing blueprint on how creative thinkers can negotiate their way to making ideas come to life in the world.” —Sir David Adjaye, OBE, architect “Tony Fadell is the rare combination of engineer and entrepreneur, with the soul of a storyteller. Build takes you far away from the beige box and into

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, iPhone, and Nest, while providing actionable advice for formulating, launching, scaling, and even selling a business.” —Benjamin Clymer, founder, HODINKEE Copyright BUILD. Copyright © 2022 by Tony Fadell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to

The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

by James Ashton · 11 May 2023 · 401pp · 113,586 words

– something better than the crop of digital players already on the market that carried just a handful of songs. To lead development, the company hired Tony Fadell, a headstrong computer programmer and rock ’n’ roll fan who had grown up listening to Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith. He had pitched

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up to 15 people, both managerial and technical, fell into a rhythm of spending one week in the UK twice a year. The likes of Tony Fadell and Apple’s senior vice president Bob Mansfield would base themselves in London, often at the Courthouse Hotel, a five-star venue converted from a

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, Arm remade its board with Wall Street squarely in mind, recruiting former executives from AOL, Intel and Qualcomm. Most eye-catching was the appointment of Tony Fadell, the engineer who secured Arm’s second wave of success by bringing it into Apple’s category-defining family of devices starting with the iPod

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant · 19 Jun 2017 · 416pp · 129,308 words

a graphic design company outside of Amsterdam, and he learned to code as a kid—maybe it was in his blood. Regardless, industry giants like Tony Fadell hail him as a visionary. One of his peers from the iPhone days puts it this way: “I don’t know what else to say

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snapshot of ultra-Jobs-ness, but it had real ramifications. “We switched from plastic to glass at the very last minute, which was a curveball,” Tony Fadell, the head of the original iPhone’s engineering team, tells me with a laugh. “There were just so many things like that.” The original plan

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former obviously drains the latter. And Apple, meanwhile, wants to keep making thinner and thinner phones. “If we made the iPhone a millimeter thicker,” says Tony Fadell, the head of hardware for the first iPhone, “we could make it last twice as long.” About two hours after departing the world’s largest

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he hated warts,” Bilbrey says, “he hated anything that wasn’t sleek and design-integrated.” Incidentally, the early iSight had been built by, among others, Tony Fadell and Andy Grignon, two men who would later become key drivers of the iPhone. The poor iSight user froze up. “The look on his face

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be able to talk about what they were working on. Steve Jobs “didn’t want anyone to leak it if they left the company,” says Tony Fadell, one of the top Apple executives who helped build the iPhone. “He didn’t want anyone to say anything. He just didn’t want—he

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a springboard for the iPhone in the process. “There would be no iPhone without the iPod,” says a man who helped build both of them. Tony Fadell, sometimes dubbed “the Podfather” by the media, was a driving force in creating Apple’s first bona fide hit device in years, and he’d

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the iPod and iPhone to market; he’s been called “Tony Baloney,” and one former Apple exec advised me “not to believe a single word Tony Fadell says.” After he left Apple in 2008, he co-founded Nest, a company that crafted smart home gadgets, like learning thermostats, and was acquired by

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embrace: Give Cingular exclusivity, and we’ll give you complete freedom over the device. Fix What You Hate From Steve Jobs to Jony Ive to Tony Fadell to Apple’s engineers, designers, and managers, there’s one part of the iPhone mythology that everyone tends to agree on: Before the iPhone, everyone

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creating the software that powered the iPod to working on the software for a videoconferencing program and iChat. He’d become friends with rising star Tony Fadell when they’d built the iSight camera together. After wrapping up another major project—writing the Mac feature Dashboard, which Grignon affectionately calls “his baby

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.” True to the name, they would at times behave in a manner befitting a close-knit, secretive (and highly efficient) organization. P1 Thing After Another Tony Fadell was Forstall’s chief competition. “From a politics perspective, Tony wanted to own the entire experience,” Grignon says. “The software, the hardware… once people started

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that the company speak with just the voices of top executives,” Markoff noted after being denied an interview with a driving force behind the iPod, Tony Fadell. Another Times writer, Nick Bilton, observed that Jobs frequently described his products as “magical,” and, “as Mr. Jobs knew so well, one thing that makes

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effort to locate leakers—if the fake product showed up on fan site, Jobs would know the source of the leak and fire the supplier. Tony Fadell, a senior vice president and once one of the company’s stars, told me that at times, the secrecy made working on the iPhone—which

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one point, his team was the same size as the software team,” Williamson says. Hardwired for Touching And then, of course, there was the hardware. Tony Fadell started hiring hands from around the company and, because the extreme-secrecy clause applied mostly to the user-interface and the industrial-design teams, hiring

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couldn’t see the actual UI that it was going to ship with.” By insisting that the UI remain secret, Forstall made life difficult for Tony Fadell, who had recently been promoted to senior vice president and who was the only one on his team allowed to see the software. “Forstall skillfully

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in. And these were also my friends. I’m not supposed to be honest with my friends? It was really fucking weird.” To this day, Tony Fadell sounds exasperated when the conversation turns to iPhone politics. “The politics were really hard,” he says. “And they got even worse over time. They became

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’s like, If there’s something here you don’t want, no complicated thing, blah blah blah, you just swipe it away—and it was Tony Fadell. You just flick it, I can delete him, and he’s gone. And I was like, Ahhhh, and the audience was doing this clap-clap

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us to swipe, press, and tap; we still scroll through lists of information with the flick of a finger. “It stands the test of time,” Tony Fadell says. “You look at the base assumptions, and what’s changed? The business model changed. Sure, better camera, better whatever. But the fundamentals have not

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employees, previous research and reportage, and court- and FOIA-obtained documents. Among Apple personnel interviewed on the record were Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Richard Williamson, Tony Fadell, Henri Lamiraux, Greg Christie, Nitin Ganatra, Andy Grignon, David Tupman, Evan Doll, Abigail Brody, Brian Huppi, Joshua Strickon, and Tom Gruber. Quotes were drawn from

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson · 23 Oct 2011 · 915pp · 232,883 words

. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs. LARRY ELLISON. CEO of Oracle and personal friend of Jobs. TONY FADELL. Punky engineer brought to Apple in 2001 to develop the iPod. SCOTT FORSTALL. Chief of Apple’s mobile device software. ROBERT FRIEDLAND. Reed student, proprietor

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exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make, and he began to look around for someone who could lead the development team. Tony Fadell was a brash entrepreneurial programmer with a cyberpunk look and an engaging smile who had started three companies while still at the University of Michigan

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the future?” Wired scoffed on its November 2005 cover. Jobs was furious. “I’m sick of dealing with these stupid companies like Motorola,” he told Tony Fadell and others at one of the iPod product review meetings. “Let’s do it ourselves.” He had noticed something odd about the cell phones on

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the world. But Intel was used to making processors for machines that plugged into a wall, not ones that had to preserve battery life. So Tony Fadell argued strongly for something based on the ARM architecture, which was simpler and used less power. Apple had been an early partner with ARM, and

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. “The question is whether the twin policies of putting design in front of engineering and having a policy of supersecrecy surrounding unreleased products helped Apple,” Tony Fadell said later. “On the whole, yes, but unchecked power is a bad thing, and that’s what happened.” Had it not been the Apple iPhone

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, Tim Cook, Katie Cotton, Eddy Cue, Andrea Cunningham, John Doerr, Millard Drexler, Jennifer Egan, Al Eisenstat, Michael Eisner, Larry Ellison, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Gerard Errera, Tony Fadell, Jean-Louis Gassée, Bill Gates, Adele Goldberg, Craig Good, Austan Goolsbee, Al Gore, Andy Grove, Bill Hambrecht, Michael Hawley, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Elizabeth Holmes

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, Oct. 7, 2005; Farhad Manjoo, “Invincible Apple,” Fast Company, July 1, 2010; email from Phil Schiller. iTunes: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell. Brent Schlender, “How Big Can Apple Get,” Fortune, Feb. 21, 2005; Bill Kincaid, “The True Story of SoundJam,” http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/popup-sjstory

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–60; Knopper, 167; Lev Grossman, “How Apple Does It,” Time, Oct. 17, 2005; Markoff, xix. The iPod: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell. Steve Jobs, iPod announcement, Oct. 23, 2001; Toshiba press releases, PR Newswire, May 10, 2000, and June 4, 2001; Tekla Perry, “From Podfather to Palm

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iPod,” Wired, July 21, 2004; Tom Hormby and Dan Knight, “History of the iPod,” Low End Mac, Oct. 14, 2005. That’s It! Interviews with Tony Fadell, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs. Levy, The Perfect Thing, 17, 59–60; Knopper, 169; Leander Kahney, “Straight Dope on the IPod’s

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,” Esquire, July 2003; Steven Levy, “Not the Same Old Song,” Newsweek, May 12, 2003. Microsoft: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell, Eddy Cue. Emails from Jim Allchin, David Cole, Bill Gates, Apr. 30, 2003 (these emails later became part of an Iowa court case and Steve

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; Bill Gates, “We’re Early on the Video Thing,” Business Week, Sept. 2, 2004. Mr. Tambourine Man: Interviews with Andy Lack, Tim Cook, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, Jon Rubinstein. Ken Belson, “Infighting Left Sony behind Apple in Digital Music,” New York Times, Apr. 19, 2004; Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of

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. Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address. A Lion at Fifty: Interviews with Mike Slade, Alice Waters, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Avie Tevanian, Jony Ive, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell, George Riley, Bono, Walt Mossberg, Steven Levy, Kara Swisher. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, All Things Digital conference

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Levy, “Finally, Vista Makes Its Debut,” Newsweek, Feb. 1, 2007. CHAPTER 36: THE iPHONE An iPod That Makes Calls: Interviews with Art Levinson, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell, George Riley, Tim Cook. Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, Nov. 2005. Multi-touch: Interviews with Jony Ive, Steve Jobs

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Cook. Gorilla Glass: Interviews with Wendell Weeks, John Seeley Brown, Steve Jobs. The Design: Interviews with Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Tony Fadell. Fred Vogelstein, “The Untold Story,” Wired, Jan. 9, 2008. The Launch: Interviews with John Huey, Nicholas Negroponte. Lev Grossman, “Apple’s New Calling,” Time, Jan.

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Ive, Brian Roberts, Andy Hertzfeld. CHAPTER 38: THE iPAD You Say You Want a Revolution: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Tony Fadell, Paul Otellini. All Things Digital conference, May 30, 2003. The Launch, January 2010: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke. Brent Schlender, “Bill Gates Joins the

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, 2010; JR Raphael, “I Want Porn,” esarcasm.com, Apr. 20, 2010; Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Apr. 28, 2010. Antennagate: Design versus Engineering: Interviews with Tony Fadell, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Art Levinson, Tim Cook, Regis McKenna, Bill Campbell, James Vincent. Mark Gikas, “Why Consumer Reports Can’t Recommend the iPhone4,” Consumer

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee · 13 May 2025 · 377pp · 138,306 words

up on other projects. So Ruby looked outside for someone to lead the project and determine if it was really feasible. That led him to Tony Fadell, a brash, quick-minded entrepreneur from Detroit with an engineering mind and a knack for punchy storytelling. He’d founded three companies by the time

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his CV, detailing his niche experience in Asia working with silicon and hardware to make handheld electronics. Within days he received a phone call from Tony Fadell. Tupman, who gives off a sense of warmth in his soft-spoken English-accented speech, was living in London at the time. He agreed to

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for the first time and immediately knew he’d made the right choice to join Apple. “It was like, ‘This is so cool!’ ” he says. Tony Fadell built a team of young engineers for the iPod; their reputations would rocket within the company over the next decade, reflecting the huge success of

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these great engineers. We’ve got all this stuff for you, and we’re here to help,’ ” says a person present. The Apple visitors included Tony Fadell, Steve Zadesky, and DJ Novotney, all from PD, plus Ops negotiator Tony Blevins. Foxconn’s timing was impeccable. Apple was growing frustrated with Inventec, testing

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computer-aided design. Because it had such confidence in Apple’s future, Foxconn said it would take on this work for pennies on the dollar. Tony Fadell credits Terry Gou with understanding the value of working with Apple better than anyone. “Terry was all about the relationship. He knew he needed to

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first iPods, Jony Ive wanted to push the boundaries on other materials, first with metals and later with glass. “We wanted to machine aluminum,” says Tony Fadell. “High polish, very accurate, detailed metals—and that’s where Foxconn came in. Foxconn supplied all the metals for the Apple products, and Foxconn got

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life,’ and I was thinking, God, I hope not, right? Because that’s really a sad way to think.” CHAPTER 17 PROJECT PURPLE IN ASIA Tony Fadell could hear the footsteps behind him. Apple finally had its confidence restored after two decades of being beaten down, its near bankruptcy less than a

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October 25, 2013 (aired November 19, 2005), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plx69SIvgWI. “heavy, stomping footsteps”: Lex Fridman, “Tony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, and Nest,” episode 294, June 15, 2022, https://lexfridman.com/tony-fadell. had fled Chile: Microsoft, “Rubén Caballero: Another Adventure and Loving It!” (corporate blog), March 24, 2021, https://blogs.microsoft

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

by Ali Tamaseb · 14 Sep 2021 · 251pp · 80,831 words

Out of Silicon Valley into Denver: INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL CARLSON OF GUILD EDUCATION 8 Product A Founder Who Always Built Highly Differentiated Products: INTERVIEW WITH TONY FADELL OF NEST AND APPLE 9 Market A Founder Who Did Both Market Creation and Expansion: INTERVIEW WITH MAX LEVCHIN OF PAYPAL AND AFFIRM 10 Market

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the face of data that shows otherwise. We will hear from Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Affirm, on market creation versus expansion; from Tony Fadell, founder of Nest and the inventor of the iPod, on product differentiation; from Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of Cloudflare, on starting a company during the

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Nat Turner of Flatiron Health was keen on the application of data in “neurology, neurodegenerative disease, and cardiovascular diseases.” The most interesting response came from Tony Fadell, the co-founder of Nest. “I think it’s more important to look at the markets than spaces and industries,” he told me. Beyond Silicon

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work on risky, highly differentiated, and sometimes bizarre ideas that end up generating massive value. A FOUNDER WHO ALWAYS BUILT HIGHLY DIFFERENTIATED PRODUCTS INTERVIEW WITH TONY FADELL OF NEST AND APPLE Nest’s first product, its thermostat, is one example of a highly differentiated product. When the company began to reinvent the

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digital, programmable device designed in the 1980s—was a clunky, rectangular wall panel that required people to punch in their desired temperature each day.3 Tony Fadell, former SVP of the Apple iPod division, is known as the “father of the iPod” and coinventor of the iPhone. In 2010 he set out

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all happen. It’s just a question of when. —MARC ANDREESSEN, FOUNDER OF NETSCAPE AND ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ In 1995, General Magic, the startup company where Tony Fadell worked, built an early version of a smartphone. The hybrid telephone-computer was unlike anything the industry had seen before. But it never caught on

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investors whom I interviewed as well as their assistants and public relations people: Henrique Dubugras, Arie Belldegrun, Nat Turner, Max Mullen, Neha Narkhede, Rachel Carlson, Tony Fadell, Max Levchin, Mario Schlosser, Eric Yuan, Tom Preston-Werner, Michelle Zatlyn, Elad Gil, Keith Rabois, Alfred Lin, Peter Thiel, Carmen Collyns, Linda Barnes, CJ Jackson

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building a business. These insightful stories help break down bias along the startup journey, a great guide I wish I had earlier in my career.” —Tony Fadell, Future Shape principal, Nest founder, iPod inventor, and iPhone co-inventor “Ali Tamaseb offers an extraordinary look at the success and failure of startups coupled

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words

not one thing. You have layers. You have the engineers and you have the bankers. But the people who are active ingredients, the troublemakers, the Tony Fadells, the Steve Jobses—they’re really lusting for fame. They want to be relevant, they want to be recognized, they want to be famous, and

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buzz. All the buzz. It was where the pixie dust was. It was where you wanted to work if you were cool and smart. Tony Fadell: I am looking all over for General Magic, and I find out that their office is in Mountain View in this high-rise, and so

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up at me with these bloodshot eyes, like, “Leave us alone, kid.” Michael Stern: But Tony just keeps pestering people until they hire him. Tony Fadell: I was humbled in the first ten minutes of being there, I was like, Oh my God, this is not like Michigan, these are the

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and got his first gig to do stuff. General Magic was Broadway, and Andy and Bill gave this kid from the Midwest somewhere a break. Tony Fadell: Ultimately, they gave me the job, and I was the lowest guy on the totem pole. I came in and I was working with

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water weapons. He would start battles with water guns and pistols, and it was really fun. Steve Perlman: So much fun! But too much fun. Tony Fadell: Remember Gak, or Slime, the green slime? We would leave it on stuff, and we had all kinds of practical jokes on each other.

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stuff. There was just always some little joke going on. It was just, we spent all of our time there. Every night was late night. Tony Fadell: We were known to work really late. Eleven or twelve, even four in the morning. It just depended. So this was about ten or

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thought it would be really funny if we went and shot Gak so it splattered on the outside window. We’d watch it drool down. Tony Fadell: So who was it? I think Perlman and Andy were holding it on either end, and because earlier in the day we had lined

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it up, I was like, I am really going to pull this thing back. Steve Jarrett: Tony’s really strong. Tony Fadell: Everyone is cheering me on: “Go, go, Tony!” So I am pulling it back and pulling it back, and they are like, “Go!” and

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Giannandrea: The green slime went straight at the window and then the window just shattered—fell out of the building. And we were like, “Ooops.” Tony Fadell: I just looked, and my whole life flashed before my eyes. I am like, Oh fuck, I am going to get fired, what am

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describe the design of the new hardware—the new chips and the entire layout of the next generation of the hardware that we’re creating. Tony Fadell: Japan was it for electronics in the early nineties. Even Apple could not make small stuff back then. And Mitsubishi Electric was a partner

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go into this meeting and Tony gets up and on the overhead projector, puts down a slide, and he starts to walk through the diagram. Tony Fadell: I am going through the block diagram, explaining it, and they were all, “Oh, yes, that is great, wonderful.” Steve Jarrett: And so, Tony

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of them jumps up and grabs the telephone that’s in the room and yells down the phone. They ask us to stop and wait. Tony Fadell: Just then the boss, Nagasawa-san, comes into the room and sees this activity. And as this happens, the loudspeaker goes, “Beep beep beep,”

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head on the table. I said, “Is everything okay?” The guy who organized the meeting says, “You have just obsoleted Kato-san’s division.” Tony Fadell: So while the whole of Mitsubishi Electric is being evacuated, the CEO and that team and us stay there the whole afternoon and we sat

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It was like the Apollo Project. Steve Jarrett: The user interface was really visionary, too. It was groundbreaking. It was based on the real world. Tony Fadell: Each thing was a mock-up of the real world, and you would interact with those things like you would interact with the real world

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: You started at a picture of a desk and you could drag things around on the desk and you tap on things to open them. Tony Fadell: It was skeuomorphic—like file cabinets to put your things in, a desk to write on… Steve Jarrett: And then you could leave the

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play online with opponents. No one had ever done it before! Again, this was something Tony just kind of whipped out in a day. Tony Fadell: And you would go out the door and you could go down the street and go to a shop which would be a virtual shop

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on these mobile devices that we were creating. He created a turn-based chess game that was easily the most popular game on our platform. Tony Fadell: It was pretty neat, you know? Michael Stern: So we were demonstrating all this stuff. Meanwhile Marc is talking up the vision of the

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-gross-margin stuff. It might as well be a clothing store. It took eighteen months for Apple to get back on its feet. Meanwhile, Tony Fadell, the young engineer who had cut his teeth at General Magic, was trying to get his own company off the ground. The idea was to

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moving forward. Essentially he was founding a company, and he wanted to go investigate the hardware and the software that could live around digital media. Tony Fadell: Hardware plus software plus services: General Magic was the first link that I ever saw like that. That influenced me for everything I did in

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a square. It was a design that we had scaled down to a small portable player, and up to a nice little cube stereo system. Tony Fadell: I never went off to the internet. When everyone went off to the internet I stayed doing devices. Yves Béhar: We had made a

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lot of progress: We had a great product lineup, we had some hardware designed, we had some mock-ups, the technology was aligning… Tony Fadell: And then the internet crunch happened. Yves Béhar: Just as it was for everyone else, it was impossible to find money to fund the next

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round for the company. Tony Fadell: No one wanted to fund it. They were like, “You are crazy, you should only be doing software, hardware is dead,” blah blah blah.

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you always had to double-check with Fred, and Fred said, “The check is good,” and so we started assembling a team to do it. Tony Fadell: So I am getting on a ski lift in Vail, and I get this call: “Hi, this is Jon Rubinstein from Apple,” blah blah

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I need some help on.” I didn’t tell him what it was but I said, “It’s a small consumer form-factor product.” Tony Fadell: I thought they wanted me to restart Newton or something. So I did not know what it was and they would not tell me. Then

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and it was, “Here’s what we’ve been looking at, and so now go thrash out what’s available to make all this happen.” Tony Fadell: I said, “Okay,” and then I worked nights, weekends, all day, and I let my start-up company just run and I went off

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Rubinstein: There was a key meeting. It’s me and Phil Schiller and Jony—there was a group of us, but Tony is the lead. Tony Fadell: Steve comes in the room, does not say a word, takes the checklist, throws it on the desk, and gives the vision for it.

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Ellison: He was obsessive about making an MP3 player easy to use, and affordable, and beautiful… all the things you’d think Sony would do. Tony Fadell: Then we flip to the next page of the checklist, and there was something about Sony. “And Sony, yes they are number one, but

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software company, and Sony is not.” Jon Rubinstein: We knew that someone was going to replace the Walkman. Either we were, or they were. Tony Fadell: And he would just skip around, so it was just this back-and-forth; he was riding the tide of momentum. Larry Ellison: Apple is

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software company, but Sony was a hardware company. You can kill a hardware company, because most hardware products, like an iPod, are 95 percent software. Tony Fadell: And then at the end I had all these little mock-ups. I had bought these modern-day calculators and all the MP3 players, tore

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order you present them in. Here’s how you present it so that when we come to the end, we get the right answer. Right?” Tony Fadell: For the final option, which a bunch of us thought was the best option, I made a Styrofoam model, with laser printouts of what

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Olufsen never patented, by the way, and I remember being there going, “You’re right, this is cool, this is a really cool user interface.” Tony Fadell: I looked at it and figured out in my brain how they did it. I was like, “Sure. We can add that.” And Steve is

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, but… Guy Bar-Nahum: Tony was really put on the spot, and he really didn’t know what to do; he kind of hesitated. Tony Fadell: I am like, Wait a second! I have a company and there are people over there working on this other thing. How am I going

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“I can’t do it myself—I need a full company behind me to actually make it.” Was it a discussion with Steve? Some reassurance? Tony Fadell: I had a very pointed conversation with Steve, going, “Look, let me tell you, I was at General Magic and I watched them come

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was our chance to really make a difference. Jon Rubinstein: Our demographics were terrible, and we hoped the iPod would bring more younger people in. Tony Fadell: Now, everything is half-truths so I was like, Okay, Steve is saying the right things but will he really do it? Then in the

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phone-of-the-future project has the proper urgency, Jobs divides Purple into two groups—and pits them against each other. P1 is quarterbacked by Tony Fadell, the hardware hero who had changed Apple’s fortunes with the iPod. P2 is led by Scott Forstall, a software wiz from Apple’s Macintosh

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to a Macintosh. Scott Forstall: We were asking ourselves, “Could we use the technology that we were prototyping for this tablet to build a phone?” Tony Fadell: Mobile phones were coming on strong… Nitin Ganatra: But all of the technical advancements around phones were happening somewhere other than Silicon Valley. All the

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. So of course the group that is going to develop the next thing that fits in your pocket is going to be the iPod group. Tony Fadell: So first it was the iPod, then it was the iPod with music syncing, then it became the iPod with music and photo syncing,

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it a phone. Nitin Ganatra: In early 2005 there was a meeting. Steve Jobs did most of the talking. Phil Schiller was there, and Tony Fadell, and then a lot of leadership from the Purple side, and Jon Rubinstein as well. So we all pile into this room, and Steve starts

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something that’s going to bridge between now and when we can actually ship Purple. That is when the designations P1 and P2 were created. Tony Fadell: P1 was the iPod plus phone, the iPod-phone. It had a small screen and a wheel and a cell phone built into it.

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doing and show it to Steve. And Steve would say, “This is shit, this is shit, this is shit, this is good, fix that.” Tony Fadell: It was about four or five months of research, but halfway through everybody knew it wasn’t working. But Steve didn’t want us to

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the actual hardware, but Forstall had won the software war, and so now Tony was building Forstall’s hardware—which chapped him to no end. Tony Fadell: The confidentiality started driving a wedge between the teams. And then it was used as a tool… Matt Rogers: I was part of the hardware

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emulate what works, right? And so everyone started screaming at each other. It became just like the thing to do: Fly off the fucking handle. Tony Fadell: It became, “Your teams can’t see the apps, your team can’t touch any of this stuff.” We had to create a whole

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like blue buttons on a red background. It was just awful to look at. We did it on purpose. It was supposed to be hideous. Tony Fadell: Then Steve and Scott would say, “You can’t even show the devices to your people.” And my engineers were saying, “We need to

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. Andy Grignon: Everything had code names, so P2 was the program name, and M68 was the name of the actual hardware, the actual thing. Tony Fadell: The original iPod was called P68, and we were in the M-series now, so I thought, Let’s just name it M68, because hopefully

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And that was the end of Tony—onstage. Nitin Ganatra: During the Macworld demo in front of the whole entire world, Steve went and deleted Tony Fadell’s name from the list of favorites within that phone app. Andy Grignon: He joked about it, like, “Let’s say there’s somebody

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random things and Tony just had to take it. And by this point Forstall and Tony had developed a full-on feud with each other. Tony Fadell: That demo script was created by Scott Forstall. Nitin Ganatra: Now you could innocently look at it as, “Look, I can add things to

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in the business of betting on these people, and the good ones make money at it. Then it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling organism. Tony Fadell: That’s going to be Silicon Valley’s legacy: It has cast a mold, cast the die, for this ever-evolving way of taking

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that in the future, there are going to be more computers, they’re going to be faster, and they’re going to do more things. Tony Fadell: You’re going to see every single industry, no matter how behind the times they are, adopting technology—deep technology. Scott Hassan: Eventually computers are

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going to do everything. I don’t think anything is safe. Nothing. Tony Fadell: Change is going to be continual, and today is the slowest day society will ever move. Kristina Woolsey: Technology is changing fundamental things. It changes

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. Scott Hassan: Never ever try to compete with a computer on doing something, because if you don’t lose today, you’ll lose tomorrow. Tony Fadell: Tomorrow will get faster and every year after it’s only going to continue to get faster in terms of the amount of change. That

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hybrid systems that are kind of biological- and computer-like, and they’re going to be there to make humans more effective at whatever… Tony Fadell: So then after that I think it’s really going to be how we coevolve with AI. How do we as humans coevolve with the

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’s best chess player on the planet is not an AI, it’s not a human, it’s a centaur, it’s a team. Tony Fadell: And so the chess champions have now coevolved with the technology and they’ve gotten smarter and better. Too many times do we get stuck

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Right now humans are still in control, and I’ve never heard anyone talk like we’re going to be out of control very soon. Tony Fadell: And then I think there’s going to be another big split when we decide that biological means locomotion, or biological means manipulation. Because robots

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famous 1968 demo. In 1970 he jumped ship to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he developed a new version of Engelbart’s system. Tony Fadell is another alumnus of General Magic, the before-its-time smartphone company. After Magic failed Fadell turned to music and came up with the essential

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landed an internship at Apple right out of school, and by virtue of his hard work on the iPod team quickly became the protégé of Tony Fadell—the “podfather.” The two eventually left Apple and started a company together. Hilary Rosen was a longtime employee of the Recording Industry Association of

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Leander Kahney · 14 Nov 2013 · 363pp · 94,139 words

group, was already busy with other products. As was usual with such exploratory, blue-sky projects, Apple went looking for an outside consultant. Someone recommended Tony Fadell, a designer/engineer who specialized in handheld hardware and digital audio. Fadell had worked for General Magic, an Apple spinoff, and developed PDAs for Philips

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to remember, P-68 came to be known among insiders as “Project Dulcimer.” Jobs had green-lighted it, but one main player on the project, Tony Fadell, not only didn’t work at Apple, he didn’t particularly want to. Fadell pitched Rubinstein on awarding the job to his start-up on

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, Apple issued a press release that framed Rubinstein’s exit as a long-deserved retirement. He was replaced as head of the iPod division by Tony Fadell.28 Rubinstein would spend some time building a house in Mexico before later becoming CEO of Palm and developing a rival to the iPhone. Speaking

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fit in your pocket, but give it all the same power that we were looking at giving to the tablet?’”5 After the meeting, Jobs, Tony Fadell, Jon Rubinstein and Phil Schiller went over to Jony’s studio to see a demo of the 035 prototype. They were impressed by Jony’s

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thirty million, according to research firm Canalys.6 At Apple HQ, some of the faces who initiated this growth were also changing. In November 2008, Tony Fadell had stepped down as senior vice president of the iPod division, the job he took over from Rubinstein. According to an Apple press release, Fadell

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?v=HegU77X6I2A 8. “On the verge,” The Verge, April 29, 2012, video http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2987892/on-the-verge-episode-005-tony-fadell-and-chris-grant. 9. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle Edition. 10. Scott Forstall testimony at Apple v. Samsung trial. 11. Apple v. Samsung trial, deposition of

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution

by Fred Vogelstein · 12 Nov 2013 · 275pp · 84,418 words

music-listening applications in their phones. And companies such as Amazon, Walmart, and Yahoo! were beginning to sell downloadable music. Executives such as iPod boss Tony Fadell worried that if consumers suddenly gave up their iPods for music phones, Apple’s business—only five years removed from its flirt with bankruptcy—would

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to contend with in early 2007. To get the iPhone built, Jobs had pitted two of his star executives against each other—Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell—to see who could come up with the best product. The fallout from that two-year fight was now rippling through the corporation. It had

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, including Fadell and Forstall. “So there’s this reunion of the original Mac guys, and it’s really cool. And then Steve goes up to Tony [Fadell] and proceeds to go over in a corner of the store and talk to him for an hour and ignore Forstall just to fuck with

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Apple,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 11/12/2011; Jessica Lessin, “An Apple Exit over Maps,” Wall Street Journal, 10/29/2012. Fadell is not shy: Leo Kelion, “Tony Fadell: From iPod father to thermostat start-up,” BBC News, 11/29/2012. Fadell was truly: Steven Levy, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader

by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli · 24 Mar 2015 · 464pp · 155,696 words

earnest on some sort of portable audio device around the Toshiba micro-drive. In March he put an engineer he’d hired from Philips NV, Tony Fadell, in charge of the group. Fadell, an energetic entrepreneur with the build of a college wrestler and the intensity of a high school football coach

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, for one simple reason: most people at Apple didn’t like the idea of collaborating with other companies. The iPod hardware team, especially, led by Tony Fadell, couldn’t stomach the notion of ceding the development of what they had started to call “musicphones” to the traditional handset industry. And the more

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phones. And he wanted to hear what the iPod guys thought about multi-touch, since they’d already built the two musicphone prototypes. He asked Tony Fadell to come check out the Jumbotron, since he had the hardware engineering expertise to judge what it might take to build such a technology into

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the greatest physical manifestation of Steve and Jony’s remarkable creative friendship. The iPhone was the product of the efforts of thousands of people, from Tony Fadell and Greg Christie to the workers in the Foxconn factories in China. The inventions and engineering breakthroughs necessary to make it work are too numerous

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form, solidly contributing and fully engaged, or they would find themselves subtly marginalized by Steve. His relationships with Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Fred Anderson, and Tony Fadell, among others, demonstrated how quickly Steve could revoke the special insider status that was his to grant. Anderson was the first to leave the executive

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the iPod and other mobile devices had become Apple’s growth engines. Steve saw Avie and Ruby as, first and foremost, “old-time” computer guys. Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall were early members of the post-PC generation, and seemed destined to be the key leaders of the iPhone hardware and software

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role. He also had started clashing with Ive, who had once reported to him but now reported directly to Steve. And he couldn’t stand Tony Fadell, the lead engineer for the iPod. Ruby and Fadell would resent one another for years, long after they’d each left Apple, each claiming responsibility

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returned in 1997. Its management team was a veteran group that had been remarkably stable over the years. Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Fred Anderson, and Tony Fadell were notable departures, but others remained with institutional memory and remarkable chops. Most important of all, the company had shown an astounding capacity to conceive

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of this chapter. Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, most of the direct quotations in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Tony Fadell on May 1, 2014; Eddy Cue on April 29, 2014; Jony Ive on June 10, 2014; Tim Cook on April 30, 2014; and Jon Rubinstein

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in this chapter were drawn from interviews with Jim Collins on April 15, 2014; Jony Ive on May 6, 2014, and on June 10, 2014; Tony Fadell on May 1, 2014; Laurene Powell Jobs on October 14, 2013; Tim Cook on April 30, 2014; and Eddy Cue on April 29, 2014. Online

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, senior vice president of design Jony Ive, senior vice president of Internet software and services Eddy Cue, vice president of corporate communications Katie Cotton, and Tony Fadell, the founder of Nest Labs, which is now a subsidiary of Google. We also relied upon Apple press releases and SEC filings and court records