iPad came before the iPhone

Awesome Engadget live blog covering an Interview with Steve Jobs at D8. It just ended. I found this little nugget very interesting:

Steve: And same thing on the tablet. I remember telling you I thought handwriting was the slowest input method ever. We re-imagined the tablet, we didn’t do what MSFT did. They had a totally different idea than us. And that drove everything. There tablet was based on a PC. It had the battery life, the weight, it needed a cursor like a PC. But the minute you throw a stylus out, you have the precision of a finger, you can’t use a PC OS. You have to create it from scratch.

Walt: So when you built this OS, you did it in a phone. Why? Why not a tablet first.

Steve: I’ll tell you. Actually. It started on a tablet first.

Steve: I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on. I asked our people about it. And six months later they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, “my god, we can build a phone with this” and we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone.

Makes a lot of sense actually, especially when the market was probably not ready for the iPad then and adoption of the OS would be a lot quicker on the iPhone. Also if there is any doubt, it looks like Steve is the man behind all the product propositions and solutions at Apple.

Via Engadget.