SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Apple took great pains to make its first iPhone as simple as possible, a company engineer told a court here, as Apple sought to add weight to its patent infringement suit against Samsung.
A key argument for Apple throughout its various trials involving Samsung is that Apple took many risks when making the iPhone, and that its innovations should be protected. It took the company about three years to make its first device, Greg Christie, an Apple vice president who worked on the first iPhone, testified Friday. Part of the reason it took so long was that engineers took the time to make tweaks and develop features that tech novices could understand. Making things simple isn't easy, Christie said.
"One of the biggest challenges is that we need to sell products to people who don't do what we do for a living," Christie, one of the inventors of the slide-to-unlock iPhone feature, said. When designing products, Apple keeps in mind that it wants "normal people -- people with better things to do with their lives than learn how a computer might work -- to use the product as well as we can."
Almost two years after Apple and Samsung faced off in a messy patent dispute, the smartphone and tablet rivals have returned to the same San Jose, Calif., courtroom to argue once again over patents before federal Judge Lucy Koh. Apple is arguing that Samsung infringed on five of its patents for the iPhone, its biggest moneymaker, and that Apple is due $2 billion for that infringement. Samsung wants about $7 million from Apple for infringing two of its software patents.
While the companies are asking for damages, the case is about more than money. What's really at stake is the market for mobile devices. Apple now gets two-thirds of it sales from the iPhone and iPad, South Korea-based Samsung is the world's largest maker of smartphones, and both want to keep dominating the market. So far, Apple is ahead when it comes to litigation in the US. Samsung has been ordered to pay the company about $930 million in damages.
Christie, the second witness to testify for Apple in this trial, after marketing chief Phil Schiller, walked the jury on Friday through the process of developing the first iPhone in the mid-2000s. Much of his time on the stand was spent emphasizing Apple's efforts to make the device easy to use. According to various surveys Apple conducted -- and that were made available as court exhibits -- ease of use is the most important factor for smartphone buyers.
Christie worked on the "human interface" team at Apple, primarily responsible for the Mac OS X operating system. In 2004, Scott Forstall, leader of the Macintosh group, came into Christie's office to ask him, "how would you like to do a phone?" Christie and his team got to work on the device in their spare time away from working on the desktop operating system. In the early days, meetings were held in a windowless, "dark, dirty little room" reserved for meetings with then-CEO Steve Jobs. It had special security, including a numerical code to enter.
The team, which specialized in user interface, held regular meetings with Jobs every couple of weeks or so where it would show a single feature demo, such as the phone's dialing feature. After the Macworld conference in early 2005, Jobs got angry with the team's lack of progress. He gave the team two weeks to "put together an end-to-end story" and full demo, or the project would be reassigned to a different group of engineers.
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