The very first iPhone did not have copy/paste due to time constraints

Do you know Ken Kocienda  ? If not, it’s normal: this former Apple employee left the company in 2017, on the eve of the release of the iPhone 8. He will have officiated there for more than fifteen years as head of the interface and resulting user experience. Among the achievements to his credit, we find in particular the software of the very first mobile presented by the Apple brand.

If it had been praised by critics for its technical advances, it was nonetheless exempt from certain essentials of today such as the App Store open to third-party developers or the simple copy/paste shortcut. In a new interview , Kocienda comes back to the creation of this feature that we now all use every day.

Late as usual

In fact, copy/paste was indeed already considered even before the release of the very first generation of iPhone . Unfortunately, its creation took a long time so the tool was simply not ready for the 2007 keynote. Eventually, an operating system update will be the solution on the iPhone 3GS which will arrive one little later.

Its technical sheet offered a 3.5-inch LCD screen with a definition of 320 by 480 pixels, a Samsung ARM Cortex-A8 chip, a PowerVR SGX535 graphics card and only 256 MB of RAM. The success will be immediate and international and will quickly become Apple’s first revenue model, ahead of services and Macs today.

A roadmap that is sometimes difficult to follow

This wo n’t be the only time Apple has struggled to meet the deadlines imposed by its conferences with great fanfare. At the moment, it is rumored, for example, that the Californian company’s VR headset is still too energy-intensive to hope for commercialization in time. We will not have discovered the device during WWDC 2022. The Apple Car, too, has experienced serious internal slowdowns.

We can also cite the case of the AirPower wireless charger , which will indeed have been unveiled to the public but which would have finally suffered from overheating problems blocking the viability of the prototype.