Apple introduced the first iPhone 15 years ago, and a lot has changed since then. We are now discussing rumors about the next iPhone with 8K video and a new display, but it’s hard to believe that once the iPhone didn’t even have copy and paste options. Now former software engineer and designer Ken Cosienda has revealed details about why the first iPhone did not have such features.
Kosienda, who joined Apple in 2001, was one of the key engineers behind the iPhone. Prior to working on the iPhone, Cosienda was on the team that created Apple’s Safari web browser – which gave him an important role in the development of Apple’s first smartphone.
Now that the iPhone is approaching its 15th anniversary on the market, the former Apple engineer decided to share some interesting stories about how Apple created the first iPhone. One of them includes details about why the company decided to deliver its first smartphone without copy and paste options.
There was no time for that.
Kocienda’s brief and ridiculous explanation is that Apple’s engineers didn’t have time to implement copying and pasting the first iPhone. But, of course, the story goes beyond that.
According to him, the team has already been busy creating the iPhone’s virtual keyboard and its auto-correction system. After the iPhone was released, Kocienda and his team finally decided to work on copy and paste options, but it still took some time before the feature was ready for users.
The engineer explains that he came up with the idea of a “magnifying glass with magnifying text” to inform users exactly where they are pointing the text cursor, which is crucial for copying and pasting. However, even with this classic virtual magnifier, the cursor eventually moved between characters after the user lifted his finger off the screen due to natural flicker.
Kocienda had to develop a “touch history diary” just for editing text. In this way, after removing the finger from the screen, the system automatically detects the position of the user’s finger milliseconds after the last touch, so that the cursor stays where the user really wanted it.
Another interesting detail about the iPhone’s text input system is that, according to the former Apple engineer, all stylized text was originally based on WebKit. This means that every time an application used a custom font, it basically displayed a small web page to display the text. When text fields were not in edit mode, they displayed a static image of their contents – probably to save CPU, RAM and battery.
Copy and paste options were introduced as part of iPhone OS 3.0 in 2009, which was pre-installed by default on the iPhone 3GS. Apple even created a TV commercial highlighting the new feature at the time.
More goodies for the first iPhone
Kocienda also shared some other goodies about developing the first iPhone. For example, the iPhone lacked real multitasking, not only because of its low RAM, but also because of its lack of virtual memory. Engineers had to create a system known as “jetsam” to force the iPhone to run one application at a time, automatically terminating other background processes to avoid performance issues.
Because touchscreen devices weren’t exactly popular and lacked tactile feedback, the iPhone team implemented a virtual area that was larger than the buttons shown on the interface. As such, iPhone recognizes touches even when the user doesn’t touch the screen button exactly.
This system was also important for the automatic keyboard correction feature, as it identified the letters around the one that the user touched to replace the misspelled word with the correct one.
Kosienda also explains that consumers’ perceptions of where they touch their fingers are different from where they actually touch their fingers, and the system had to be prepared for that.
The curvature of your fingers makes you think you’re touching higher than the screen than you are. So the touches are distorted to account for this. That’s why – to this day – it’s hard to point taps when you hold your phone upside down. pic.twitter.com/xl8YaxvKKu
– Ken Kocienda (@kocienda) June 19, 2022
Those interested in learning more about the iPhone development process should definitely read Kosienda’s book, Creative Selection: Inside the Apple Design Process in the Golden Age of Steve Jobs.
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