Fred Vogelstein Profiles the iPhone

Fred Vogelstein's piece in Wired about the story behind the iPhone is distracting me from my RSS sifting this morning, but he's dug up some really interesting nuggets about the development and impact of the device (even if those details remain unconfirmed by Apple or AT&T).

For instance!

• "Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep." There ought to be a name for that, like "Take this nap and shove it."

• "Meanwhile, about 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T's rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier's volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco." I enjoy any anecdote that highlights the literal limitations of networks, making it easier to think of them as something with finite resources, not nebulous services without limit.

• "Now, in the pursuit of an Apple-like contract, every manufacturer is racing to create a phone that consumers will love, instead of one that the carriers approve of."

• "Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes."

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry [Wired]