The original iPhone, what a marvelous device it was for about a year. In fact it was really a mass produced prototype.
A few years ago, in 2005 actually, I was picking grapes and teaching wine making to a friend that works at Apple. He had been hired when the company he was working at was bought by Apple. This is known as an aqui-hire. Prior to the purchase he was a programmer on what was a web based calendaring system for Mac users.... we used to call it "iCal", now its Calendar and it syncs seamlessly across all Apple devices.
While we were picking grapes, I asked what he was up to at Apple. He responded that he was programming an OSX micro kernel OS. To almost anyone else, it would have just slipped by un-noticed. But I know a bit about compiled operating systems and what a micro kernel would be used for.
I responded, "Oh wow, you're writing the iPhone OS!"
He was quite shocked by the remark and spent so much time denying that was what he was working on... that it left no doubt.
Mixed in with the denials were things like, "iPhone... I don't know about that... how did you hear about it?" and later "where did you hear about the iPhone?"
You see, it's really hard to deny something and then give credence to the denial by foraging for its point of origin.
I explained the only reason to build a micro OS was to use it on a portable device that had memory constraints. He said it might be used for a laptop. I replied that hard drive capacity would not be a restraint obligating a micro kernel OS.
I even knew the name of the company that Apple had contracted with to help on the engineering and that was the moment where he dropped the pretense.
Yes, Apple is secretive and they expect their employees to abide the secrecy. To this day, if I send an email to his work email address and there are any words that can be sniffed out as having to do with an Apple product... that email doesn't arrive.
If I send him a message at home and his work is in any way mentioned in it, I don't get response.
But I have learned a number of things "in person".
The original 2g phone, from what I can infer wasn't the phone Apple had originally wanted to produce and sell. There were engineering aspects that weren't "clean" enough. I was given the impression, the 2G iPhone was kicked through engineering sooner than wanted so Apple could get something in end users hands before Google's Android OS became the slightest bit viable. At that time.. early 2007 Google had already publicly begun the Android OS and their intent was to use the OS to serve Google ads on an interstitial basis on Android phones...
Study of the iPhone 2G compared to later models would seem to show it wasn't fully baked by the time it was kicked out the door. Remember, it was first revealed in January of 2007, and proclaimed it would be ready to ship in June. They kept to the deadline.
Things I never liked about the 2G.
1) The upper glass/digitizer and LCD screen were are laminated together obligating the owner to spend quite a bit getting merely a cracked upper glass replaced. I believe, the only way for Apple to get the Touch interface working at the level they needed... so your finger lined up over the digitizer and LCD exactly enough that the Operating System would see "finger and D" instead of "finger and S" was by gluing them perfectly over one another.
2) The battery was soldered in. Look, I firmly believe Apple expected the original iPhone to be used at most two years. Even internally... they labeled the 3G (according to software releases) as version 1. The Li-Po battery in the iPhone used the way people do with cell phones (leave them charging all night) had at best a useful life of two years. By hard soldering them in, they set the circumstance to obligate replacement. They *had* been making monolithic devices without user replaceable batteries for years, but this was a degree harder still to replace.
3) The 2G relied on two small wires with snap down fittings to make the antenna connection for the telephone and the WiFi connection. Though they used an industry standard for the ends, about half way through the manufacturing they started to cover the connection over with a hard silicone seal making it impossible to take off the antenna connections without destroying them... and typically that meant destroying the logic board female or jack connection. I'll never be convinced the reason for that was anything but to make sure the phones were retired early.
Okay, let's say you still have a 2g and want me to work on it..... I won't do it... even for money. What should you do?
Anyone that knows me would say three things about me.. I'm pretty smart, I can fix anything but a rainy day and I have unfaltering truth that I give people constantly.
Here it is... I won't repair the 2G anymore because that phone is such a bad implementation of what an iPhone or any handset needs to be these days.
The last time I worked on one at all, was 2013, and it was a data recovery mission for someone in Alaska that had every important life photo they had taken on it and never sync'd the phone. The phone wouldn't work. What they had done actually is use a cheap wall adapter that failed and it destroyed the docking to logic board connection. I was able to replace the part and retrieve all the data from the handset.
In one other case, in 2014, some idiot with an interest in steam punk appearance wanted to have and use one. Of course he didn't realize the 2g network it worked on had already been down in California.
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