Science & Tech

Steve Jobs Did Not Invent The iPhone, Says Pelosi

Published on: June 9, 2016 at 2:25 PM
By Caroline Diana

This might come as a shock to Apple loyalists, but a U.S. politician has made a statement that neither Steve Jobs nor the Apple team invented the iconic iPhone.

Hailed as the innovator and inventor among the tech community, Apple founder Jobs is regarded as the father of entrepreneurship and a man who changed the world. However, statements made by Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority leader (D., Calif.), have brought certain things to light.

At a Democratic National Convention Platform hearing in Washington, D.C, on Thursday, Pelosi said that it was the federal government that created the iPhone and not Apple or Steve Jobs, Free Beacon reported.

During her speech, Pelosi asked the audience, “Anybody here have a smartphone?”

Holding up her own iPhone, she said, “In this smartphone, almost everything came from federal investments in research.”

According to Free Beacon , Pelosi also listed out government’s contribution to research that resulted in iPhone’s various components and functionalities.

“The list goes on and on. If you want to learn more, look at the Association for the Advancement of Science in America, and they have the full list,” Pelosi said.

“They say Steve Jobs did a good idea designing it and putting it together. Federal research invented it,” Pelosi added, reiterating the fact that Jobs did not come up with his own ideas for the Apple iPhone.

Speaking of original ideas and conceptualization, Pelosi is not the only one to discredit Steve Jobs.

Apple’s chief industrial designer Jonathan Ive had remarked that Jobs is notorious for stealing ideas.

In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Ive was portrayed as an artist with a “sensitive temperament.”

Like many other Apple employees, Ive did get upset when Steve Jobs took credit for the ideas he had not conceptualized.

“He [Jobs] will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, ‘That’s no good. That’s not very good. I like that one. And later I will be sitting in the audience and he will be talking about it as if it was his idea. I pay maniacal attention to where an idea comes from, and I even keep notebooks filled with my ideas. So it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs,” Ive told Isaacson during the interview for Steve Jobs’ biography, according to CNET .

Good artists copy, great artists steal — this has been Jobs’ ideology while creating products for Apple.

In an interview with Triumph of the Nerds , a 1996 British/American television documentary, produced by John Go Productions and Oregon Public Broadcasting for Channel 4 and PBS, Jobs said, “Picasso had a saying he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

A year before his remark about “shamelessly stealing great ideas,” Jobs talked about the role that artistry plays in product development in an interview with Smithsonian .

“I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight so they can get some of the advantage of that insight that makes them feel a certain way or allows them to do a certain thing. I think that a lot of the folks on the Macintosh team were capable of doing that and did exactly that,” Jobs told Smithsonian .

Perhaps, in Jobs’ perspective, great ideas are free. What matters is what you do with those ideas. That’s how the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad came into being.

[Photo by Paul Sakuma/AP Images]

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