In its February issue, Wired promises "The Untold Story" of the iPhone. But as typical for the magazine, they instead deliver a rehash of things you mostly already know, spread over 3,336 lavish words. Here, instead, are 378 words, in bullet points, containing the truly juicy tidbits Wired writer Fred Vogelstein was able to turn up. My favorite? That when Steve Jobs gets really mad, he doesn't scream. He stares.

  • In the fall of 2006, in Apple's boardroom, the prototype flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly. Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet." The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums.
  • For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.
  • Just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show wireless boss Stan Sigman. Sigman, uncharacteristically effusive, called the iPhone "the best device I have ever seen."
  • 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.
  • In February 2005, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.
  • At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down.
  • Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
  • Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2.
  • Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter.
  • 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.
  • By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.