Upvoted you since you probably didn’t know and I didn’t want to see you buried for not knowing something, but Jobs did talk about how iPhones were a spin-off from an internal tablet project. At some point Apple realized that the tech they were developing for tablets would also work really well in a phone, and they shifted priorities to making a phone first.
As I understand it, a semi regular dinner guest that worked at Microsoft, the husband of his wife’s friend or something like that, came around with a Windows tablet PC after they hit the market and was talking about how great it was and Apple didn’t have anything like this. Jobs saw it for the crap it was (touchscreen Windows was pretty bad back then) and to shut this guy up, put together a team at Apple to work on developing tablets. This was the project that would eventually spawn iPhones and later, iPads.
As I understand it, a semi regular dinner guest that worked at Microsoft, the husband of his wife’s friend or something like that, came around with a Windows tablet PC after they hit the market and was talking about how great it was and Apple didn’t have anything like this. Jobs saw it for the crap it was (touchscreen Windows was pretty bad back then) and to shut this guy up, put together a team at Apple to work on developing tablets. This was the project that would eventually spawn iPhones and later, iPads.