Input Interview With Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, Key Members of Original iPad Team

Input:

Two people who’ve known the iPad longer than anyone are Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, the married founders of the mysterious new tech start up Humane, who met while working at Apple on the iPad and related projects. For the tenth anniversary of the iPad, Input talked to them about its strange development, its biggest feature flops, and how it has changed the world. […]

Bongiorno: I joined in 2008, actually, right after they shipped the first phone. I joined immediately after that and started as a project manager on the iPhone. There was a very small team back then; we sat kind of in one hallway. [The phone] was definitely a startup within Apple and I was brought on board because the project manager that was working there really didn’t like working with designers and really didn’t like working at the higher levels of the stack. She preferred kind of working at a lower level; the core operating system and the kernel and things like that.

Then very quickly after that, they told me that the real reason they had to hire me was because Steve had this pet project that he was really excited about and they needed somebody to lead that effort because the team really needed to remain focused on development of iPhone. They needed to kind of spin up a startup within a startup that would be a small team to build this new project codenamed K48.

Good interview. Can’t wait to see what Humane is doing.

★ Tuesday, 28 January 2020