Daring Fireball has been digging into the saga of Tony Fadell, the “Father of the iPod” who’s left Apple, potentially to be replaced by Mark Papermaster (if they can get around IBM’s lawyers, that is).

What’s been turned up?

The iPhone’s software is overseen by Scott Forstall (Senior Vice President, iPhone Software), and, at a technical level, Bertrand Serlet (Senior Vice President, Software Engineering). There is no such division between hardware and software with the traditional (pre-Touch) iPods. The story I’ve heard is that at the outset of Apple’s iPhone initiative, there was a heated debate within Apple as to what OS should be used. Forstall and Serlet pushed for using OS X. Fadell (and, according to one source, former Apple executive Steve Sakoman) pushed for using something else.1 Obviously, Forstall and Serlet won this debate, and, hyperbolic though it may sound, it may prove to be the single best early design decision in the entire history of the company. It seems hard to imagine the iPhone any other way now, but at the outset it was not a foregone conclusion that a stripped down and revamped version of OS X would work for a mobile phone.

And the OS Fadell is rumored to have wanted to use instead?

Linux.

Needless to say, harnessing the already tremendous effort and technology behind OS X for their mobile wireless platform seems wicked-obvious in hindsight, as is avoiding the fragmentation of resources and focus that introducing a third OS (counting the already embedded iPod OS) would entail. However, the choice to go with OS X seems to have marginalized Fadell, taking him from the man behind Apple’s music success, to the man behind the times on Apple’s next great success, the iPhone.

And, hey, Linux eventually found a home on Android anyway!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

The iPhone Almost Ran… Linux?!

Opera, the admirable yet often un-admired cross-platform web browser alternative to Internet Explorer on the PC, Safari on the Mac, and Firefox pretty much everywhere, was considered by Apple to be the original baked-in surfing standard for the iPhone?

Huhbuwha?

That’s pretty much what we thought too, though Valleywag stands behind the story:

Before the first iPhone was released, Apple wanted Opera to build the browser for the iPhone, says a source. Negotiations dragged on for six months, the sticking point being exclusivity — Apple wanted it, but Opera was unwilling to commit, seeing a larger market for licensing its proprietary software to multiple handset manufacturers.

Valleywag says, if true, Opera made a huge miscalculation, give the iPhone’s unprecedented mobile browsing market share. We say… shenanigans! Unless we’re talking history so ancient Bill Gates was floating overhead at Macworld announcing IE as the default Apple browser, this just doesn’t seem logical, reasonable, or rational.

As any longtime reader of this site knows, the iPhone started life as a tablet concept device called… (wait for it…) Safari Pad. Pretty big clue right there in the name as to what browser Apple was leaning towards, wouldn’t you say? (We would).

Likewise, Apple was willing to throw away devote resources to a Windows version of Safari, never mind Steve Jobs’ near totalitarian approach to keeping things in the Apple ecosystem (after having been burned one to many times by licensed technology).

Stranger bedfellows have tech made (see IE on Mac, above) but we’re filing this one under EPIC NO! for now…

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Opera Was the Original Browser… For the iPhone?!