One of the former Apple engineers who worked on the first model of the iPhone revealed last month some of the secrets behind the development process of this product. He claims that he wrote about 6% of the source code of OS X, and about the first model of the iPhone he says that it was known within Apple under the code name "the purple project".
For starters, he says that before he could sign the confidentiality agreement that allowed you to work on the project, he had to sign an initial confidentiality agreement to protect the secondary one. Practically, the engineers could not even find out the code name of the product under development, without first signing a confidentiality agreement.
Engineers worked in different groups on the same product, but each group was given a different code name, so different engineers ended up working on the same product without knowing it.
"When you finally got read in, you signed an NDA that let you see the NDA that had the code name on it. You couldn't see the code name until you agreed not to discuss the code name. Another thing that Apple does is they give different code names to different groups; in other words you may be working on the same project as someone else, and not actually know it. Or be aallowed to discuss it."
According to the Apple engineer, although he was working on the development of the first model of the iPhone, he did not know before the launch what kind of shape the product he was developing was going to have. He could see the processes running on the terminal by connecting to it remotely, but he could not actually see the device working, although he knew it was a terminal with an ARM processor.
"I only got to see the machine doing the remote debugging, not the target — but it was obviously an ARM based system […] You didn't really get to see the form factor, because when you are doing the initial work, it's all prototypes on plexiglass."
Moreover, he claims that he entered some laboratories where various secret products were being developed by Apple, they being covered with black cloths. This has been explained many times by a variety of other Apple employees, so we're not talking about something completely new in this situation.
"I got taken into areas where there were black cloths everywhere. If you ever work at Apple, black cloths are how they cover secret projects; you pretend not to see them [...] if you want a clever halloween costume for Apple, buy a black sheet, cut eye holes, and go as a "secret project".
You can find more details about what the former Apple employee told in this page.
