that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself. Sigman and his team were immediately taken with the notion of the iPhone. For Cingular， Apple's ambitions were both tantalizing and nerve-racking. A cozy relationship with the maker of the iPod would bring sex appeal to the company's brand. And some other carrier was sure to sign with Jobs if Cingular turned him down-Jobs made it clear that he would shop his idea to anyone who would listen. But no carrier had ever given anyone the flexibility and control that Jobs wanted， and Si~;man knew he'd have trouble persuading his fellow executives and board members to approve a deal like the one Jobs proposed. Sigman was right. The negotiations would take more than a year， with Sigman and his team repeatedly wondering if they were ceding too much ground.
　　Jobs wouldn't wait for the finer points of the deal to be worked out. 4Around Thanksgiving of 2005， eight months before a final agreement was signed， he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. And if the negotiations with Cingular were hairy， they were simple compared with the engineering and design challenges Apple faced. For starters， there was the question ofwhat operating system to use.
　　Jobs maintained the highest level of secrecy. Internally， the project was known as P2， short for Purple 2. Teams were split up and scattered across Apple's Cupertino， California， campus. 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 ofthe most senior people on the project had seen it.
　　It was a late moming in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier， Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here， in Apple's boardroom， it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. The phone dropped calls constantly， and the battery stopped charging before it was full. The list ofproblems seemed endless. At the end of the demo， Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said， "We don't have a product yet."
　　For those working on the iPhone， the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers， tired from all-night coding sessions， quit， only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. 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.
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