It’s been 15 years since Apple introduced the first iPhone model and revolutionized phones. In this 15-year period, our smartphones have come to a point that was unimaginable in the past, and the features that the first iPhone did and did not have started to sound like a joke. But did you know that the first iPhone didn’t even have the copy-paste feature?
Yes, on the first iPhone you had no way of copying and pasting any text. Ken Kocienda, former software engineer and designer of Apple, also explained why this feature is not available in his last interview. Kocienda’s story was both funny and interesting.
Apple engineers couldn’t catch up:
“The original iPhone didn’t have cut/copy/paste. It’s a disgrace! The most succinct explanation is that I didn’t have time to get it right. I had a lot of keyboard, autocorrect and text system work to do. The design team didn’t have the time either. So 1.0 We passed the feature for it.”
Kocienda, who joined Apple in 2001 and worked on the Safari browser before the iPhone, shared that the reason for the lack of copy-paste feature on the iPhone was that “Apple engineers did not have enough time”. Of course, the reasons were not limited to this.
The ‘text magnifier’, which we said goodbye to with iOS 13 on iPhones, but got back together with iOS 15, was Kocienda’s idea, which allows us to choose the right points when selecting a text. Kocienda, who came up with this idea to make copy-paste easier on the iPhone, shared that the feature he developed did not work well at that time and that the cursor shifted between texts when the finger was removed from the screen.
He came up with a different solution to this problem as well. Coming with the ‘touch history record’ feature, Kocienda hoped to leave the cursor at the last touched point if the finger is removed from the screen. However, according to Kocienda, iPhone engineers were busy with the virtual keyboard and autocorrect system at that time, so the development and assembly of all the systems necessary for copy-paste could not keep up with the first iPhone.
The copy-paste feature was introduced with the iPhone OS 3.0 operating system, which came into our lives with the iPhone 3GS, two years after the first iPhone. So much so that Apple even prepared a television advertisement for this feature at the time:
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