CHAPTER 13

Sellphone

How Apple markets, mythologizes, and moves the iPhone

The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in downtown San Francisco, which can seat six thousand people, is going to be absolutely packed. I join the shuffling masses—tech journalists, Apple employees, industry analysts—and inch forward with the plaid-shirt-and-jeans-patterned glacier. It feels more like the entrance line to a rock concert. The lights are low, and people are genuinely excited. And so am I.

We’re here because the iPhone 7 is about to be announced. This is all an elaborate, well-choreographed sales pitch, but I can’t help being excited. News vans are parked outside, video cameras are angled to capture reporters with the giant Apple logo installed atop the auditorium over their shoulders, idle chatter buzzes, laptops are everywhere.

Product launches are a pillar of Apple’s mythology/marketing machine. Steve Jobs introduced every major Apple product since the Mac from a stage like this one. When Aaron Sorkin wrote a film about Jobs, he set it entirely backstage at three product launches. The keynote speeches at the events became so closely associated with Jobs that fans took to calling them Stevenotes.

For good reason: Jobs was a master salesman. He didn’t typically get up on the stage and tick off product specs or descend into the effusive marketing-speak his competitors and successors sometimes do. He wasn’t telling you why you should buy an Apple product; he was matter-of-factly discussing the attributes of this Apple product that was about to change the world. His declarations felt natural, emphatic, and true. When he told you Apple was “revolutionizing the phone,” he believed it. The tradition has persisted since his passing in 2012; Tim Cook has dutifully taken over the presenter-in-chief slot, though he clearly relishes it a little less than his predecessor.

This time the buzz isn’t about what the next great addition to the iPhone will be—in the past, it’d been features like a front-facing camera, Siri, or a larger screen—it’s largely about a big subtraction. For months, Apple blogs and tech sites had speculated that Apple was going to pull the plug on the headphone jack in an effort to anoint wireless headphones as the new norm.

I sit down next to Mark Spoonauer, the editor in chief of a trusted gadget-review site called Tom’s Guide. He says he’s been to at least seven Apple product launches, and he attends the Events to try to discern what really is new and “what’s worth caring about,” and to answer the ur-question for gadget blogs: Is it worth upgrading?

“Even if someone has done a feature before, Apple needs to prove that they can do it better. It’s also about proving that Apple can still innovate in a post-Jobs world,” he says. After years of attending these product-launch events, Spoonauer is still glad to get the email invite from Apple (the Event is invitation only). “There’s still excitement about being here,” he says. “It’s not just about the product; it’s about the atmosphere.”

The lights go down, and a video rolls. It shows Tim Cook calling a Lyft for a ride to the Apple Event—the very event we are waiting for him to show up at—only to find that the car is being driven by James Cordon of Carpool Karaoke, who is then joined by Usher for some reason. They all sing “Sweet Home Alabama” together, and the flesh-and-blood Cook runs out onstage.

He makes some announcements, and then invites Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary founder of Nintendo, up to the stage to announce the company’s first foray into iPhone games, Mario Run. The crowd’s rapt quiet gives way to enthused pandemonium.

Eventually, he gets to the iPhone. “It’s a cultural phenomenon, touching lives of people all around the world,” Cook says as the video feed cuts to a pan of the audience, which, of course, consists of hundreds of people staring at their iPhones. “It is the bestselling product of its kind in the history of the world.”

Presentations like this—especially when they were given by Steve Jobs—are one of the major reasons that everything Cook is saying right now is true. Simply put, the iPhone would not be what it is today were it not for Apple’s extraordinary marketing and retail strategies. It is in a league of its own in creating want, fostering demand, and broadcasting technologic cool. By the time the iPhone was actually announced in 2007, speculation and rumor over the device had reached a fever pitch, generating a hype that few to no marketing departments are capable of ginning up.

I see at least three key forces at work. Together, they go a little something like this:

1. Shroud products in electric secrecy leading up to…

2. Sublime product launches featuring said products that are soon to appear in…

3. Immaculately designed Apple Stores.

Of course, for any of it to work, the product itself has to be impressive. But creating a mythology around that product is, especially in the early stages, as important to selling it as anything else.

Traditional marketing campaigns are important too, of course, and Apple has run plenty of iPhone ads. There hasn’t been a truly classic iPhone spot or campaign, on the level of the famous Ridley Scott–directed “Big Brother” ad that introduced the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl, the “Think Different” ads that reminded audiences that the Apple brand was associated with geniuses and world-changers in the late 1990s, the earbuds-and-silhouette campaign that created an efficient aesthetic shorthand for iPod cool in the early 2000s, or even the “I’m a Mac,” “I’m a PC” ads that played off Windows-based computers’ reputation for being buggy and lame.

The closest thing the iPhone has to a classic is probably the “There’s an App for that” campaign in 2008. The debut ad for the iPhone, “Hello,” was a mashup of famous faces answering the phone and is largely forgotten today. Other early ads were largely explanatory, which makes them interesting to watch; they’re artifacts from a time when the concept of browsing the web with your finger and then taking a call needed an introduction. One nicely executed and entirely prescient spot, “Calamari,” shows a user watching a Pirates of the Caribbean clip of a giant squid attack, getting a hankering for seafood, switching to Google Maps to search for a place nearby, and calling the restaurant, all with a few finger taps. A sequence of actions like that was pretty revolutionary at the time. Others highlight the ease of surfing the “real” internet, listening to music, and using Facebook on the go.

Still, the majority of major corporations can afford well-produced ad campaigns, and even the most uncool can score the odd hit. In the absence of a definitive iPhone ad campaign, it’s worth looking at what Apple does differently than its competition to elevate its marquee product.

So, number one: You can’t talk about the iPhone without talking about Apple’s secrecy. The way that Apple has honed its ultrasecretive approach to cater to and exploit the online hype machine is an innovation unto itself, one that rivals many of its other more tangible technological innovations. It too is steeped in history.

Apple is one of the most secretive companies in the world, and the imperative originated at the top. Jobs was always proactive in managing his company’s media appearances; from the early days, he was keen on developing relationships with editors and writers at the major magazines and newspapers. But he wasn’t always super-secretive. The New York Times reporter John Markoff, one of the writers who’d earned access to Apple, noticed the change in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“Since Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he has increasingly insisted that the company speak with just the voices of top executives,” Markoff noted after being denied an interview with a driving force behind the iPod, Tony Fadell. Another Times writer, Nick Bilton, observed that Jobs frequently described his products as “magical,” and, “as Mr. Jobs knew so well, one thing that makes magic so, well, magical, is that you don’t know how it works. It’s also one reason Apple is so annoyingly tight-lipped.”

Harnessing secrecy to generate interest in a new technology isn’t a novel idea. It’s been a key element in ginning up interest in new commercial technologies—even the ones that seem in hindsight like obvious breakthroughs.

“Flight represented the pinnacle of human achievement,” writes the technology historian David Nye. “To raise a heavier-than-air vehicle into the sky was a technological marvel, the fulfillment of a centuries-old dream. Yet when the Wright Brothers flew for the first time, in 1903, almost no one saw their achievement.” They hadn’t fed anyone’s sense of intrigue; there was no anticipation. So the brothers changed tack. “The Wrights remained secretive about their plane’s design during subsequent development, seldom allowing the press to see what they were doing,” Nye explains. Word trickled out, and the Wrights let it. When they were invited to discuss their invention at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, they refused. “They had their eyes on commercial applications, and they were unwilling to disclose the details of their machine.” The Wrights waited until 1908 and held a grand demonstration for the U.S. Army. “Huge throngs turned out to see them… Until the time of World War I, many people ran out of their houses to stare at any airplane that flew into view.”

Similarly, clamping down on Apple’s public doings was a conscious decision.

In Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli explain that Jobs “directed Katie Cotton, his communications chief at Apple, to adopt a policy in which Steve made himself available only to a few print outlets… Whenever he had a product to hawk, he and Cotton would decide which of this handful of trusted outlets would get the story. And Steve would tell it, alone.” And he, of course, would keep the details close to his chest. Schlender, who covered Jobs for years, talked with him “many times about his reluctance to share the spotlight with the others on his team, since I asked repeatedly to speak with them and was largely unsuccessful.” Jobs would say he didn’t want his competitors to find out who was doing the best work for fear of losing them, which struck Schlender as “disingenuous.” What he did buy was that “Steve didn’t think anyone else could tell the story of his product, or his company, as well as he could.”

The effect was to create a vacuum of official Apple news. As the company reemerged from its 1990s slump with a bevy of popular, sexy electronics like the sleek Bondi Blue iMac and the iPod, the demand for intel on the company’s doings boomed. Fan blogs, industry analysts, and tech reporters all commenced circling the reawakening tech giant, turning Apple-watching into a full-time job.

Speculating on the rumored iPhone became a cottage industry unto itself in the mid-aughts, and the practice continues. “Apple is so secretive that there is essentially an entire industry built around creating, spreading and debunking rumors about the company,” the Huffington Post declared in 2012. Indeed, there are too many Apple-dedicated blogs and websites to count; Apple Insider, iMore, MacRumors, iLounge, 9to5Mac, Cult of Mac, Daring Fireball, Macworld, iDownloadBlog, and iPhoneLife are a few. All of these publications, in serving their audiences, are both meeting a real demand in an iPhone-heavy world and giving the iPhone reams of free press.

So here’s the thing about that annoying secrecy: It works. At least, it has for Apple, helping to elevate the status of the iPhone as a product apart. One former Apple executive estimated that keeping the first iPhone secret “was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

How’s that, exactly? In addition to the free press generated by Apple-dedicated sites, secrecy plays a powerful role in ratcheting up demand among consumers. In a 2013 paper for Business Horizons, “Marketing Value and the Denial of Availability,” David Hannah and two fellow business professors at Simon Fraser University theorized how Apple’s secrecy benefits its product sales. “According to reactance theory, whenever free choice—for example, of goods or services—is limited or restricted, the need to retain freedoms makes humans desire them significantly more than previously, especially if marketers can convince people that those freedoms are important. Apple applies the principle very effectively.” Not only are product specifications and launch dates closely guarded secrets, the authors wrote, “the company also keeps supplies immediately post-launch artificially low.” You can’t know about it before it’s launched, and you still can’t get your hands on it once it’s available.

So die-hard Apple fans turn to the live-stream or their Twitter feed to see the secrets of the new iPhone. That sense of revelation propels a sense of desire, which Apple exploits by introducing the new iPhone with highly regulated scarcity. Fans will “happily wait in line—often throughout the night—for stores to open in order to be among the first to purchase the new product, despite the obvious fact that it will be readily available in just a few weeks more.”

That spectacle of lines of die-hard Apple fans stretching around city blocks of course further feeds the story about how in demand the iPhone is, which further feeds the gratification of all those who participate in the ritual of obtaining one.

After the first iPhone began its ascent to most-profitable product, period, secrecy inside Apple naturally only increased in its wake. Employees who leaked details about upcoming products could be fired on the spot. Teams charged with a project Jobs deemed especially important would be made to operate in secrecy, even among their peers.

Of all the complaints about working at Apple I gathered in the course of talking to the iPhone’s architects, its secrecy was at the top of the list—engineers and designers found it set up unnecessary divisions between employees who might otherwise have collaborated.

Abroad, Jobs is said to have distributed false product schematics to Apple’s suppliers in an effort to locate leakers—if the fake product showed up on fan site, Jobs would know the source of the leak and fire the supplier.

Tony Fadell, a senior vice president and once one of the company’s stars, told me that at times, the secrecy made working on the iPhone—which he was in charge of hardware for—next to impossible.

“I saw the falling-out because of that, especially when it’s such an incredibly hard program, and we all had to be working together, but yet, we weren’t on the most critical pieces,” he says.

That impulse to secrecy was transmitted to Steve’s peers. “It was fueled by not just Steve but others who had the power that Steve gave them, and they wanted to make sure they secured it at all times, and they would not necessarily tell us stuff. They would make us intentionally look bad, and point to us, and we couldn’t defend ourselves because we had no information.”

Today, the company is much larger, and since Jobs’s passing, it’s under the command of a CEO with a less paranoid style. As Apple’s supply chain has continued to expand, more leaks have dripped out, and Cook has shown less interest in punishing the leakers. “The leakers have gotten so much better over the years, there’s not much left in the way of mystery,” Spoonauer says, so when he comes to an Apple Event, “I’m more interested in how they’re going to spin those leaks.” So one might think that secrecy inside the company would fade as well. Apparently not.

“It’s worse than ever,” Brian Huppi, the input engineer who helped conceive the original iPhone design paradigm, tells me. He went back to Apple after a few years’ hiatus and found that interdepartmental secrecy had reached new heights, before he left again.

Even current Apple employees at just about every level of seniority chafed at its near-total nondisclosure policies when I managed to get through to them. Many that I reached out to told me that they’d love to be able to sit for an interview, would love to discuss their contributions publicly, but that, per company policy, they couldn’t talk.

I did meet with a representative of iPhone PR at Apple’s HQ in Cupertino. “The only reason we’re even talking to you,” he said as we sat outside the cafeteria at a table in the middle of Infinite Loop, was that Apple was in the process of opening up. But it never really did.

One result of all that secrecy is that it allows Apple to more tightly control its message and keep the focus expressly on the products and away from its more controversial practices—conditions in the factories that manufacture the phones, say, or its offshoring of $240 billion in tax havens in Ireland. Or even less controversial things, like the role a particular employee played in developing the iPhone.

Apple has essentially cultivated a new set of norms among the public and the tech press—no access, no official comment, no transparency. So I called up the editor of the Atlantic’s tech section, Adrienne LaFrance, who had recently written a treatise on the neutering of the tech press. I wanted to hear how this Apple-led trend was affecting the public sphere.

“There gets to be this danger of when people expect the tech companies to not give you on-record interviews or not to ever comment, then you slowly get to this place where it’s not clear to me always that journalists are really doggedly going after information—assuming, often correctly, that they’re not going to get it,” she says. So by denying journalists access for so long, Apple (and other increasingly secretive tech companies) trained them to accept the official line or the details doled out at the public-facing launch events.

“Everyone on all sides is getting too comfortable with this arrangement,” she says. “If you look at the ecosystem of tech coverage, how much is dedicated to the evaluation of a product versus the practices of the company?” she says. It has positioned the product as the center of its universe. It exists almost apart from the world of workers, of developers, of users, of business.

So how do you crack the code? “Even if the answer is no every single time, you have to keep trying,” she says.

So I did.

The Register, a UK-based tech pub known for its strident, critical views of the industry, ran a funny story detailing its employees’ efforts to obtain an invite to the iPhone 7 Apple Event. They installed an email tracker to see if Apple’s press folks were in fact reading their entreaties. It turned out they were. (They didn’t get in.)

So I decided to do the same. Apple hadn’t responded to my latest futile request for interviews for months. So, I installed an email tracker made by a company called Streak, and I sent a fresh query. By the end of the day, it had been read on three different devices, presumably by three different people. I never heard back. I tried again a week later, with the same result. Nice.

Eventually, I decided to cut out the middle man and write directly to Tim Cook. You never know, right? Jobs was famous for randomly responding to notes in his in-box, and Cook had done the same once or twice.

I sent Tim Cook an email requesting an interview on August 31, 2016. That’s when things got interesting. The tracking software I installed works by loading a tiny, transparent 1x1 pixel into an email message. When it’s opened, the image pings the server it came from with data that includes the time and location that the email was opened as well as the kind of device used to open it.

That was the weird thing. When Tim Cook opened my email, the software showed me what kind of device he’d opened it on: A Windows desktop computer.

That couldn’t be right. I emailed Streak to ask how accurate that part of the service was. Their support team told me, “If it has specific device data: Very accurate.” I sent a follow-up email to Cook. Once again, it was opened—on a Windows desktop computer.

Was Tim Cook using a PC? Or was whoever was sorting through his emails? Either possibility seemed odd.

Apparently, the email I sent to Cook made its way to Apple PR; my Hail Mary had been hailed. I asked the PR rep if Tim Cook had actually opened my email. “Yes,” she said, “he read it and forwarded it on.”

Okay, then. A couple weeks later, I sent one more follow-up. It was opened, again, on a Windows desktop computer. He never did write back.

Okay, okay. So we have a company that has long put an emphasis on extreme secrecy, giving rise to media that feverishly reports on anything and everything Apple-related, giving rise to a core of user-consumers awaiting the latest release. Sounds like the groundwork has been laid for a well-honed message—the entry of a definitive voice that can correct the record once and for all and excite the masses anew.

And so we get the biggest public displays that Apple offers—the invitation-only, tech-demo spectacle of the storied Apple Event.

These Stevenotes aren’t a novel format. Alexander Graham Bell, recall, went on tours and put on shows in exhibition halls and convention centers across the Eastern Seaboard to demonstrate his new telephone.

But the most famous tech demo of all was the one that may have most informed Jobs’s style.

In 1968, an idealistic computer scientist named Doug Engelbart brought together hundreds of interested industry onlookers at the San Francisco Civic Center—the same civic center where the iPhone 7 demo was made nearly forty years later—and introduced a handful of technologies that would form the foundational DNA of modern personal computing.

Not only did Engelbart show off publicly a number of inventions like the mouse, keypads, keyboards, word processors, hypertext, videoconferencing, and windows, he showed them off by using them in real time.

The tech journalist Steven Levy would call it “the mother of all demos,” and the name stuck.

A video feed shared the programs and technologies being demoed onscreen. It was a far cry from the more polished product launches Jobs would become famous for decades later; Engelbart broadcast his own head in the frame as, over the course of an hour and a half, he displayed new feats of computing and made delightfully odd quips and self-interruptions.

“As windows open and shut, and their contents reshuffled, the audience stared into the maw of cyberspace,” Levy writes. “Engelbart, with a no-hands mike, talked them through, a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. Not only was the future explained, it was there.” The model for today’s tech-industry keynote presentations was forged, almost instantly; the presentation style was perhaps not as influential as the technologies presented, but they were closely intertwined.

Through his suite of inventions, which were further developed at Xerox PARC—yes, PARC again—Engelbart laid the foundation of modern computing. But he insisted that PCs were antisocial and counterintuitive; his dream was augmenting the human intellect through collaboration. He imagined people logging on to the same system to share information to improve their understanding of the world and its increasingly complex problems. He advocated something a lot like the modern internet, social networking, and a mode of computing that, through the smartphone, has indeed begun the supplanting of the PC as the primary way we most often trade information.

Though Engelbart’s mother of all demos became legendary among the computer crowd, it was an outsider, it seems, who would turn Steve on to the format he later became famous for. Apple expert Leander Kahney says that Jobs’s keynotes were the product of CEO John Sculley: “A marketing expert, he envisioned the product announcements as ‘news theater,’ a show put on for the press. The idea was to stage an event that the media would treat as news, generating headlines for whatever product was introduced. News stories, of course, are the most valuable advertising there is.” Sculley thought that entertaining a crowd should be the priority, so product demos should be “like staging a performance,” he wrote in his autobiography, Odyssey. “The way to motivate people is to get them interested in your product, to entertain them, and to turn your product into an incredibly important event.”

Combining exciting new technologies with theater has become a uniquely American art form, and Apple has perfected it. It taps directly into what the historian David Nye calls “the American technological sublime”—the awe people feel at witnessing an impressive new leap in technology. Although America is a diverse nation, fragmented in religious belief and cultural values, its citizens have long found common ground, Nye argues, in the uniting power of an impressive new technological feat. The Hoover Dam, the lightbulb, the atomic bomb. We find solidarity in the language of areligious, asexual progress.

And it works. You feel it at the civic center as tech executives walk onstage brandishing the latest world-changing gadget. And the secrecy generated beforehand, the sense that you’re being allowed a peek under the hood is—undeniably—a little bit thrilling.

But as gadget-review editor Mark Spoonauer reminds me, “There are journalists who actually try to stay away from the ‘reality distortion field,’ because what you don’t want to do is get caught up in the excitement. Because you have to be objective.”

It’s just really hard to do after Apple delivers you the sublime.

After the presentation, which concluded with a performance by the Australian pop singer Sia, who stood motionless in a giant wig and sang her hits while a kid bounced around and did cartwheels, the press is funneled into a room, stage right, that resembles a miniature version of an Apple Store—a month into the future, when the products just announced onstage will be available. We all get our first shot at handling, swiping, and snapping photos with the iPhone 7. I tried on the new AirPods—the new wireless earbuds, which, in my head, I could not refrain from thinking of as Airbuds—and piped in some Apple-sanctioned tunes.

Bloggers and news crews were angled everywhere, filming stand-ups in front of the products, rattling off first reactions. Others were jotting down notes. There must have been a hundred blog posts filed from the premises that hour. More people kept cycling in, and the room seemed increasingly crowded. There were lots of people taking photos of the iPhones with their iPhones, and people like me, using their iPhones to take photos of the people taking photos of iPhones with their iPhones.

It was a curious simulacrum; an Apple Store turned into a showroom, a showroom of a showroom. The space designed into synonymity with modern retail done up as a celebrity. This is what these products would look like out in the wild. And so they would.

Weeks later, on the day the iPhone 7 was slated to launch at retail stores around the nation, I set out to see the results of that marketing machinery in action. I made my pilgrimage to one of the first Apple Stores. This location in the Glendale Galleria outside of Los Angeles, along with the store in Tysons Corner Center in Virginia, were the first to open, on May 19, 2001. I was meeting a friend, Jona Bechtolt, a die-hard Apple fan—he’s even got the Apple logo tattooed on his leg—who was planning on upgrading to a 7 that day. I wanted to see if crowds still turned out in droves, if those famous lines would stretch on, nearly ten years after the 2007 iPhone inspired the first queues to became media sensations.

Short answer: Yep.

The line stretched out across the entryway, through the central corridor, and around the corner here on the second story of this indoor mall. It certainly wasn’t the size of the epic, block-long lines of yore; I counted forty people. Still, that was a lot for an iPhone model that a lot of the press had written off as a nonessential upgrade.

As soon as I walked up, I heard the sound of three-quarter-hearted, corporate-colored cheering. The doors had just opened, and, as is customary for Apple Stores on launch day, the employees line up and applaud the customers who were dedicated enough to show up hours early, or even spend the night. A handful had.

“I do it every year,” a man named John said with a smile, and almost a shrug. The crowd was a mix of die-hard enthusiasts who still enjoyed the ritual of waiting outside overnight to be among the first to own the latest iPhone even if it wasn’t necessary, and mini-entrepreneurs who planned on buying the maximum allotted number and reselling them to friends and on eBay while supply was still constrained and the phones were in high demand, hoping, as in years past, that phones would sell out for a couple weeks. “I’m gonna buy eight, sell two to my friends, and do eBay for the rest,” one woman told me. “I take a little on top.”

This year, the jet-black phone (a new color) and the 7 Plus (the larger model with a new dual camera) both sold out early. “Selling out” is part of the dance. The first iPhone was “sold out” for the first couple months after it went on sale in 2007, and we’ll never know if that was due to a legitimate supply shortage. That does seem plausible, given the rush involved in getting it out. But for later models, Apple’s finely tuned supply-chain and its sway over suppliers means that most scarcity in subsequent launches is plausibly artificially generated by Apple.

“It’s not just design, it’s just not the iPhone, it’s not just the marketing,” Bill Buxton says. It’s also about maintaining supply-chain flexibility and inflating demand by creating the impression of scarcity. It’s about making the iPhone feel “like the Cabbage Patch doll, everybody is running out to get one and buying them because they were afraid that they were going to be out of stock and they needed to give one to somebody for Christmas. I do not know a single person, I challenge you to find a single person, who despite that feeding frenzy could not find one.” Which is a good point. We know now that Apple’s suppliers can manufacture half a million phones in a day and ship them to the U.S. in another one. Believing that the most anticipated new color of the new model has sold out requires a suspension of disbelief.

“It’s completely manufactured by one of the most brilliant marketing teams,” Buxton says. “They designed the production, supply chain, and everything. So with the greatest tradition of Spinal Tap, if needed, they could turn the volume up to eleven to meet demand.”

Anyway, I was surprised—in 2016, I hadn’t expected to find anyone camped out or willing to wait in line for hours, given the tenor of the conversation around the iPhone 7, which hadn’t generated as much excitement as previous models. But there they were, spending the better part of a day outside an Apple Store.

There are worse places to be. Apple’s immaculately designed product hubs are the envy of retail stores around the world. Intended, it is said, to resemble the long wooden tables used in Jony Ive’s Industrial Design Lab, with considerable input from Jobs, who holds a patent on the glass staircases, Apple Stores began opening in the early aughts. Initially opposed by the board, they’ve proven to be a sales behemoth.

In 2015, they were the most profitable per square foot of any retail operation in the nation by a massive margin; the stores pulled in $5,546 per square foot. With two-thirds of all Apple revenues generated by iPhones, that’s a lot of hocked handsets.

And the Geniuses and Specialists doing the hocking make up a large number Apple’s employees. Across 265 U.S. stores, Apple says it has thirty thousand retail employees. As of 2015, that was nearly half of the company’s total U.S. workforce. Given the high volume of sales and the immense success of the retail spaces, these are some of the most productive retail workers in the nation.

In 2011, the Apple analyst Horace Dediu broke down the numbers in an attempt to calculate just how productive. He found that, on average, each employee at a U.S. Apple Store generated $481,000 in 2010 and was on track to do roughly the same in 2011. That’s nearly four times as much as employees made for JC Penney, he noted. Average employees served six customers an hour and generated about $278 per hour.

Apple retail employees made from nine to fifteen dollars an hour and received no commission for those sales. While that’s well above the minimum wage, the company’s skyward profits put the relatively low wages into stark contrast. Apple had no trouble attracting employees; the iPod and then the iPhone had made Apple popular among precisely the young-skewing set that was ideal for the company, enough so that it would attract criticism for resembling a cult. But it was developing a retention problem, due in part to the low-end, commission-free wages.

As a 2012 New York Times headline put it, “Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay.” Health benefits were available only to full-time employees, and the advancement structure was arcane. Tensions began to rise inside the perpetually optimistic-beaming company.

The retail stores were designed to be beautifully stark tech sanctums, places that would inspire a little awe in consumers and cast Apple products as the tools of the future. And the enthusiastic Geniuses and Specialists were tireless Apple ambassadors, instrumental in extending its message to consumers, in creating an environment where consumers would be thrilled to participate in that future and buy new iPhones. They also had to educate new Apple gadget owners, diagnose problems with existing products, fix them if possible, and tend to the more mundane demands of retail. It’s hard work, in other words. And behind the scenes, there is a human cost to the carefully constructed retail ritual.

One employee, a part-time Specialist at Apple’s flagship San Francisco store, decided to make a stand.

“As much as we helped Apple to be a really cool place to come in and shop for things, we wanted it to be a fun and enjoyable place to work,” Cory Moll tells me. “And it was becoming less of that.” Moll had been working for Apple since 2007; he started at the Madison store in Wisconsin, where he was from. In 2010, he transferred to the flagship Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. He’s a die-hard Apple fan; he tells me he can’t wait to get the iPhone 7 and is considering jet-black but was worried it’d scuff up.

And he sighs, just thinking aloud about the incoming rush (we spoke the week before the 7 was set to hit stores). “That’s going to be a whole lot of crazy, happy fun. I miss being a part of that,” he says. “Launch days—iPhones are always the biggest. Any Mac updates, people come in for that. But the iPhone was where it’s at.”

But after being at Apple for a few years, and working at its flagship San Francisco store, he began to see some systemic problems.

“Pay was an issue,” he says. “Compared to other companies in other regions, for as long as we’d been there, only seeing raises of one, two, three percent, that’s a small number.” And it didn’t seem to reflect the employees’ expertise and skill set, the familiarity with the products, with Apple culture, the salesmanship. “We all had developed a strong skill set and knowledge base,” he says, so “making twelve dollars an hour on top of not having any benefits, that’s kind of saying, ‘Hey, you’re working for one of the top companies in the world, and you’re barely making minimum wage, and if you get sick, well, screw you.’”

There was no mechanism to discuss promotions, and management would schedule part-time workers to do full-time weeks without offering them the status change that would let them qualify for benefits. When Moll or his co-workers asked about the longer hours, management would simply cut them. Moll alleges that practices like that could be violating labor law, by misclassifying workers.

“In terms of scheduling, in terms of promotion—people who had been there for years and years and years—being overlooked for full-time status, being overlooked for role changes. From being a Specialist to being a Genius. It was incredibly difficult. It felt like there was a lot of favoritism, when it comes to being looked at for a promotion, you’ve got to be friends with management team, you’ve got to be buddy-buddy.”

Many of Moll’s peers felt the same way. “Working stressful hours, you don’t really know two weeks out from next when you’re going to be working. And then if there’s a launch event, that throws everything off.” After Ron Johnson, whom many retail employees saw as the father of Apple retail, left to join JC Penney in 2011 and was replaced by Jon Browett, who brought a colder, outsider style, those tensions started to boil over.

“Not a single person I knew liked the direction he was taking it,” Moll says. He began to grow interested in the idea of organizing, though he wasn’t sure how to do it yet. But he started discussing the possibility with his peers.

“The conversations I had with people on the inside, they varied, of course,” Moll recalls. “Some people were excited about it, and there were people who were afraid of it. I didn’t really position it as wanting an official union. I really positioned it as us getting together, and whatever that looked like—we could figure that bit later on. I was really just focused on building a voice.”

It quickly became apparent that it would be difficult to discuss, much less organize, around the bustling Apple Store, so Moll turned to Twitter—he started reaching out to employees and organizing support over the social network. After he figured he’d received a show of solidarity from “a couple hundred” local and national Apple retail workers, he crafted a press release and blasted it out to the tech press. He set up a website, AppleRetailUnion.com, and met with established unions that were interested in helping them organize. Eventually Moll made himself known as the driving force behind the effort and did interviews with the likes of CNET, the Times, and Reuters. And he set up an electronic form that would allow Apple retail workers to submit grievances to him, and he would forward them on to corporate—he got hundreds of complaints that way.

Apple, of course, responded in kind. The company disseminated “union training materials” to its stores, which were largely interpreted as tools to help management quell union activity. Shortly after, however, it announced that it would be awarding raises early, offering more training opportunities to part-time staff, and extending benefit packages to part-time workers.

Those raises did in fact materialize. Moll says his pay was bumped up by $2.42 an hour, a much bigger increase than usual, and most workers saw increases of that size too. It was, undeniably, a victory for the thousands of iPhone sellers who helped Apple turn immense profits. “I know going public with what we want to have happen definitely lit a fire under their butts and said, ‘Hey, we really need to reconsider how valuable these people are to this company.’”

It also, however, deflated interest in the unionization drive. After five and a half years at Apple, Moll decided it was time for a change, and he left the company.

Even though Moll’s drive didn’t result in a recognized union, the effort did improve the quality of life for thousands then and to come. “I think that it did serve its purpose,” Moll says, adding that employees should continue to stand up if the times demand it. “It’s a scary thing to do,” he says, but “they should feel empowered to speak out when they feel that other avenues become closed or seem closed.”

They might have to; since his effort, more revelations of worker dissatisfaction at retail stores have surfaced. In 2014, attorneys, on behalf of retail workers, filed a class-action lawsuit that they said affected twenty thousand employees, alleging they were routinely denied meals during longer shifts and breaks on shorter ones, that they received payments late, and that there were other violations of California labor laws. In 2016, a court ruled in the workers’ favor, ordering Apple to pay them $2 million.

At the Beijing Apple Store, Specialists complained of being treated like “criminals,” being forced through daily screenings, which they had to wait in line for on their own unpaid time. But generally, worker satisfaction seems high; GlassDoor, the app that workers use to rate workplace satisfaction, shows Apple with high marks. In fact, Apple retail jobs are rated higher than jobs at the company’s HQ.

To get a sense of how things might stand for the iPhone salespeople of 2016, I talked to as many as I could. I visited Apple Stores in New York (the flagship glass cube on Fifth Avenue), in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Paris (at the Louvre), in Shanghai, and in Cupertino, at Apple’s headquarters.

I spoke with dozens of Specialists and Geniuses, none of whom would agree to be quoted by name—Apple’s policy of secrecy stretches all the way to the showroom floor.

Generally, people were satisfied with the job; few loved it, few hated it. There was much less of the “cultishness” that critics denounced during the height of i-mania in the mid-to late aughts. Some complained about the lack of flexibility, others hailed the solid benefits. Typical stuff. Perhaps as die-hard enthusiasm—and the once-total secrecy—recedes, along with the shadow of Jobs, that millennial enthusiasm that fueled its once die-hard-loyal workforce will too. But it was an interesting, diverse lot, and I enjoyed chatting with them. I met immigrant jazz musicians and young firefighter trainees and, of course, software developers and part-time repairmen.

There’s an Apple Store at Apple HQ, and I popped by after my chat with Apple’s PR rep. It’s right next to 1 Infinite Loop and one building away from 2 Infinite Loop, which houses the Industrial Design studio, where the very first experiments that would mature into the iPhone were carried out.

Each of the iPhones on the shelf here was designed next door, a couple hundred feet away; the designs were then sent to China, where workers manufactured phones on a massive assembly line and then loaded them onto cargo planes; they were flown to San Francisco and shipped here, to Apple HQ.

As I left the small store, I ran into a small group of Chinese tourists, one of whom asked me to take a photo of them in front of 1 Infinite Loop, which the store abuts.

I snapped the pic and asked the woman who’d handed me the camera why they were here. She flashed a smile and responded immediately.

“We love the iPhone,” she said.