Josh Tyrangiel at Bloomberg’s article about the new iPhone is a dense read, but this part jumped out at me in particular:
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, says that at most software companies the designers decide what they want and the engineers respond with what’s easy to build. “Every single feature becomes this unholy compromise,” says Federighi, who began his career at Apple and spent a decade at Ariba, a maker of financial management software, before returning in 2009. “With [3D Touch] it was only at the moment where we finally got a design experience that’s like, ‘Yes! This is what we want!’ that we [asked] how hard it’s going to be to make.”
The answer: really hard.