I'm an electrical engineer and know people who were on the first iPhone team. I think it was about as close to 0 to 1 as you get in a big company like that.

I worked for a major RF test and measurement company when the first iPhone came out and everyone was blown away that a company could design and tool up production for a cell phone without tipping anyone off in the industry.

Compare Apple, a consumer electronics company, building a phone to Google, an ad tech company, building a self driving car.

One seems to leverage the core competencies of an organization better than the other... One seems closer to starting from 0...

I mean, google is not quite going from 0 to 1 there. it's a machine learning problem and google has some of the brightest machine learning people out there already working on search.

That's just because you don't understand Google.

It was a ML company going from building ML for the internet to building ML for a car.

Google hired the team that won the Darpa Grand Challenge.

The iPhone was released in June 2007. At that point, the iPod models were Classic (click-wheel), Mini (click-wheel), Nano (click-wheel), and Shuffle (screenless).

The first iPod Touch wasn't until September 2007, 3 months after the first iPhone.

When the iPhone 1 was released, the iPod range didn't have much on any other MP3 player. All the things that make an iPhone an iPhone - the touch-screen, multi-touch, iOS, didn't come from the iPod.

Perhaps iPod to iPhone wasn't quite 0 to 1, but it wouldn't have been much more than 0.001 to 1.

COPY: Compare Apple, a consumer electronics company, building a phone to Google, an ad tech company, building a self driving car.

One seems to leverage the core competencies of an organization better than the other... One seems closer to starting from 0...