Visionary Steve Jobs is often cited as the inventor of the iPhone. But Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. House minority leader, has a completely different view.
Nancy Pelosi explained at this week's Democratic National Convention Platform Hearing that Steve Jobs got the idea from the federal government and then designed the iPhone. She went on to say that most of the research and development was done by the United States.
"In this smartphone, almost everything came from federal investment and research," she said while holding an iPhone in her hand.
“Steve Jobs had a good idea for his design. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation invented it.”
Certainly, this is a very controversial statement that is likely to provoke harsh criticism from Apple fans who believe that Steve Jobs was the man behind the iPhone, and that the US government is trying to steal his project.
But what Pelosi seems to be trying to say is that Steve Jobs used some of the projects whose research was funded by the US government. Putting them together, he managed to create the iPhone. It is a well-known fact that some technologies born from federal research are used for military or other rather limited purposes, before they are put into production and public use.
And yet, as CNET points out, Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tried to make things clearer by adding some background to the original statement.
“The late Steve Jobs and the Apple team that made the iPhone will be the first to tell you that they did not invent many of the key technologies we take for granted today.”
“Nancy Pelosi counts Steve Jobs as a friend, and the statement was made not with any disrespect for his legacy, but because it is valid in a way. Pelosi believes that Steve Jobs and his colleagues at Apple deserve great credit for taking federal innovations off the shelf, reshaping them, commercializing them, and turning them into a beautiful device that changed the world.”
It would be interesting to hear what Apple CEO Tim Cook has to say about Pelosi's latest statements, although what is certain is that Cupertino does not want to get involved in another scandal against the US government after the San Bernardino case.
