Isaacson reconfirms older stories explaining that the iPad project actually predated Apple’s phone project. But once Jobs saw the multitouch interface in action, he concluded that it was far superior to the company’s other approach: adapting an iPod Click Wheel as a phone interface.

Oddly enough, Microsoft—or at least one zealous Microsoft engineer—spurred Jobs to begin investigating the creation of a tablet device. Jobs tells Isaacson about a Microsoft employee he met at a dinner party who “badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you’re dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and, ‘F—- this, let’s show him what a tablet can really be.’”

The next day, Jobs said, he told his team: “I want to make a tablet, and it can’t have a keyboard or a stylus.”