Our collective memory is wrong. The story of Apple’s comeback from the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1990s to the birth of the iPhone in 2007 is almost always told as the triumphant tale of Steve Jobs’ product vision coupled with the clever designs of Jony Ive.

But the triumphant years were also manufacturing hell, as Apple synthesised competing systems of how to build products at scale, quickly, and without defects. “It was trial by fire,” says Tony Fadell, who rose from contractor to senior vice-president in this period. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know.”

Apple was battling one crisis after another, from the stock collapse of the 2000 dotcom crash to notable product failures like the G4 Cube. Despite the cultural success of the iMac and the iPods, profitability was so low that in Jobs’ first seven years as chief executive, Apple achieved a cumulative net profit of around $2.1bn. Today, Apple earns $2.1bn of profit per week.