Reborn in 2005, starting with repairing mobile phones

Zhou Chengyu was the first to break the silence, his voice filled with confusion, "President Lin, Apple only has iPods and Macs right now... they haven't made phones yet."

"That's right."

Lin Dong turned and walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and drew three coordinate axes in the blank space.

"In 2001, the iPod was released." He marked the first point, "Apple used this small music player to tell the world three things—"

The pen tip drew clear lines on the whiteboard:

"First, exceptional design can command a premium of four times its cost."

"Secondly, the integration of hardware and software can create an experience barrier that competitors cannot imitate."

"Third," he paused, his pen slamming down heavily, "most importantly, redefining a product category is more important than becoming number one in an existing one."

Zhang Mingyuan sat up straight instinctively. Those words struck him like an electric shock—for the past ten years, all the mobile phones he had repaired had focused on being "more durable," "cheaper," and "more functional," but no one had ever asked: What should a mobile phone be?

Nokia was thinking about how to make the keyboard more durable, Motorola was thinking about how to make the flip phone last longer, and Samsung was thinking about how to coat the plastic shell with a coating that looked more like metal.

Lin Dong's voice was as calm as if he were stating an objective fact, "But do you know what Apple's design team is thinking right now?"

He looked around at everyone, then said, word by word:

"They were thinking—what if cell phones shouldn't have keyboards at all?"

"Bang."

Su Xiaowen's drawing pencil fell to the ground.

She stared blankly at the lines on the whiteboard.

The design drawing that kept her up all night yesterday, the screen that occupied the entire front, the lonely round button... all the fragments suddenly pieced together a complete and terrifying picture.

"A phone without a keyboard..."

Zhou Chengyu muttered to himself, his fingers unconsciously tracing the trajectory of the famous touchscreen in the air, "Capacitive screen... multi-touch... if the response latency could be controlled to the millisecond level..."

His eyes grew brighter and brighter, the instinctive excitement of a technologist seeing a completely new frontier.

"impossible!"

Zhang Mingyuan suddenly stood up, his voice trembling with excitement, "Without physical buttons, how can users type? How can they operate blindly? What if they accidentally touch something? This... this completely violates the basic principles of mobile phone design."

"What principle?"

Lin Dong interrupted him, looking at him calmly, "Who set these principles?"

Zhang Mingyuan opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

"Was it Nokia that placed the order? Motorola? Or one of those people sitting in the conference room in Cupertino, California?"

Lin Dong walked up to him, his voice not loud, but every word sounded like a chisel, "Mingyuan, you've repaired so many phones, have you ever thought about this?"

Why do all cell phones look almost identical?

This question is so simple that no one has ever asked it before.

The meeting room fell silent again.

"Because MediaTek provides a reference design," Lin Dong answered himself. "Because ARM licenses the standard architecture, because everyone thinks 'this is how users are used to it,' and because innovation is risky, following is the safest option."

He turned to look out the window, where the Shenzhen skyline of 2005 was awakening in the morning light.

"But someone has to break this cycle."

"Apple will do it because they have Steve Jobs, a man so obsessed that he's willing to let the entire supply chain collapse and start over just for a rounded corner."

Lin Dong paused, a complex emotion surfacing in his voice for the first time. "He will use a press conference to tell the world what a mobile phone should look like. Then everyone will follow him, just like they followed the iPod back then."

"And what about us?" Su Xiaowen suddenly asked, her voice tense. "We can only... wait for him to finish it, and then try to catch up?"

"No."

Lin Dong turned around, his gaze sweeping over everyone. "We need to finish this before he does."

"That's impossible!"

Uncle Cai finally couldn't help but interject, his face etched with the pragmatism of a businessman, "Boss Lin, all we have is less than ten million in cash. What kind of company is Apple? Their R&D budget is in the hundreds of millions of US dollars! How can we compete with them?"

"time."

Lin Dong uttered two words.

He walked to the whiteboard and drew a second point on the coordinate axis he had just used: "2007".

Then a red line was drawn between 2005 and 2007.

"We're here now. Apple's iPhone project is here."

He looked at everyone and said, "Apple is probably still in the early stages of architecture development. Steve Jobs was a perfectionist; he would have the team iterate dozens of times for the feel. He would have Corning redo hundreds of samples for the curvature of the glass."

"This time is our opportunity."

Zhou Chengyu suddenly realized: "You mean...trading speed for space? Before Apple's 'perfect product' is released, we'll launch a 'good enough' version to capture mindshare?"

Not entirely.

Lin Dong shook his head, his eyes becoming unusually sharp. "If it's just about 'getting ahead,' we'll never win. Apple's brand, channels, and ecosystem are the moat they've built over ten years."

"What we need to do is fundamentally take a different path."

He erased all the lines on the whiteboard and redraw two parallel arrows:

An arrow points to "Closed Ecosystem, Ultimate Experience, High Premium"—with the label "Apple Path" next to it.

Another arrow points to—

"Technological sovereignty, disruptive experience, and open ecosystem."

Next to the second arrow, he slowly wrote four words:

"The Eastern Path".

"Apple will make a perfect machine and sell it for $600." Lin Dong's voice echoed in the conference room. "They will tell users: This is the future, please buy it."

"And us."

He paused, his gaze sharp:

"We want to make a machine that is more perfect and easier to use than Apple's, and then sell it for $999."

"We want to tell the world: from now on, we set the price for 'perfection'."

After he finished speaking, there was a brief silence in the conference room, as if everyone was digesting the weight of his outrageous statement.

Zhou Chengyu broke the silence once again. He adjusted his glasses, his tone displaying the calm and pragmatic nature characteristic of a technologist: "President Lin, I understand our goals. We now have the direction for touch algorithms, the framework for hardware design, and the blueprint for the exterior design."

But we still lack three essential things: a chip design team capable of tape-out, software architects capable of writing underlying system code, and top-tier engineering talent capable of integrating and implementing all of these.

We don't have any of those people right now. Talking theory without practice won't build a real phone.

Lin Dong looked at him, and instead of feeling displeased, a hint of admiration flashed through his mind.

"Very good, you're the first to break the ice again. That's the kind of ruthless clarity I need."

There was no embarrassment on his face at being stumped by the question; on the contrary, it was as if he had been waiting for this question all along.

"I'll handle the people problem," he said calmly and confidently. "I will find the people we need. But before that, we must solve a more fundamental problem."