• Steve Jobs faked full signal strength and swapped devices during the first iPhone demo due to fragile prototypes and bug-riddled software.
• Engineers got drunk during the presentation to calm their nerves.
• Despite the challenges, Jobs successfully completed the 90-minute demonstration without any noticeable issues.
And look where he is now. Dead. Lesson learned.
That’s where all of us are headed. What’s the lesson?
A fruitarian diet won’t help you against pancreatic cancer.
Or, in other words, you can’t fight P.C. with apples.
I haven’t snorted that loud in public for quite a while
But are we dead right now, like Steve is? No.
Just give it time.
What’s the lesson?
You can’t take it with you.
Also, if you have cancer, go to a doctor.
Fake it till you make it?
The final goal in life: the eternal slumber.
Not me - I’m learning from Steve’s mistake.
Dead people should be shot at birth
cheaters never live forever
idiots who refuse cancer treatment in favor of “alternative medicine” don’t live forever…
also, everyone else, really, forever is quite a long time.
Calling the stage units prototypes is being nice. The reality was that at that point the iPhone had barely gotten to a proof of concept stage. Months before this event, the developers were still using a giant desktop tower to simulate the phone’s hardware.
That the photos of the phone were real and not concept art, that the stage units weren’t just unusable rubber dummies was a magic trick itself.
When the developers revealed years later that the iPhone presentation (just the presentation, not even the actual launch) was a make or break moment for the company, they absolutely were not kidding.
And then they went from “should not even be working” test units to fully functional production units in six months!
Whatever your opinion of Jobs or Apple, credit where credit is due.
To the engineers.
Jobs: Ass
Apple: Ass
Engineers: overworked
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This is marketing. Showing the phone as a working product ready to be shipped is a tactic to scare off the competition, demonstrate that you have the upper hand, and entice customers to buy it.
That is marketing in our capitalist system. I’m not saying it’s right, just that it’s a fact.
What competition? At that point it was BlackBerry and WinCE. Oh, and PalmPilot.
Android, Windows Phone (the “metro” rewrite from scratch - not the WinCE one), Palm WebOS, etc were all well and truly in development and close to launch and most of them were being developed in the open. Apple who was cutting corners everywhere to leapfrog those products. It took Apple just four years to go from initial planning to a shipping product.
Symbian was starting to look pretty good too — my last “feature” phone ran Symbian, and it was better than an iPhone in a lot of ways. For example it had an “app store” well before Apple did.
It was the ARM CPU that kicked it off. At the time even a shitty slow Intel CPU only got a third of a day battery life with a 100Wh battery. ARM had just worked out how to design a processor that could last all day on a 10Wh battery and with decent performance.
Apple was a founding partner of ARM - decades before iPhone, so they knew it was coming and what was on the roadmap. They also likely knew other phone companies were ramping up production taking advantage of the new generation of processors.
Android, Windows Phone (the “metro” rewrite from scratch - not the WinCE one), Palm WebOS, etc were all well and truly in development and close to launch and most of them were being developed in the open. Apple who was cutting corners everywhere to leapfrog those products. It took Apple just four years to go from initial planning to a shipping product.
This is ranges from just misleading to factually wrong. WebOS, for example, didn’t launch until 2009, 2 years after the iPhone demo in question.
In 2008, Microsoft reorganized the Windows Mobile group and started work on a new mobile operating system.
An early prototype had a close resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard, but the arrival of 2007’s Apple iPhone meant that Android “had to go back to the drawing board”.
For ARM, I have to go with a “sort of?” Apple has been tied to ARM 80’s so that’s correct, but my phone prior to the first iPhone was one of these bad boys: the Palm Treo. It used a Intel PXA270 312 MHz. In my use, the Treo had better battery life, though admittedly that may just be because I rarely even tried to do things like use the internet on it because it was such a jank experience, so my primary use was planner types of things, texts, and since it was 2005-6, phone calls.
Anyway, back to the poster you responded to:
What competition? At that point it was BlackBerry and WinCE. Oh, and PalmPilot. [sic: by this point they had dropped “Pilot” which was actually a device type, not a company/brand.]
The actual timeline makes it pretty clear that this comment is almost objectively correct. However, even this is not correct because Apple didn’t set out to compete with what we considered “smartphones”:
He said Apple had set the goal of taking 1 percent of the world market for cellphones by the end of 2008. That may seem small, but with a billion handsets sold last year worldwide, that would mean 10 million iPhones — a healthy supplement to the 39 million iPods that Apple sold last year.
Bold added for emphasis.
Or, you can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth: Jobs at the original iPhone keynote.
Anyway, I was alive for all of this, iPhone 10000% caught literally everyone flatfooted.
Android was still a year+ out at that time (first beta came out in Nov 2007, though). Thanks, I did forget Symbian. Thanks for the opportunity to dig through the rest, though.
Windows Phone seven was three years away from unveiling and nearly 4 from release.
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You say that like there’s a single system in the history of the world which doesn’t. Capitalism isn’t novel with regard to humans taking advantage of one another.
The difference is that in other systems, when people behave like that, it’s then gaming the system. Capitalism is the only system that incentivizes it in rewards it directly, As a matter of principle.
It doesn’t reward it anymore than even local government control over resources. You act like nobody has ever tried to get out of a speeding ticket or fake their way to impress their lead.
Capitalism incentivizes producing value
It incentivises producing a perceived value. So faking value works just as well as providing real value
Not sure why you are down voted. Marx argues that the secret to value is human labor, and capitalists exploit labor to capture surplus value.
Progress requires human labor. It doesn’t matter what government or ideology you use.
I think some folks, especially of the marxist POV, argue that labor is the work that you sell to make money. Progress and government require work. It’s not necessarily labor.
At least pure Capitalism promotes a free, open market rather than black markets.
LOL. Nothing about our markets are free.
No, it doesn’t. It promotes oligarchy.
And monopolies.
I had to give my head an actual shake - this can’t be a real comment. A normal, sentient human would not produce a sentence like this unironically.
The only explanation I can come up with is the OP is a first-year economics student.
Ever heard of Lysenko? The con artists and their bullshit are everywhere.
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You think that’s limited to capitalism?
Edit. Not sure why downvoted. But also, despite the controlled nature of the demo, didn’t apple kind of deliver on the marketing to an acceptable degree?
Also, think of the self proclaimed communist leaders projecting how they solve all society’s problems, or will do so, without any proof of concept.
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This is old news. We all know this. These were prototypes and still buggy but Steve knew he had to present it first, ASAP, to the public to earn and keep the excitement.
It was a gamble they worked. People were super exited and for months the anticipation built resulting in a strong launch with massive sales.
Even to this day, it’s that presentation they keeps the fans buying.
I wonder where we’d be if the iPhone was a flop. Android was well in development, but as an independent company, the success of the iPhone is what prompted Google to buy Android a year later
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Yes but the first android prototype was a blackberry clone with horizontal tiny screen and all physical keyboard. The iPhone changed everything even if on paper was worse (no apps, ultra closed, expensive on contract)
For example only for the specs the HTC universal was better in every single part and it launched two years earlier. Bigger screen, higher resolution, full keyboard, lots of buttons, stylus, 3g modem, expandable memory, replaceable battery, an operating system that allowed to install any app. But then the user experience…
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I don’t really think so. Google took another two years to release the HTC dream and at release was shipped in beta. If they were already developing a “touch first” handset it wouldn’t have been that long. They shipped the device without an on screen keyboard! It came only later with updates
And the start menù of win mobile 6.5 with the nice hexagons was just a nice menu, the rest of the os still required stylus and tiny buttons on those terrible resistive touch screens
Android’s interface was all BlackBerry in terms of UI too. The full touch control came after iPhones launch.
Symbian to this day. It would be hell.
Phone I remember using Symbian on my N95. It was really pushed to the limits on that phone and it showed
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Oh no, stop the presses! They missed a C! ⚠️ Their whole argument is invalid!
Every tech demo ever is fake, with the possible exception of the original Cybertruck demo, but I suspect even that one just wasn’t faked very well.
This, all they look for is a poc to prove that its possible then they can sell that to fund the actual development
Apple had already done 30 years of development (starting with ARM and NeXT) when he did this keynote, and the product shipped a few months later. It might have been barely ready for the demo - but it wasn’t that far off.
People laughed their assess off at Bill Gates’s epic failed demo of usb on windows 95. Live on stage he plugged in a peripheral and the machine blue screened. No way in hell would Jobs have taken that risk.
was this the one? (Windows 98) https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=yeUyxjLhAxU
This article is terribly written and seems to repeat itself a bit. Almost seems like it was written by a GPT system.
Odds are, it was.
so it was like every demo ever? k
This is how all demos used to be. If the author/publisher of the ai prompt wasnt born less than 20 years ago they would know this
Used to be?
Even as early as a few years ago, game demos at E3 were extremely controlled environments to avoid the journalist player crashing the game.
I’ve been at Gamescom once where we considered backup consoles and HDMI switches in the cable aisle to ensure we could rapidly switch onto a running game when the first instance crashed. Stability improved enough that it wasn’t required in the end but yeah, software for trade shows was always hot as hell.
I have a hard time even figuring out what the issue here is? it’d be one thing if the first iPhone shipped and was riddled with bugs and promised/demoed features weren’t there, but that wasn’t the case. Launched more or less rock solid, and iPhoneOS 1.0 (as it was called then) was far from the buggiest wide release.
Yeah. Am I supposed to be upset by this? Fuggen thing worked when it shipped. Are people angry that the marketing campaign started before every single engineering problem was solved? Why?
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Why?
Because they’ve never solved a complex problem, or accomplished anything that took the conscious coordination of multiple people.
That is easily the dumbest thing I’ve read today.
Used to be? Why did I just demo a Potemkin village and get drunk in the middle of the week?
Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂
“You’ll cum within 40 seconds by using this iPhone.”
Is… Is that something people want?
You don’t want to cum within 40 seconds every time you use your phone?
Are you some kind of prude?
I would switch to apple if that was a feature 🤷♂️ just saying
yes
Can confirm. Worked at BioWare for ten years. They did a presentation at some big release event and they had the pc off stage with a pan of ice and a fan directly blowing on the open pc. Mmmhm it totally won’t melt your pc! They eventually fixed it, but video game announcement trailers are total smoke and mirrors typically.
Find a demo that Apple/Jobs didn’t fake. He was infamous for this shit.
Most top level shit is.
While it’s a mistake to fake what you can’t build (I have cautionary tales about folks that did that), faking what you can and will build in order to build momentum to launch is not as uncommon as people might think.
Reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes. She really really believed it would be built. She just needed more time and money. Sometimes it’s a challenge to accept a failure, and move on.
“Demo magic”, it’s everywhere. Always has been, always will be.
Hey… at least the ruse worked…
That was on him for going out the script. He could have made a cult like Apple.
Instead he did whatever the hell this is
Somehow it still has a cult like Apple
i think Tesla’s and Elons cult is gonna be much different, he has succesfully alienated most of the so called “woke liberal” crowd with his fascists free speech absolutist sex offender shit, and then right wingers wont purchase his shit because they deny climate change and want their gas guzzlers, so he is stuck with the niche, crypto fun tech bros to worship him and his shitty “cars”
And he elegantly timef his shit to alienate his main purchase demographics to be at the time when the big automakers start coming out with their own offerings
Tesla will be a charging provider at best in a decade if they survive all the class action lawsuits over his fake claims that is
I love this bumper sticker:
always has been… do people only notice it when main main stream media covers it?
That is the one single example when a product was unveiled on stage and the presenter perfectly expressed my feelings on it.
honestly selling a product based on a prototype is really common
Same with using a custom, presentation-only UI.
They wanted to show what it could do in a perfect setting, so they would have connected it to a remote system in the back. You never trust tech to work flawlessly for a presentation as the risk is too high.
You got to say he was a master bullshitter, but he had some miracle workers engineers that made it happen.
His gift was the gift of gab, and he was an asshole, but I will give him credit for co-founding Apple and for the NeXT and Pixar.
I think the NeXT was the most enjoyable desktop computing experience I’ve had in my life.
In my career, I’ve learnt the hard way that every crowning achievement starts with a bullshitter being cursed by a bunch of engineers - the very same engineers who years later laud the bullshitter as the person with the tenacity to drive them to achieve greatness.
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Jobs definitely pushed engineers to work harder than they would have otherwise.
For example he complained the first prototype iPod was too bulky. And when they said it can’t possibly be made any smaller he tossed it in a fish tank and pointed at the bubbles as proof that it could be made smaller - the prototype was full of empty space/air.
There have been some detailed stories from the engineer that invented the first small touch screen keyboard that actually worked well, as part of a larger team that worked their asses off repeatedly being told their keyboard wasn’t good enough over and over. Steve was so unhappy with the early iterations that he was going to scrap the entire iPhone project unless they could fix it on a short deadline. From the stories it was clearly an extremely stressful project, with engineers pulled off other products to try to get the keyboard to work, but they cracked it - with a complex system that algorithmically (and invisibly) adjusted the size of each key based on english language patterns.
Even that wasn’t good enough. Steve gave it the all clear to ship that keyboard but years after the release he sent them back to start over from scratch. iPhone keyboards didn’t work like that for long. The latest version uses a scaled down version of a Large Language Model (Apple calls it a “Transformer-powered” that learns not just from english (or whatever language) but also your personal typing habits.
Ken Kocienda, the engineer who led the team that created the original iPhone keyboard and predictive text system, wrote a book titled “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs.” So there’s at least one real engineer for you who speaks highly of Jobs.
They aren’t nameless. They write books and go on podcasts, their thoughts on Jobs are available to us. Plenty of them praise Jobs for driving them to do their best work.
Be careful, you’re stepping out of the “all bosses are capitalist, exploitative assholes and if you aren’t out in the field ploughing, you’ll be next against the wall in our cultural revolution”-zone that’s considered acceptable on Lemmy.
JdW clearly thought not very much of my thoughts and someone decided the name-calling warranted a removal. That said, I’ve responded to JdW with a direct message to share some examples I’ve been part of in my time. I do believe it’s a pattern you come to recognise after 20+ years in software development.
what’s your career?
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Software development. I’ve been on both sides of the equation I’m describing above, many times. Looking back, a large part of the achievements I’ve been fortunate to be part of started with someone who said “we can totally do it” while we, the team, were mouthing “how the fuck are we going to do that?!”.
But you find a way, usually. That’s all I’m saying.
Found the bullshitter
