Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software
(finance.yahoo.com)
from AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 16 Dec 2023 17:52
https://programming.dev/post/7339673
from AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 16 Dec 2023 17:52
https://programming.dev/post/7339673
• 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.
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This is old news, and perfectly normal for stage work.
I know it’s already normalized, but…
Maybe it’s just me, but maybe we shouldn’t be normalizing outright deceiving people when you’re selling a product.
How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
Just because it’s “perfectly normal” doesn’t make it okay to peddle propaganda and lie to people for profit.
It’s like the Tesla “robot” that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don’t exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?
I mean holy fuck it’s like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days… Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.
It’s all fucking bonkers, man. We’ve just allowed snake-oil salesmen to rule the roost. The bigger the lie, the bigger the profit.
Oh, I agree with you! And I’m sure we can have this discussion about almost any current product launch, too.
If when they ship the actual thing to the customer it’s not like they claimed then it’s fraud (or “false advertising” which is the lenient version).
Strictly for presentation ahead of time I think it’s borderline. Negative hype can kill a product that could have been good. Sure, complete honesty would be ideal, but if you say “well it sucks right now but we promise it will be ok when you buy it”, not many people would rush to order one. Many good products never made it to market because of insufficiently good perception. On the flip side, creating positive hype out of smoke and mirrors can be used to kill a competitor’s product for no good reason, so it’s not quite ok either.
Positive false hype can deceive people into wasting money.
And they shouldn’t. It’s just another way of saying “people acting rationally based on truthful information”
That should be a separate issue. It’s not the only available path, just one often taken because it’s the most forgiving of shoddy business practices, doesn’t justify its existence, either.
I think people are starting to realize the depth of corporate deception and bad-faith practices and how that affects everyone at large, and so they’re rightly tired of them and trying to reset it all back to simple, effective, and fair ethical standards.
I disagree, I think this is equally as bad. These presentations are still false advertising, just to a different audience.
These presentations are selling investors and press and attention on something that doesn’t exist yet. Sure, sometimes it works out where the product works, but other times, it’s wasted money from investors and attention from the public that wasn’t warranted.
I don’t see this any differently than the current shit show with The Day Before. Both are promising smoke and mirrors. Apple succeeded and is praised and people are here defending it saying it’s okay. The Day Before didn’t, and everyone’s at their throats saying it shouldn’t be allowed and that they should be sued for false advertising and for the amount of time wasted on hype for something that never came.
Beeper stopped charging customers for the time Apple broke their app.
So each time Apple breaks it, they have to stop charging customers? Sounds like a real winning business plan to lose money each time you need to code up a new solution to the original problem. /s
That shows they actually care about billing their users fairly. They lost some money but gained some trust, just like how Apple would’ve lost some money if they didn’t fake their demo
You sound fun
I agree, but what’s more, I am not trying to defend the behavior of Jobs here. But…to me anyway there is a material difference between say this, where the product did live up to the demo ultimately. In this case the demo was done on pre-release versions and so problems were expected and planned for.
Contrast this with say the cyber truck launch. Similar situation but 1. they failed to properly anticipate and plan for failure (broken window?) and 2. they made promises about wishes and desires, because the delivered product thus far does not live up to the promises.
The whole behavior is shitty to be sure, but I’d be ok going back to demos about planned yet achievable and deliverable features.
That’s gambling.
I think that’s kind of rhe point of these sorts to demos to begin with.
The company says we’re developing a product that, we are not ready to ship today, but will be this awesome. Give us some money and you can see how awesome it will be.
I generally assume that anything a company says about a product/service that is not shipping today is the best possible spin on the best version of what they’d like to sell. What you buy probably won’t be what is shown as an early demo
Just because you’ve adapted to the lies doesn’t make them ok, nor the best version of what is possible
I had to look up the robot one. I think they tried to get away with it actually being the robot, but since everyone saw through it, they went another route. lmao. It was supposed to be here end of last year too, where is it?
www.autoweek.com/…/tesla-robot-human-in-spandex/
Eh I think it’s fine because they weren’t selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that’s fine.
Who’s normalizing it?
I have exactly zero control over what these people do. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and I have fuck all to do with it.
And don’t tell me we have influence en masse. If that were true, then this stuff wouldn’t be happening. Quite the opposite, clearly most people don’t want to look past the smoke and mirrors for the stuff they’re hyped about. (We’re all susceptible to this kind of thing).
A quote from 230+ years ago kind of sums it up nicely:
He’s talking about public good, but you could insert any subject, eg. Perspective on a sales presentation (all of them are lies, to greater and lesser degrees).
I’m sure I could find similar quotes from the Stoics (~1000 years ago), Sun Tzu (~1900 years ago) or even Hammurabi (~3800 years ago), showing this ain’t new. It’s part of human nature.
Liars gonna lie, telling myself I can change that is just delusion, which gets me nowhere.
The way Apple does things is insane, but they weren’t selling iPhones yet.
It’s not false advertising because it did everything it was advertised to do in the introductory demo when it went on sale six months later. Google is the one faking their demos.
There’s a very simple reason… The world is absurd, and we’ve designed an idiotic financial system full of issues
Here’s the thing… If Apple didn’t fool investors into giving them money, they might not have had the money to get through the difficult problem of getting to a production chain. And if Apple was honest and Google staged their demo, investors are going to be drawn to the party faking it
Obviously, there’s many problems with this, and the fact that they can just cash out and never deliver cough Tesla cough. There’s also the issue that this makes marketing and hype far more monetarily valuable than actual performance… It doesn’t matter to investors if Tesla or Apple lies, they made real money if they time it correctly
The government is supposed to put boundaries on this kind of behavior, because if anyone does this, it lets scammers take resources that should go to companies playing honestly and actually making things
But know what else produces extreme return on investment? Spending money to shape regulations
For Apple, we can stop right here, the product worked as described. Apple did the demo, and then released the things they said they would in the time they said they would.
Snake oil salesman in the dictionary should just be updated to a picture of Elon Musk. Elon has a long track record of saying shit and not doing it, whether that’s full self driving, cybertruck (well, that finally came out), solving world hunger, etc.
Yeah, I totally agree.
It would absolutely have been false advertising if the first iPhone hadn’t been the absolute phenomenon that it was. That’s literally how simple it is. Apple delivered.
Maybe a demo should be just that; not a magic show. Normalizing deception for profit doesn’t seem like a healthy thing for anyone, but that’s only because I** didn’t own any stock in apple back then. Edit: Yes, I am still salty about the purchasing Starfield also
Eh I think it’s fine because they weren’t selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that’s fine.
Yeah I think the industry learned from Bill Gates' flub when demoing Win98.
For those too young, it bluescreened and crashed on a giant projector screen in front of thousands of people when they plugged in a scanner to demonstrate "plug and play".
Even more worth a laugh is the Surface presentation where both the presentation model and the backup froze within a minute of each other.
That was an early beta of Win95, very iconic. He famously closed the laptop, smiled, and said “I guess that’s why we’re not shipping yet.”
And yes, that’s exactly the kind of situation you want to avoid on stage.
Right. You definitely want to avoid that because Bill Gates is a billionaire and Windows still dominates the market. Looks like Microsoft paid a heavy price for that transparency.
Okay, how are we all seeing some moral downfall of Steve Jobs here? I mean... Perhaps we should just see what's shown at such events realistically. I mean, who wouldn't show their product from the best side possible? So they faked some reception. Of course they want younto see the "optimal case", right? Same goes for swapping Devices in case of some failure. When they show their device, they want to show what it will be like, so they will not let you see a ton of bugs that are about to be fixed for the release anyway.
Besides: they cannot deceptively, promise you fake stuff and people will be lead into erroneous decisions by them. Quite the opposite. Think about it: anyone who actually watches those presentations is not your standard customer, right? They'll be invested or knowledgeable anyway. So if they promise you utter bullshit, people will notice your lies immediately. Tests will chide you for it, people will distrust you, sales will go down. So don't assume that any beautification of the product at such presentations will lead poor, uninformed customers to buy the thing. Quite the opposite. They will more likely not hear too much about the presentation until the "they lied!" Cries start.
Considering I was present at several Microsoft and other vendor events where they laughed their way through blue screens and other crashes, I'm perfectly OK saying Apple did something bad.
no downfall for sj, pretty standard behavior from him. it was absolutely normal for him to deceive people. as for all billionaires. how do you think they make those riches?
Say it isn’t so.
Anyways.
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 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.
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.
Windows Phone:
Android:
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:
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”:
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.
Windows Phone seven was three years away from unveiling and nearly 4 from release.
They didn’t fake full signal strength they had AT&T( I think) bring in a full blown portable GSM transmitter
…so they faked it.
Well that’s where I’ve been going wrong in my career. I have worked for 2 startup companies, who faked product demos, in software.
I’d come from corporate background, where it was all fairly standard off the shelf software we sold and implemented. Not above the odd white lie, but the products could do what they claimed.
In the startups, the first occasion I did a presentation on a laptop. I was new to the company, had a couple of days training. The demo went great, the client loved it. Since I would also be managing the systems integration, I asked the devs how exactly x talked to y - and they said it didn’t yet, I’d just shown a simulation. Looking back I was naive, but I quit at the end of the week . I had no idea it was not uncommon.
I think people outside tech have no idea how common place this is.
My company was hired to consult on a startup in the financial industry, a product for banks, that was having bad tech debt and dirty code problems.
We were on site for a couple of months, pairing with the engineers and interviewing management.
One of the rules we recommended they implement was that the CEO (who was the sales staff) was not allowed to sell features that weren’t working yet.
The eliminated ultra tight surprise deadlines on new features, and enabled the engineering team to take it easy and produce better code at a deliberate pace.
Another rule was that there was one release per week, and no more.
That’s amazing they were able to pull that off
Agreed that it’s pretty cool. The vast majority of on-stage demos like this are faked, but it’s not usually because they aren’t long enough into development that they just can’t do it any other way. And as long as what they show is what you get, which is the case here, I think it’s fine.
so it was like every demo ever? k
Why is this published now as news when every one of these anecdotes was published over a decade ago? This story leaves out all the better juicy details.
wow and there I was demonstrating my senior project robot, sober, fixing network connectivity issue (we didn’t test in the lecture hall… oops) and successfully applying multiple code fixes on the fly while the audience and all my professors looked on
But these guys are the real experts
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.
This isn’t news, but yes - people forget that Steve Jobs was just as dodgy and a bit unhinged as Elon Musk now is.
He certainly had issues, but Musks issues absolutely eclipse Jobs by a large margin.
I think given time and the advent of social media Jobs would have ended in the same bucket.
Again, the way they act, the things they do and say are almost mirrors to one another.
When Steve Jobs died, social media was already around. Steve Jobs was 56 when he died. We saw what Steve Jobs became already. And I just do not see any meaningful similarities in their personalities.
Maybe it’s worth reading their biographies. Here’s a very short version: businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-steve-jobs-simi…
But having read both, it’s very easy to see how similar they are. They both treated employees like shit, demanded perfection, and sought to change the world with innovative products.
Obviously they’re not identical, but there’s waaay more similarities than not.
The headline is pretty negative but the actual article is a pretty insightful look at the behind-the-scenes of the demo and how they made it work.
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? Why did I just demo a Potemkin village and get drunk in the middle of the week?
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?
I’m not upset at all. Because I understand. But maybe they are upset they promised something they didn’t know they could deliver.
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.
Not saying all these necessarily apply to Steve jobs but I really hate how capitalism gratifies liars, fakers, cheaters, egomaniacs, narcissists, psychopaths and selfish exploiters in general.
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.
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.
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
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.
It incentivises producing a perceived value. So faking value works just as well as providing real value
Ever heard of Lysenko? The con artists and their bullshit are everywhere.
Very interesting, thank you for the hint. However, I would argue that Lysenko(ism) being successful in socialist Russia was an unintended result of authoritarian Idiocracy, while in capitalism the systematic promotion of con artists is a “feature”. Sorry Adam Smith but you were quite naïve …
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.
No, it’s not limited to capitalism of course but it’s especially rewarded in capitalism. I did not downvote though, in fact I upvoted because your comment is fine to me and it’s a legitimate question.
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.
You got to say he was a master bullshitter, but he had some miracle workers engineers that made it happen.
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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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.
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.
Yes he was a dick. Yay capitalism
When a keyboard is nearly impossible to type on - calling that out isn’t being a dick. It’s just being honest.
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It is a quite well known fact that Steve Jobs was an arrogant prick. He certainly knew it and thought it was a good thing. ITT: people butthurt that anyone would suggest it’s not
Is a Drill Instructor a dick or is he trying to push you to be better?! It’s more complicated that just “dicks and saints”.
Yes, they 100% are a dick if they’re anything like the character in full metal jacket
Yes ok, but I didn’t mention FMJ, you did.
And? That’s a popular conception of the role for a reason
If you, or others, choose to interpret my use of the words “drill instructor” as “that guy from FMJ [a fiction film about the US army 60 years ago]”, I can see why confusion arises.
Let’s forget about drill instructors - it was an allegory and if the allegory didn’t work to serve the point I’m actually trying to make, let’s say “personal trainer” instead. Why do personal trainers exist? One of the clear reasons is that they help you exceed what you thought possible.
And all I’m saying is that I’ve been working on dev teams where you end up achieving more than you thought you could because there’s some separation between those who dream up features and those who build them.
People were discussing Jobs being a nightmare to work for, which is honestly very well documented. The question is, is it justified? I say no not really. Being a good leader doesn’t require being an asshole. You seem to be saying it IS justified.
The analogy of a drill instructor worked perfectly I thought, since that stereotype exists for a reason. Outside the movie, that phrase is commonly used as shorthand for an uptight mean hardass. One example of a real story supporting that: my grandfather fought in WW2 and had horror stories about his, including getting kicked in the mouth by them.
Now you’re backpedaling and comparing Jobs to a personal trainer. Nah, Jobs was an asshole and simping for him is weird.
Shit take
what’s your career?
Undertaker
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.
In other words, you’ve been the shitty boss like I had who would make unrealistic promises to clients and then pretend it’s all okay you made everyone work all weekend because hey, you bought them pizza and they NEED your Jobs-like genius to achieve their best 🙄
Wow, assume much?
Found the bullshitter
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.
So basically that scammer woman that wanted to be Steve jobs did a better job at it that we had been led to believe?
Nah, cause she made the mistake of ripping off rich people. That’s illegal.
Not even close. Jobs had a proof of concept that actually worked.
And look where he is now. Dead. Lesson learned.
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.
That’s where all of us are headed. What’s the lesson?
Not me - I’m learning from Steve’s mistake.
Fake it till you make it?
The final goal in life: the eternal slumber.
But are we dead right now, like Steve is? No.
Just give it time.
You can’t take it with you.
Also, if you have cancer, go to a doctor.
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
Dead people should be shot at birth
Slow down your thinking and consider this: why would any practical person fully develop something without getting market feedback and understanding demand?
This is by the book “Preto-typing”. You can frame it as lying, but the reality is Apple had faith that all of the “faked” features in the demonstration would be fully developed before launch.
IBM did something similar before voice-to-text existed. They faked the technology during market research and discovered that people didn’t enjoy speaking to their computer as much as initially thought. It showed them that they could better invest that money elsewhere.
It would make zero sense and be a foolish use of capital to fully develop a product that complex and expensive without understanding market preferences.
This is a non-story, rage-bait headline.
It’s also been a known thing ever since the demo occurred. This isn’t news, it’s been a known thing for basically the last 15 years.
99.5% of all on-stage demos have fake elements. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.
The problem in all this for me, is that examples like Jobs are pointed to as examples of why this should be done (your entire post basically), and then we have examples like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos who basically couldn’t deliver the technology and kept the “lie” going.
How does one know they can eventually deliver? In your post, you basically assume the problem is solvable with capital. With some promised tech (like Theranos), at what point does “there is a necessary need to gauge the publics interest in a product to evaluate if capital needs to be invested in this space” turn into fraud if the product turns out to be unattainable? (Think cancer cures, limb regeneration, etc)
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) vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=yeUyxjLhAxU
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
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
Android’s interface was all BlackBerry in terms of UI too. The full touch control came after iPhones launch.
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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
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Oh no, stop the presses! They missed a C! ⚠️ Their whole argument is invalid!
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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.
And then when you have issues with this kind of stuff when your own managers do it, they’ll just turn to you and say, “you don’t understand how business works”
You’re right, yes, business is a field made for liars.
Had this on Friday.
Net result is that we’ve pushed a major problem into the next phase without giving ourselves more time to do anything about it. …and people wonder why projects are “late” at the last moment.
This is a success because we said so.
“The Mythical Man-Month” is a book written in the 70s based on experiences from software development in the 60s, and project managers still cling to the myths about project planning it debunked conclusively.
Hey, those executives worked very hard on their coloring sheets in business school!
“Demo magic”, it’s everywhere. Always has been, always will be.
Hey… at least the ruse worked…
<img alt="" src="https://smartcdn.gprod.postmedia.digital/nationalpost/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ezgif.com-optimize-2-1.gif">
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:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/34996ec7-0f83-4d71-9a42-6f020186339c.png">
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.
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.
Reminds me of this: toastycode.com/besavers/buynow.html
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.
Fragile prototypes? And then he decided not to do anything about it and sell them as is?
I will never forgive the world for buying into his overhyped inferior product and get hailed as a genius for it.
Bring back buttons, and screens that don’t shatter from being sneezed on.
Yeah, and what’s up with these transistors? I want vacuum tubes in my iPhone!
Buttons? Ew.
I have consistently been Luddish about moves like this (removign physical keyboard, eliminating phone jack, even the tablet form factor in general) but I think I was mostly wrong, and monimizing hardware features in favor of software seems to improve user experience.
I only disagree with the removal of 3.5mm and microSD ports, and removable batteries. Imo the ports are both 100% needed, and the battery would be nice though I understand waterproofing is important. I’m fine with screens and no physical keys, though I would like a camera cover switch for at least one of the two cameras if possible, like laptops are starting to have.
Like what blackberry did?
I think it is normal since the software wasnt ready for production yet; at work we also have forks and forks of forks just to demo new features for people. At the end he did deliver a working product unlike many game devs these days.