• 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.
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.
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?
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.
Strictly for presentation ahead of time I think it’s borderline.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a37359183/tesla-robot-human-in-spandex/
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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
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?
The way Apple does things is insane, but they weren’t selling iPhones yet.
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
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:
Happy will it be if our [decisions] should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.
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.
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.
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.
Even more worth a laugh is the Surface presentation where both the presentation model and the backup froze within a minute of each other.
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.
Dead people should be shot at birth
Not me - I’m learning from Steve’s mistake.
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.
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
Google bought Android in 2005. The iPhone was announced in 2007. The iPhone didn’t have anything to do with Google and Android. Google had a slower hardware start because it has to convince companies to switch from making Windows Phones to Android Phones.
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)
No, that is Steve Job’s attempt to having re-write history to make Apple look better. The truth is, the prototype you are referring to was called “Sooner”, but at the same time, they were making a prototype called “Dream” (in 2006) that was a full touchscreen.
https://www.osnews.com/story/27481/sooner-prototype-dropped-well-before-the-iphone-announcement/
On top of this, phones were already moving to full touch screens. Windows Mobile 2005 was designed for touchscreen only (MS attempt was the Start menu on the bottom), but it wasn’t a requirement and companies wanted to play it safe. After that came the LG Prada which was a full touchscreen phone.
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!
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.
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.
No, it doesn’t. It promotes oligarchy.
And monopolies.
LOL. Nothing about our markets are free.
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.
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.
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 …
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
Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂
“You’ll cum within 40 seconds by using this iPhone.”
Is… Is that something people want?
I would switch to apple if that was a feature 🤷♂️ just saying
You don’t want to cum within 40 seconds every time you use your phone?
Are you some kind of prude?
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.
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?
I’m not upset at all. Because I understand. But maybe they are upset they promised something they didn’t know they could deliver.
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?
“Demo magic”, it’s everywhere. Always has been, always will be.
so it was like every demo ever? k
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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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.
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.
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
