Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software — The Engineers Were So Nervous They Got Drunk During Presentation To Calm Their Nerves
finance.yahoo.com
The late Steve Jobs, renowned for his innovative vision at Apple Inc., faced a unique challenge in 2007 with the first iPhone presentation. The device was a groundbreaking concept, but it wasn't ready for a public debut. Jobs, known for pushing boundaries, orchestrated a presentation that was more of an artful illusion than a demonstration of a fully functional product. Jobs insisted on a live presentation, deviating from the norm of prerecorded demonstrations common in Silicon Valley. To ensure

• 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.

  • abhibeckert@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Mbourgon everywhere@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      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.