• 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.
Negative hype can kill a product that could have been good.
Positive false hype can deceive people into wasting money.
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.
And they shouldn’t. It’s just another way of saying “people acting rationally based on truthful information”
Many good products never made it to market because of insufficiently good perception.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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’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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Demos are haunted.
It’d be nice if you could show off a product that’s about to launch, and have it Just Work under what should be controlled conditions. But it never does. It never fucking does. The little electronic bastards get infested with gremlins the moment you expose them to an audience.
Having things break onstage isn’t necessarily any more representative than showing off what’ it’s supposed to do. It can leave people thinking the product is hopelessly buggy, when really it’s a rare or mild problem.
None of this is comparable to Tesla’s outright fraud.
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”.
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.
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.
Fake it till you make it?
The final goal in life: the eternal slumber.
What’s the lesson?
You can’t take it with you.
Also, if you have cancer, go to a doctor.
Not me - I’m learning from Steve’s mistake.
Dead people should be shot at birth
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 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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Ever heard of Lysenko? The con artists and their bullshit are everywhere.
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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.
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.
Used to be? Why did I just demo a Potemkin village and get drunk in the middle of the week?
so it was like every demo ever? k
“Demo magic”, it’s everywhere. Always has been, always will be.
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.
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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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.
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.
Shit take
what’s your career?
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?
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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.
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.
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)
