• 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.
Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂
“You’ll cum within 40 seconds by using this iPhone.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
