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How Steve Jobs Made the iPhone with Smoke & Mirrors


Marc Wielage

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Great story in the current issue of The New York Times on the first iPhone demo from 2007. It turns out that the phone barely worked, a lot of the demo was rigged, and backstage, the Apple engineers were terrified that all or part of the demo would blow up in everybody's faces. Incredibly, the (carefully staged and planned) demo went off perfectly, Steve Jobs was happy, and the iPhone went on to become one of the greatest successes in electronics history. It took 2-1/2 years of R&D and more than $150 million just to create the first prototype, according to the article.

 

Full story here:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

and a shorter rundown here:

 

http://gizmodo.com/the-iphones-first-demo-was-buggy-as-hell-1441324523

 

Fascinating inside details. It's amazing the damned thing ever came together at all! People forget how revolutionary this was, more than 6-1/2 years ago...

 

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Yes, I worked on the intro videos etc for the orig iPhone, and there was a continual raging debate re what they should say in the script re what was actually going to work and what was just for show--for later development.  Most of the time what you see in those videos is a dummy phone.  There were days in which we did a lot of sitting around because they couldn't anything on the phone to work.

 

philp

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Phil, I still remember the time Bill Gates did a big Windows demo at CES, flogging "the convergence of computers and home theater" in front of thousands of people at the Vegas Convention Center in 2005, and the system crashed twice. Blue screen of death. God, what a mess. 

 

Soon after that, at I think a Macworld keynote, Jobs was showing off an iMac (I think it was)...part way through the demo, the iMac he was using "crashed." Jobs jumped to another iMac and said something like, "well WE were prepared in case something went wrong." Everyone knew what he was referring to, so huge applause from 5,000 or however many Macheads.

 

But I always wondered if the machine really crashed or if that was a planned stunt to Steve could get out the dig at Microsoft. I'd wager it was a planned stunt.

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