• 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.
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
At least pure Capitalism promotes a free, open market rather than black markets.
LOL. Nothing about our markets are free.
No, it doesn’t. It promotes oligarchy.
And monopolies.
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.
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.
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
deleted
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.
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.
“Demo magic”, it’s everywhere. Always has been, always will be.
Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂
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.
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.
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:
That is the one single example when a product was unveiled on stage and the presenter perfectly expressed my feelings on it.
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 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?
Why?
Because they’ve never solved a complex problem, or accomplished anything that took the conscious coordination of multiple people.
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.
That’s a load of bull. None of those nameless Apple engineers that really engineered all that Apple crap lauded Jobs, that was only media and sycophants like you.
I dare you to name one real life instance in “your career” when -named- engineers were happy with marketing bozo’s taking credit for their work and actual genius. You can’t as it never happened in the history of time.
The actual arrogance to suggest that those poor engineers should have been happy that someone was there to "teel them what to do. Wow. Just wow. Maybe leave your mom’s basement and stop sniffing the glue for a day this weekend…
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.
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.
Found the bullshitter
And then when you have issues with this kind of stuff when your own managers do it, they’ll just turn to you and say, “you don’t understand how business works”
You’re right, yes, business is a field made for liars.
Had this on Friday.
- Boss: Have we hit the milestone?
- Me: No, our performance is low and we don’t know why? We need to analyse it.
- Boss: …but we’ve done what we said we’d do. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over some metric. I think we’ve should say we’ve made it.
Net result is that we’ve pushed a major problem into the next phase without giving ourselves more time to do anything about it. …and people wonder why projects are “late” at the last moment.
“The Mythical Man-Month” is a book written in the 70s based on experiences from software development in the 60s, and project managers still cling to the myths about project planning it debunked conclusively.
This is a success because we said so.
Hey, those executives worked very hard on their coloring sheets in business school!
Why is this published now as news when every one of these anecdotes was published over a decade ago?
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.
Reminds me of this: http://toastycode.com/besavers/buynow.html
