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And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

370 points by apress 13y ago

JunkDNA 13y ago
I always like stuff like this because you see that these people who knock it out of the park apparently effortlessly actually struggle like all the rest of us normal humans behind the scenes. They couldn't figure out how to make a touch screen, the processor wasn't available, Sir Ive's case was impermeable to RF, the LCD was causing interference on the multitouch display, etc... This stuff is hard. Really, really hard. Any one technical obstacle could have killed the whole thing.
- tazjin 13y ago
  "But Apple just took existing parts and smashed them in a case!" I love articles like this, even though the people who need to read them the most don't have the attention span for them :-)
  - makomk 13y ago
    Reading the article, I think even Apple thought it was just a case of taking existing parts and smashing them in a case - until they actually tried doing it. A lot of the stuff Apple had problems with is almost certainly routine for the big existing phone players like HTC, Samsung, Nokia... I mean, Jobs and Ive didn't even realise that metal cases block radio waves, which is basically common knowledge. Many of their problems seem self-imposed in general - for example: "Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance." Apple could apparently get away with this, but I expect their development techniques would have killed lesser companies. Maybe, in some alternative universe where things worked out just a little differently, the iPhone killed Apple too rather than being their biggest success.
    - gibwell 13y ago
      I'm sure this can't be what you intended, but it sounds as though you just said that developing something like the iPhone is a matter of routine for companies like HTC, Samsung and Nokia, and that Apple only found it hard because of poor technique.
      - seiji 13y ago
        Some things are always hard, but doing them for the first time is harder. Building buildings is always difficult, but if you've done it ten times before, you know a lot of the caveats. If you're doing it for the first time, you'll go slower due to more learning-by-doing. Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
        leoc 13y ago
        > Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world. Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.) (It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electronic/dp/0465091180/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)
      - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
        Well I think it's obvious what he meant ... If true, tripping over obvious, common knowledge things like what materials block RF signals is not something you would see major cell phone players doing.
- underwater 13y ago
  When referring to a knight you use the subject's first name. So, Sir Jony.
  - ishansharma 13y ago
    Shouldn't it be Sir Jonathan then?
    - sudomal 13y ago
      Or just skip the subservient/traditional stuff and use their real name.
    - kmfrk 13y ago
      "Ser Jonathan", technically. :)
- binocarlos 13y ago
  Indeed - I think making all the hard work look effortless is the reward you get for doing the hard work. The mistake is to want people to see how difficult it all was - then things go to shit.
- sneak 13y ago
  I remember thinking during the reveal that that's a neat hack, the live digital video output from a phone that presumably is running bleeding edge software and drivers and whatnot. It's really mindblowing how well it all came together. Most teams in the world would not have pushed themselves that hard, I think.
hayksaakian 13y ago
Talk about literally "fake it till you make it" ----- (regarding the presentation) They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high.
- Aloha 13y ago
  Bringing a COW (Cell on Wheels) in seems like a reasonable precaution - you have a presentation with lots of people showing up, you want everything to work correctly.
  - hayksaakian 13y ago
    i included that line for context, i was referring specifically to the "displays 5 bars regardless of actual signal strength" note
    - Aloha 13y ago
      I can see that as a reasonable precaution in a demo device. It all depends on the level of showmanship you want.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Yeah, I don't really begrudge them there. As anyone who's ever had to do a tech demo should know, tech demos are the living embodiment of Murphy's Law.
    - xerophtye 13y ago
      Happened to me at a Microsoft event. Me and my friend got up on stage to demo our Software and BAM!! it crashed :P right in front of a hall full of big shots!
ianstallings 13y ago
Reading this makes me think of Jobs as a Railroad baron of old. Kind of heartless, gruff, and willing to crush anyone in his way, but a guy with a vision so strong he will do anything. And it changed the world, it's hard to overstate that. I remember seeing the iPhone unveiled and thinking "It's cool, but will people really buy such an expensive phone?". I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. I also remember thinking about how they wanted all apps to be web-based. A disaster for certain I thought. The phone market was all over the place and brand loyalty was in short supply. I'd seen compaq go from dominating PDAs and nosedive off the cliff. Motorola took their brand loyalty (remember how many people had Razrs?) and went into hiding. Time and again I'd seen phone platforms rise and fall. I was skeptical. All I knew was one thing - I certainly wasn't going to buy one. Years later and I now program for iOS a lot. Everyday pretty much. I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it. I bought my first iPhone at version 4. Then I specifically bought my first Mac so I could use the SDK for that phone. I fell in love with the platform, in all its insane glory. I might move to another platform one day, but I can honestly say I never imagined this is what I would be working on.
- runjake 13y ago
  > I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. Just a few years before, people flocked to buy $599 Motorola RAZR flip phones on two years contracts. I saw the hordes lined up, myself. Next to that, the iPhone seems like a bargain
  - ianstallings 13y ago
    Wow, they were that much? No wonder I never had one. I guess the price point wasn't that crazy. I was just cheap!
    - alex_doom 13y ago
      Yeah the pricing has always been around that range for most high-end phones. I remember lusting after some European only Nokia's that were $800.
Aloha 13y ago
The technical details of the presentation are interesting, but less relevant than how well the device worked at launch. It worked. The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable device, it put everything that came before it to shame.
- jkubicek 13y ago
  And remember, the iPhone was the first phone with visual voicemail. It boggles the mind that we all had to deal with horrible audio menus for decades before Apple came along and strong-armed Cingular into fixing voicemail.
  - perishabledave 13y ago
    Amazing how backwards the industry is to have to be strong-armed into improving something. Visual voicemail is under appreciated.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Of course it hardly matters now. Nobody leaves me voicemail or listens to the voicemail I leave anymore.
  - RyJones 13y ago
    Audio voicemail increased ARPU and minutes/month/user, thus the resistance dropping it. Now that everyone is on flat-rate plans, burning minutes for voicemail access is unlikely to ever cost you money. Didn't use to be the case.
    - Greenisus 13y ago
      I'm not sure of this, but if I recall, voicemail minutes were free for me back then on Cingular.
- zmmmmm 13y ago
  > The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable device This is both true and a horrible rewriting of history. People loved their Blackberries. The term Crackberry was invented before the iPhone was even a rumor. And don't tell me it wasn't mainstream, it had taken over most of the business and government market. It was confined to those markets, but within those huge markets it was utterly mainstream. But even before that other people loved Palm devices. The capacitive touch screen was a clear advance - but don't tell me there was no "usable" device prior to that.
YOSPOS 13y ago
Keep this story in mind when idiots on the internet talk about a "rectangle with rounded corners".
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  I am not seeing what relevance this story has to patent disputes.
bitwize 13y ago
iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android. Now that Apple is making serious downmarket moves with the 5C, it may soon be time to rethink whether Android was ultimately successful at competing with Apple. Within two years, non-iPhone smartphones will be niche players with partisan user bases, but the bulk of mobile development will be once again for iOS.
- untog 13y ago
  iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android. They just released a new iPhone. It's probably fair to say that that will be a short-term bump that will flatten in good time. I think it's seriously disingenuous to describe the 5C as a "serious downmarket move". It's a token move at best, and doesn't get anywhere near the price point a "downmarket" device would require.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    I don't think it either a "serious downmarket move" or a "token". I think it is the iPod mini for the iPhone generation. It is the hint at the iPod strategy moving to the iPhone after all this time. I would imagine we are a generation or two from the actual downmarket move.
  - cremnob 13y ago
    They gained share on Android last quarter, which doesn't include their newly launched phones. Horace Dediu raised the idea that Android has peaked in the US a few months ago, and the latest numbers seem to back him up. http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/04/comscore-apple-gains-on-android-in-the-us-even-before-iphone-5s-and-5c-launch/ http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/04/comscore-apple-gains-on-androi... https://twitter.com/asymco/status/386207186801917952/photo/1 https://twitter.com/asymco/status/386207186801917952/photo/1
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    Based on the pricing we're seeing on the 5C (some offers for $50 or $100 less than announced price) Apple is putting some flexibility in its wholesale pricing to give third parties more wiggle room with the 5C. So it's by no means a "cheap" phone, but it's not as expensive as it first appears. As for Apple gaining market share in the US, I think what we've seen is that Android is starting to run out of feature phones to replace, so it's now in a fight for the high end space with Apple, which will probably see movement in both directions for a while. I suspect a significant portion of the iPhone market and a larger portion of the Android market is really just phones with touch screens -- these are people who don't buy apps or use most of their phones' capabilities. The "network" effects that will determine the fates of the ecosystems depend on people using their phones as computers rather than merely phones. In Europe recently Windows phone (i.e. Nokia) is doing very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out too.
mcenedella 13y ago
It's easy to forget how far Apple had already come by this point. I re-discovered this super-insulting dude asking an obnoxious question to Steve at WWDC 1997: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475
- r00fus 13y ago
  I love that silence he uses in formulating his reply.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  Who the hell was that jerkoff?
- lostlogin 13y ago
  Thanks. I like the hypothetical $10B a product might make. I expected him to make a funny and snarky shoot-down, the questioner but got a sympathetic and good answer.
- eropple 13y ago
  As `teovall noted, any particular reason you linked a version covered with SEO keywords with only a few views of the video instead of the one with 2.5 million (which has the exact same title but is remarkably lacking in SEO spam)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE is the original, for anyone who's curious.
valgaze 13y ago
The unsuccessful partnership with Motorola (& Cingular wireless) mentioned in the article was probably w/ the "Rokr" See press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cingular-Launch-Worlds-First-Mobile-Phone-with-iTunes.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cin...
plg 13y ago
"In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. They transformed the stodgy cellphone industry. " What other stodgy industry is there that Apple could easily disrupt? How about this: how does it make you feel when you use the DVR box that your cable / satellite company forces you to use, to watch tv? I know the answer for me. Seems like low hanging fruit with potentially enormous payoff for Apple.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  It's not low-hanging fruit. On the technology side Apple has actually built everything necessary (AppleTV + iTunes streaming) but the problem is dealing with the content silos. If Apple could it would simply license all the content and stream it to customers either for a standard price (e.g. $1.99 per episode of 480p programming, $2.99 per episode of 1080p) or via subscription (e.g. MLB/Netflix) or ad-supported (e.g. Hulu Plus). The only reason AppleTV isn't TV nirvana (at least in the US) is licensing issues. (BTW you can program an AppleTV to recognize any remote, so you can seamlessly make you TV remote also control your AppleTV, without even switching modes). In case you're wondering, the basic problem right now is that TV networks get paid about $2 (I did a bunch of back of envelope calculations, so I may be significantly off, but it's in this ballpark) in advertising per viewer-hour, so if a family of four watches an hour of TV, then the network gets about $8 in ad revenue. Apple is offering $1.40/h, and it's also messing with DVD sales and syndication so there's a big gap there. Now, I seriously doubt that the production company that makes the content gets much of that $8, so if Apple could deal with content producers directly...
  - plg 13y ago
    If Apple can convince the networks that they will be better off with Apple than with the local cable company, then Apple can win. I can't help but think that if Steve were still here, he could get it done (much like he did with the music companies for iTunes and the original iPod). I'm not so sure that the current crew at Apple has the right stuff. What I mean is, Steve would have said "this way is better. You can give me a bunch of reasons why you don't think it will happen, or you don't think it ought to happen, but I'm telling you that it is going to happen, and I am making it happen. Now are you with me or shall I run you over?" There were a million reasons why iTunes could never work. He made it work. I understand the reasons you list for why TV is not going to work. I just wish Steve were here to make it work.
ultimoo 13y ago
>> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. While scenic, the 280 is certainly not 'remarkably empty'. I make the commute from San Jose to SF everyday and wish I shared the enthusiasm of the author. Apologies for commenting on something completely orthogonal to the point of the OP.
- jfb 13y ago
  Traffic on 280 (and to a lesser degree 880) seems to track pretty closely how inflated the current SV bubble is.
- spartango 13y ago
  I grew up in the valley, and I can tell you that in 2007 the traffic on 280 and 101 going north in the morning was much lighter than it is today. As SF tech companies have grown dramatically in the last few years, so has the traffic. The same was true building up to 2001; after dotcom, the traffic went down dramatically. Of course, improvements to the highways and interchanges around that time made traffic feel even more sparse on the peninsula. Those post-dotcom days were sad; the reason there was less traffic was the unemployment of people you knew. You felt that everywhere you went.
- eliben 13y ago
  It's still emptier than most other freeways and expressways in the area, I think you'll agree. Even during the morning commute north, it's very reasonable except for maybe the 85 intersection (and before you get into SF, naturally). Compare that to the dreadful 101.
vonsydov 13y ago
I'm still on 4s with ios 5. don't use siri.
padmanabhan01 13y ago
Articles like this help to show all the work involved in the path from a vague idea to a finished product. That's the hard part. Guess that's why they get upset when some other company just sees the end product and just makes a clone of it, without having to face all the hurdles to arrive there from the initial idea..
- makomk 13y ago
  Except that the other companies have done essentially all of the hard work this article talks about themselves, and more, and have been doing it for years before Apple entered the smartphone market. I mean, many of Apple's problems were with stuff like baseband development and antenna placement which their competitors have been dealing with successfully since before the iPhone even entered development. If anything Apple were the ones that came along after other companies had done all the hard work and piggy-backed on their work whilst claiming the credit. Companies like Nokia and Motorola literally developed the technology that made mobile phones possible, and had to build stuff like phone radios in an era where no-one had ever done it before, whereas Apple could rely on pre-existing chips, software and design experience. Then Apple sued Motorola to stop them selling phones whilst insisting they didn't have to pay Motorola for the patents they'd obtained through doing all that pioneering work.
cbr 13y ago
"The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the United States." Great solution, but illegal. Did they get permission or just do it?
- MikeCapone 13y ago
  Better to be a pirate than join the Navy, I suppose...
- sounds 13y ago
  I'm guessing they didn't. (Has the statute of limitations passed or something?) Now obviously they could claim they shielded the Moscone center and only operated on channel 14 indoors. (The US bans channel 14 due to the frequency being used by satellite.) I think the FCC might still fine them, if there was a clear-cut case with hard evidence.
- sneak 13y ago
  It doesn't matter. Nobody went to jail and everyone bought an iPhone. Who cares?
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  They're real law breakers, aren't they. :)
daned 13y ago
I thought I had it tough as a Sales Engineer but I am a piker compared to these guys.
pinaceae 13y ago
i am glad to be old enough to remember the time before the iphone. seems like a stupid thing to say, right? but go to any tech forum and it seems like all of it is forgotten already, 2007 is kinda blurry and Apple producing smartphones completely normal. when the rumours started swirling about apple launching a phone people could not believe it. like at all. apple, the ipod guys, building a phone?! no way, what a joke. you had the photoshops of ipods with a dial, etc. analysts explaining why this was completely wrong, impossible and apple was doomed. same at the launch of the iPad. same at the launch of the iPod (less space than a nomad, no wifi, lame). what the fuck is a nomad one might say today. those great photoshops of steve holding a giant iphone to his ear, hilarious. an iPad, buhaha, bunch of retards at apple. but now the galaxy note makes perfect sense. to exactly the same neckbeards who laughed at apple's idiocy before. apple is indeed the most frustrating company. it somehow has defied gravity in the second jobs era and proven that large swaths of the tech world couldn't define taste and style if their life depended on it. and perfection, like the iphone launch, is a matter of style and taste.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  Let's not get too patriotic there, Apple introduced flops as well, see apple TV
  - Alphasite_ 13y ago
    I wouldn't call it a flop, Apple TV, Roku et, al. are all pretty decent and doing well enough for then selves,
  - shinratdr 13y ago
    I have, and do, all over the place. I don't know how you can consider the Apple TV a flop. The first generation one was built of OS X instead of iOS for reasons that this article makes very obvious but it hammered out a clear path for the future Apple TV. Much like the MacBook Air, it's really only a "flop" if you're talking about the first generation product and not the establishing of a product line. Neither took the world by storm, but they both launched a product category that was ill-defined at the time and Apple sells millions of both. There were internet connected set top boxes and ultraportables before the Apple TV and the MacBook Air, but there were only Smart TVs, Rokus, Google TVs, and Ultrabooks after. Maybe it's just me but establishing a successful and profitable product line that exists to this day hardly qualifies as a flop. Just a shaky first generation. Which, keep in mind, also applies to the iPod. IMO, the iPod can hardly be considered a flop. The iPod HiFi, THAT was a flop.
PhasmaFelis 13y ago
"Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall." "Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired." Christ, what an asshole.
- sneak 13y ago
  But holy fuck, what a phone. "You had me at scrolling."
forgottenpaswrd 13y ago
"The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened." What is interesting is that product-demo glitches happened all the time. We went to one presentation in which Steve had to ask for people not to use the Internet because they had not enough bandwidth. But mistakes were so "naturally handled" that people just did not care. I think Edison said, you will not be remembered by your mistakes, but from your successes.
- afterburner 13y ago
  Chamberlain?
chernevik 13y ago
The timing of the project launch is pretty remarkable. It seems that Jobs wanted to do this for some time, but was waiting and watching for technical feasibility. From the effort they had getting the demo to work, it seems that they launched the project something like immediately after the progress of the component technologies brought that feasibility into view. And even then they had to manage risks, and then they had to get the thing into production. And while that suggests some pretty deep technical savvy at executive levels, they still had heartburn over seemingly simple questions like "can you put radio waves through aluminum?" It seems to me that the genius of Jobs was 1) to envision customer experiences based on really remarkable extensions / integrations of existing tech and 2) to judge the moment when those visions had gone from "someday" to "now".
mistercow 13y ago
>What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is headed. As a former Apple fan, I actually find the iPhone's hemorrhaging of market share and Apple's uncertain future extremely encouraging. I always attributed the things I liked about Apple to their struggling underdog status. They lost that with the iPhone, and they've never been the same since. It will be fascinating to see if some of the old Apple shines through in the years to come.
- mercer 13y ago
  If you look at the general course of Apple, they've generally been quite consistent in their road map. I think the incredible success of the iPhone might cause a slump for a while, but then they'll just continue what they've been doing for a while: releasing good, high-end and profitable products and comfortably occupying multiple niches. Alternatively, they might create a few more iPhone- and iPad-like successes and continue ruling new and existing product categories. In both cases, they'll keep 'shining' for quite some time. If that stops, it'll suck for people like me who are fully invested in their ecosystem. That said, I switched to a Nexus 4 recently and it was surprisingly painless.
codeulike 13y ago
Watching the original iPhone unveil, it was pretty surprising to see all the Google love from Steve, and Eric Schmidt come bounding onto the stage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M
- abrowne 13y ago
  Maybe surprising now, post "thermonuclear war", but not for 2007.
siglesias 13y ago
Amusingly, there was one technical snafu during the presentation. Steve's clicker stopped responding [1]! Of course, the way he handled it, in my opinion, made the presentation that much better and that much more human. 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&t=1h14m39s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&...
yashg 13y ago
I always thought Apple took the iPod and added phone radio to it, then they took out the radio, made the screen big and called it iPad. Not anymore. This is interesting stuff.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
A nice reminder that the screen sharing built for the initial demo still doesn't exist without jailbreaking a device. :)
AndrewKemendo 13y ago
I think it is hilarious how Jobs basically reinvented the wheel when it came to operations security, when there have been major organizations doing secret things for decades that he could have pulled the lessons from.

370 points by apress 13y ago

I always like stuff like this because you see that these people who knock it out of the park apparently effortlessly actually struggle like all the rest of us normal humans behind the scenes. They couldn't figure out how to make a touch screen, the processor wasn't available, Sir Ive's case was impermeable to RF, the LCD was causing interference on the multitouch display, etc... This stuff is hard. Really, really hard. Any one technical obstacle could have killed the whole thing.

tazjin 13y ago
"But Apple just took existing parts and smashed them in a case!" I love articles like this, even though the people who need to read them the most don't have the attention span for them :-)
- makomk 13y ago
  Reading the article, I think even Apple thought it was just a case of taking existing parts and smashing them in a case - until they actually tried doing it. A lot of the stuff Apple had problems with is almost certainly routine for the big existing phone players like HTC, Samsung, Nokia... I mean, Jobs and Ive didn't even realise that metal cases block radio waves, which is basically common knowledge. Many of their problems seem self-imposed in general - for example: "Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance." Apple could apparently get away with this, but I expect their development techniques would have killed lesser companies. Maybe, in some alternative universe where things worked out just a little differently, the iPhone killed Apple too rather than being their biggest success.
  - gibwell 13y ago
    I'm sure this can't be what you intended, but it sounds as though you just said that developing something like the iPhone is a matter of routine for companies like HTC, Samsung and Nokia, and that Apple only found it hard because of poor technique.
    - seiji 13y ago
      Some things are always hard, but doing them for the first time is harder. Building buildings is always difficult, but if you've done it ten times before, you know a lot of the caveats. If you're doing it for the first time, you'll go slower due to more learning-by-doing. Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
      - leoc 13y ago
        > Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world. Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.) (It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electronic/dp/0465091180/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)
    - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      Well I think it's obvious what he meant ... If true, tripping over obvious, common knowledge things like what materials block RF signals is not something you would see major cell phone players doing.
underwater 13y ago
When referring to a knight you use the subject's first name. So, Sir Jony.
- ishansharma 13y ago
  Shouldn't it be Sir Jonathan then?
  - sudomal 13y ago
    Or just skip the subservient/traditional stuff and use their real name.
  - kmfrk 13y ago
    "Ser Jonathan", technically. :)
binocarlos 13y ago
Indeed - I think making all the hard work look effortless is the reward you get for doing the hard work. The mistake is to want people to see how difficult it all was - then things go to shit.
sneak 13y ago
I remember thinking during the reveal that that's a neat hack, the live digital video output from a phone that presumably is running bleeding edge software and drivers and whatnot. It's really mindblowing how well it all came together. Most teams in the world would not have pushed themselves that hard, I think.

hayksaakian 13y ago

Talk about literally "fake it till you make it" ----- (regarding the presentation) They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high.

Aloha 13y ago
Bringing a COW (Cell on Wheels) in seems like a reasonable precaution - you have a presentation with lots of people showing up, you want everything to work correctly.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  i included that line for context, i was referring specifically to the "displays 5 bars regardless of actual signal strength" note
  - Aloha 13y ago
    I can see that as a reasonable precaution in a demo device. It all depends on the level of showmanship you want.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Yeah, I don't really begrudge them there. As anyone who's ever had to do a tech demo should know, tech demos are the living embodiment of Murphy's Law.
  - xerophtye 13y ago
    Happened to me at a Microsoft event. Me and my friend got up on stage to demo our Software and BAM!! it crashed :P right in front of a hall full of big shots!

ianstallings 13y ago

Reading this makes me think of Jobs as a Railroad baron of old. Kind of heartless, gruff, and willing to crush anyone in his way, but a guy with a vision so strong he will do anything. And it changed the world, it's hard to overstate that. I remember seeing the iPhone unveiled and thinking "It's cool, but will people really buy such an expensive phone?". I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. I also remember thinking about how they wanted all apps to be web-based. A disaster for certain I thought. The phone market was all over the place and brand loyalty was in short supply. I'd seen compaq go from dominating PDAs and nosedive off the cliff. Motorola took their brand loyalty (remember how many people had Razrs?) and went into hiding. Time and again I'd seen phone platforms rise and fall. I was skeptical. All I knew was one thing - I certainly wasn't going to buy one. Years later and I now program for iOS a lot. Everyday pretty much. I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it. I bought my first iPhone at version 4. Then I specifically bought my first Mac so I could use the SDK for that phone. I fell in love with the platform, in all its insane glory. I might move to another platform one day, but I can honestly say I never imagined this is what I would be working on.

runjake 13y ago
> I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. Just a few years before, people flocked to buy $599 Motorola RAZR flip phones on two years contracts. I saw the hordes lined up, myself. Next to that, the iPhone seems like a bargain
- ianstallings 13y ago
  Wow, they were that much? No wonder I never had one. I guess the price point wasn't that crazy. I was just cheap!
  - alex_doom 13y ago
    Yeah the pricing has always been around that range for most high-end phones. I remember lusting after some European only Nokia's that were $800.

Aloha 13y ago

The technical details of the presentation are interesting, but less relevant than how well the device worked at launch. It worked. The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable device, it put everything that came before it to shame.

jkubicek 13y ago
And remember, the iPhone was the first phone with visual voicemail. It boggles the mind that we all had to deal with horrible audio menus for decades before Apple came along and strong-armed Cingular into fixing voicemail.
- perishabledave 13y ago
  Amazing how backwards the industry is to have to be strong-armed into improving something. Visual voicemail is under appreciated.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Of course it hardly matters now. Nobody leaves me voicemail or listens to the voicemail I leave anymore.
- RyJones 13y ago
  Audio voicemail increased ARPU and minutes/month/user, thus the resistance dropping it. Now that everyone is on flat-rate plans, burning minutes for voicemail access is unlikely to ever cost you money. Didn't use to be the case.
  - Greenisus 13y ago
    I'm not sure of this, but if I recall, voicemail minutes were free for me back then on Cingular.
zmmmmm 13y ago
> The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable device This is both true and a horrible rewriting of history. People loved their Blackberries. The term Crackberry was invented before the iPhone was even a rumor. And don't tell me it wasn't mainstream, it had taken over most of the business and government market. It was confined to those markets, but within those huge markets it was utterly mainstream. But even before that other people loved Palm devices. The capacitive touch screen was a clear advance - but don't tell me there was no "usable" device prior to that.

YOSPOS 13y ago

Keep this story in mind when idiots on the internet talk about a "rectangle with rounded corners".

Kylekramer 13y ago
I am not seeing what relevance this story has to patent disputes.

bitwize 13y ago

iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android. Now that Apple is making serious downmarket moves with the 5C, it may soon be time to rethink whether Android was ultimately successful at competing with Apple. Within two years, non-iPhone smartphones will be niche players with partisan user bases, but the bulk of mobile development will be once again for iOS.

untog 13y ago
iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android. They just released a new iPhone. It's probably fair to say that that will be a short-term bump that will flatten in good time. I think it's seriously disingenuous to describe the 5C as a "serious downmarket move". It's a token move at best, and doesn't get anywhere near the price point a "downmarket" device would require.
- protomyth 13y ago
  I don't think it either a "serious downmarket move" or a "token". I think it is the iPod mini for the iPhone generation. It is the hint at the iPod strategy moving to the iPhone after all this time. I would imagine we are a generation or two from the actual downmarket move.
- cremnob 13y ago
  They gained share on Android last quarter, which doesn't include their newly launched phones. Horace Dediu raised the idea that Android has peaked in the US a few months ago, and the latest numbers seem to back him up. http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/04/comscore-apple-gains-on-android-in-the-us-even-before-iphone-5s-and-5c-launch/ http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/04/comscore-apple-gains-on-androi... https://twitter.com/asymco/status/386207186801917952/photo/1 https://twitter.com/asymco/status/386207186801917952/photo/1
- Tloewald 13y ago
  Based on the pricing we're seeing on the 5C (some offers for $50 or $100 less than announced price) Apple is putting some flexibility in its wholesale pricing to give third parties more wiggle room with the 5C. So it's by no means a "cheap" phone, but it's not as expensive as it first appears. As for Apple gaining market share in the US, I think what we've seen is that Android is starting to run out of feature phones to replace, so it's now in a fight for the high end space with Apple, which will probably see movement in both directions for a while. I suspect a significant portion of the iPhone market and a larger portion of the Android market is really just phones with touch screens -- these are people who don't buy apps or use most of their phones' capabilities. The "network" effects that will determine the fates of the ecosystems depend on people using their phones as computers rather than merely phones. In Europe recently Windows phone (i.e. Nokia) is doing very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out too.

mcenedella 13y ago

It's easy to forget how far Apple had already come by this point. I re-discovered this super-insulting dude asking an obnoxious question to Steve at WWDC 1997: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475

r00fus 13y ago
I love that silence he uses in formulating his reply.
chris_wot 13y ago
Who the hell was that jerkoff?
lostlogin 13y ago
Thanks. I like the hypothetical $10B a product might make. I expected him to make a funny and snarky shoot-down, the questioner but got a sympathetic and good answer.
eropple 13y ago
As `teovall noted, any particular reason you linked a version covered with SEO keywords with only a few views of the video instead of the one with 2.5 million (which has the exact same title but is remarkably lacking in SEO spam)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE is the original, for anyone who's curious.

valgaze 13y ago

The unsuccessful partnership with Motorola (& Cingular wireless) mentioned in the article was probably w/ the "Rokr" See press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cingular-Launch-Worlds-First-Mobile-Phone-with-iTunes.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cin...

plg 13y ago

"In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. They transformed the stodgy cellphone industry. " What other stodgy industry is there that Apple could easily disrupt? How about this: how does it make you feel when you use the DVR box that your cable / satellite company forces you to use, to watch tv? I know the answer for me. Seems like low hanging fruit with potentially enormous payoff for Apple.

Tloewald 13y ago
It's not low-hanging fruit. On the technology side Apple has actually built everything necessary (AppleTV + iTunes streaming) but the problem is dealing with the content silos. If Apple could it would simply license all the content and stream it to customers either for a standard price (e.g. $1.99 per episode of 480p programming, $2.99 per episode of 1080p) or via subscription (e.g. MLB/Netflix) or ad-supported (e.g. Hulu Plus). The only reason AppleTV isn't TV nirvana (at least in the US) is licensing issues. (BTW you can program an AppleTV to recognize any remote, so you can seamlessly make you TV remote also control your AppleTV, without even switching modes). In case you're wondering, the basic problem right now is that TV networks get paid about $2 (I did a bunch of back of envelope calculations, so I may be significantly off, but it's in this ballpark) in advertising per viewer-hour, so if a family of four watches an hour of TV, then the network gets about $8 in ad revenue. Apple is offering $1.40/h, and it's also messing with DVD sales and syndication so there's a big gap there. Now, I seriously doubt that the production company that makes the content gets much of that $8, so if Apple could deal with content producers directly...
- plg 13y ago
  If Apple can convince the networks that they will be better off with Apple than with the local cable company, then Apple can win. I can't help but think that if Steve were still here, he could get it done (much like he did with the music companies for iTunes and the original iPod). I'm not so sure that the current crew at Apple has the right stuff. What I mean is, Steve would have said "this way is better. You can give me a bunch of reasons why you don't think it will happen, or you don't think it ought to happen, but I'm telling you that it is going to happen, and I am making it happen. Now are you with me or shall I run you over?" There were a million reasons why iTunes could never work. He made it work. I understand the reasons you list for why TV is not going to work. I just wish Steve were here to make it work.

ultimoo 13y ago

>> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. While scenic, the 280 is certainly not 'remarkably empty'. I make the commute from San Jose to SF everyday and wish I shared the enthusiasm of the author. Apologies for commenting on something completely orthogonal to the point of the OP.

jfb 13y ago
Traffic on 280 (and to a lesser degree 880) seems to track pretty closely how inflated the current SV bubble is.
spartango 13y ago
I grew up in the valley, and I can tell you that in 2007 the traffic on 280 and 101 going north in the morning was much lighter than it is today. As SF tech companies have grown dramatically in the last few years, so has the traffic. The same was true building up to 2001; after dotcom, the traffic went down dramatically. Of course, improvements to the highways and interchanges around that time made traffic feel even more sparse on the peninsula. Those post-dotcom days were sad; the reason there was less traffic was the unemployment of people you knew. You felt that everywhere you went.
eliben 13y ago
It's still emptier than most other freeways and expressways in the area, I think you'll agree. Even during the morning commute north, it's very reasonable except for maybe the 85 intersection (and before you get into SF, naturally). Compare that to the dreadful 101.

vonsydov 13y ago

I'm still on 4s with ios 5. don't use siri.

padmanabhan01 13y ago

Articles like this help to show all the work involved in the path from a vague idea to a finished product. That's the hard part. Guess that's why they get upset when some other company just sees the end product and just makes a clone of it, without having to face all the hurdles to arrive there from the initial idea..

makomk 13y ago
Except that the other companies have done essentially all of the hard work this article talks about themselves, and more, and have been doing it for years before Apple entered the smartphone market. I mean, many of Apple's problems were with stuff like baseband development and antenna placement which their competitors have been dealing with successfully since before the iPhone even entered development. If anything Apple were the ones that came along after other companies had done all the hard work and piggy-backed on their work whilst claiming the credit. Companies like Nokia and Motorola literally developed the technology that made mobile phones possible, and had to build stuff like phone radios in an era where no-one had ever done it before, whereas Apple could rely on pre-existing chips, software and design experience. Then Apple sued Motorola to stop them selling phones whilst insisting they didn't have to pay Motorola for the patents they'd obtained through doing all that pioneering work.

cbr 13y ago

"The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the United States." Great solution, but illegal. Did they get permission or just do it?

MikeCapone 13y ago
Better to be a pirate than join the Navy, I suppose...
sounds 13y ago
I'm guessing they didn't. (Has the statute of limitations passed or something?) Now obviously they could claim they shielded the Moscone center and only operated on channel 14 indoors. (The US bans channel 14 due to the frequency being used by satellite.) I think the FCC might still fine them, if there was a clear-cut case with hard evidence.
sneak 13y ago
It doesn't matter. Nobody went to jail and everyone bought an iPhone. Who cares?
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
They're real law breakers, aren't they. :)

daned 13y ago

I thought I had it tough as a Sales Engineer but I am a piker compared to these guys.

pinaceae 13y ago

i am glad to be old enough to remember the time before the iphone. seems like a stupid thing to say, right? but go to any tech forum and it seems like all of it is forgotten already, 2007 is kinda blurry and Apple producing smartphones completely normal. when the rumours started swirling about apple launching a phone people could not believe it. like at all. apple, the ipod guys, building a phone?! no way, what a joke. you had the photoshops of ipods with a dial, etc. analysts explaining why this was completely wrong, impossible and apple was doomed. same at the launch of the iPad. same at the launch of the iPod (less space than a nomad, no wifi, lame). what the fuck is a nomad one might say today. those great photoshops of steve holding a giant iphone to his ear, hilarious. an iPad, buhaha, bunch of retards at apple. but now the galaxy note makes perfect sense. to exactly the same neckbeards who laughed at apple's idiocy before. apple is indeed the most frustrating company. it somehow has defied gravity in the second jobs era and proven that large swaths of the tech world couldn't define taste and style if their life depended on it. and perfection, like the iphone launch, is a matter of style and taste.

hayksaakian 13y ago
Let's not get too patriotic there, Apple introduced flops as well, see apple TV
- Alphasite_ 13y ago
  I wouldn't call it a flop, Apple TV, Roku et, al. are all pretty decent and doing well enough for then selves,
- shinratdr 13y ago
  I have, and do, all over the place. I don't know how you can consider the Apple TV a flop. The first generation one was built of OS X instead of iOS for reasons that this article makes very obvious but it hammered out a clear path for the future Apple TV. Much like the MacBook Air, it's really only a "flop" if you're talking about the first generation product and not the establishing of a product line. Neither took the world by storm, but they both launched a product category that was ill-defined at the time and Apple sells millions of both. There were internet connected set top boxes and ultraportables before the Apple TV and the MacBook Air, but there were only Smart TVs, Rokus, Google TVs, and Ultrabooks after. Maybe it's just me but establishing a successful and profitable product line that exists to this day hardly qualifies as a flop. Just a shaky first generation. Which, keep in mind, also applies to the iPod. IMO, the iPod can hardly be considered a flop. The iPod HiFi, THAT was a flop.

PhasmaFelis 13y ago

"Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall." "Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired." Christ, what an asshole.

sneak 13y ago
But holy fuck, what a phone. "You had me at scrolling."

forgottenpaswrd 13y ago

"The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened." What is interesting is that product-demo glitches happened all the time. We went to one presentation in which Steve had to ask for people not to use the Internet because they had not enough bandwidth. But mistakes were so "naturally handled" that people just did not care. I think Edison said, you will not be remembered by your mistakes, but from your successes.

afterburner 13y ago
Chamberlain?

chernevik 13y ago

The timing of the project launch is pretty remarkable. It seems that Jobs wanted to do this for some time, but was waiting and watching for technical feasibility. From the effort they had getting the demo to work, it seems that they launched the project something like immediately after the progress of the component technologies brought that feasibility into view. And even then they had to manage risks, and then they had to get the thing into production. And while that suggests some pretty deep technical savvy at executive levels, they still had heartburn over seemingly simple questions like "can you put radio waves through aluminum?" It seems to me that the genius of Jobs was 1) to envision customer experiences based on really remarkable extensions / integrations of existing tech and 2) to judge the moment when those visions had gone from "someday" to "now".

mistercow 13y ago

>What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is headed. As a former Apple fan, I actually find the iPhone's hemorrhaging of market share and Apple's uncertain future extremely encouraging. I always attributed the things I liked about Apple to their struggling underdog status. They lost that with the iPhone, and they've never been the same since. It will be fascinating to see if some of the old Apple shines through in the years to come.

mercer 13y ago
If you look at the general course of Apple, they've generally been quite consistent in their road map. I think the incredible success of the iPhone might cause a slump for a while, but then they'll just continue what they've been doing for a while: releasing good, high-end and profitable products and comfortably occupying multiple niches. Alternatively, they might create a few more iPhone- and iPad-like successes and continue ruling new and existing product categories. In both cases, they'll keep 'shining' for quite some time. If that stops, it'll suck for people like me who are fully invested in their ecosystem. That said, I switched to a Nexus 4 recently and it was surprisingly painless.

codeulike 13y ago

Watching the original iPhone unveil, it was pretty surprising to see all the Google love from Steve, and Eric Schmidt come bounding onto the stage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M

abrowne 13y ago
Maybe surprising now, post "thermonuclear war", but not for 2007.

siglesias 13y ago

Amusingly, there was one technical snafu during the presentation. Steve's clicker stopped responding [1]! Of course, the way he handled it, in my opinion, made the presentation that much better and that much more human. 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&t=1h14m39s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&...

yashg 13y ago

I always thought Apple took the iPod and added phone radio to it, then they took out the radio, made the screen big and called it iPad. Not anymore. This is interesting stuff.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

A nice reminder that the screen sharing built for the initial demo still doesn't exist without jailbreaking a device. :)

AndrewKemendo 13y ago

I think it is hilarious how Jobs basically reinvented the wheel when it came to operations security, when there have been major organizations doing secret things for decades that he could have pulled the lessons from.