Steve Jobs Rigged The First iPhone Demo By Faking Full Signal Strength And Secretly Swapping Devices Because Of Fragile Prototypes And Bug-Riddled Software

This is old news, and perfectly normal for stage work.

And look where he is now. Dead. Lesson learned.

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.

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This is old news. We all know this. These were prototypes and still buggy but Steve knew he had to present it first, ASAP, to the public to earn and keep the excitement.

It was a gamble they worked. People were super exited and for months the anticipation built resulting in a strong launch with massive sales.

Even to this day, it's that presentation they keeps the fans buying.

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.

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.

This article is terribly written and seems to repeat itself a bit. Almost seems like it was written by a GPT system.

so it was like every demo ever? k

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

Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂

"Demo magic", it's everywhere. Always has been, always will be.

Find a demo that Apple/Jobs didn't fake. He was infamous for this shit.

Hey... at least the ruse worked...

honestly selling a product based on a prototype is really common

You got to say he was a master bullshitter, but he had some miracle workers engineers that made it happen.

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.

Why is this published now as news when every one of these anecdotes was published over a decade ago? This story leaves out all the better juicy details.

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.

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.

They didn't fake full signal strength they had AT&T( I think) bring in a full blown portable GSM transmitter

That's amazing they were able to pull that off

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

The headline is pretty negative but the actual article is a pretty insightful look at the behind-the-scenes of the demo and how they made it work.

I didn't like him either but not for such shenanigans. Any entrepreneur with half a brain would do the same in this situation and then nevertheless try to deliver a sound product after the presentation.

And this is why he died of treatable cancer

Say it isn't so.

Anyways.

Fragile prototypes? And then he decided not to do anything about it and sell them as is?

I will never forgive the world for buying into his overhyped inferior product and get hailed as a genius for it.

Bring back buttons, and screens that don't shatter from being sneezed on.

So basically that scammer woman that wanted to be Steve jobs did a better job at it that we had been led to believe?

Okay, how are we all seeing some moral downfall of Steve Jobs here? I mean... Perhaps we should just see what's shown at such events realistically. I mean, who wouldn't show their product from the best side possible? So they faked some reception. Of course they want younto see the "optimal case", right? Same goes for swapping Devices in case of some failure. When they show their device, they want to show what it will be like, so they will not let you see a ton of bugs that are about to be fixed for the release anyway.

Besides: they cannot deceptively, promise you fake stuff and people will be lead into erroneous decisions by them. Quite the opposite. Think about it: anyone who actually watches those presentations is not your standard customer, right? They'll be invested or knowledgeable anyway. So if they promise you utter bullshit, people will notice your lies immediately. Tests will chide you for it, people will distrust you, sales will go down. So don't assume that any beautification of the product at such presentations will lead poor, uninformed customers to buy the thing. Quite the opposite. They will more likely not hear too much about the presentation until the "they lied!" Cries start.

This isn't news, but yes - people forget that Steve Jobs was just as dodgy and a bit unhinged as Elon Musk now is.

wow and there I was demonstrating my senior project robot, sober, fixing network connectivity issue (we didn't test in the lecture hall... oops) and successfully applying multiple code fixes on the fly while the audience and all my professors looked on

But these guys are the real experts