How Apple Kept the iPhone Secret 539
An anonymous reader writes "Bogus prototypes, bullying the press, stifling pillow talk — all to keep iPhone under wraps. Fortune's Peter Lewis goes inside one of the year's biggest tech launches. One of the most astonishing things about the new Apple iPhone, introduced yesterday by Steve Jobs at the annual Macworld trade show, is how Apple managed to keep it a secret for nearly two-and-a-half years of development while working with partners like Cingular, Yahoo and Google."
How to keep somthing seceret. (Score:4, Insightful)
Step 2) dont deny it exists.
Thats about it realy.
Secret? (Score:1, Insightful)
Not all that's secret (Score:5, Insightful)
- What processor?
- How much "system" RAM in the thing?
- Can users install their own software? Rumor is that you cannot - you have to buy it from Apple or Cingular.
- What bluetooth profiles are available?
- Can I get shell?
I have a feeling that this is not going to be a geek's toy.
jh
How sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure any job is worth this, let alone producing a gadget.
Hence no FCC approval (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why iPhone doesn't have approval (though I bet it already passes certification - they just haven't filed yet) - the instant it's filed, it's public information, and Apple hates that. (Especially since a lot of collateral gets filed - internal photos, external photos, user manuals, lab reports, etc).
Honestly, until now, I really didn't find anything that made me want a new cellphone (the one I have is great, but it's coming up in the years), so I wouldn't know what to get when it died. Guess I do now. It's pricey, but I paid more for my current smartphone...
And given how difficult it is to do a cellphone (very - carriers are very picky - if the color of the button is wrong... or if it has certain features like call timers or byte counters...), I wouldn't see Apple as being able to get one in since it has no experience. (I expected it to be some super-hyped rumor that someone started and everyone ran with it after being upset at how crappy their current phone was, or some half-assed thing as is typical reaction.). But I suppose GSM carriers are less strict than CDMA ones since you don't strictly need carrier approval to sell a GSM handset (just replace the SIM card).
Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
They waged a viral campaign so effective that analysts and customers were basically demanding to be given the opportunity to purchase the new product--and they did it so silently that I'll probably get responses arguing that Apple didn't even do a campaign. THAT, to me, is the real story of secret-keeping.
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what Apple has here is a "digital life manager" first that is incidentally also a cellphone. They will absolutely not miss the market of people who want to open a goddamn shell on their phone.
Re:Secret? What secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that what brute-force password attacks are about? One cannot claim that hackers knew one's secret password only because they were able to discover that a password existed and then were able to gain it by brute-force attack.
I think it can be classified as having been an unqualified bona-fide industrial secret to the extent they were able to keep the details about the device at large from the press and the public and even their competitors.
Re:Not Kept For Very Long (Score:3, Insightful)
from the F*ing article...
In the end, Apple decided to reveal the iPhone several months ahead of its official June launch because it could not keep the secret any more. Apple has to file with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the permits needed to operate the iPhone, and once those public filings are made, Apple has no control over the release of that information. So, Jobs said, he made the decision to have Apple tell the world about its new phone, rather than the FCC.
we need a new mod catagory, how about "-1, Didn't RTF"
And one of the year's biggest tech launches? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's January 10th. Obviously this is going to be the year's biggest tech launch to date. Talk about hyperbole. Talk to me in November and then we can talk year's biggest tech launches.
Yet Another Phone (or PDA), huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
At $500 a pop it may be Sony-ing it's way out of its target market too.
Re:How sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Seriously. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Am i the only person surprised (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:5, Insightful)
Can users install their own software? Rumor is that you cannot - you have to buy it from Apple or Cingular.
There hasn't been any real information on this, but I've heard people complaining that it will be sold "as is", and that you won't be able to get new software on it at all. While nothing has really been said about it, it seems ridiculous to me. Jobs made a big deal of the idea that it's running OSX with support for Cocoa and Core Animation and such. He made a point of saying that the screen would allow people to think of new, clever interfaces and be able to add things that are unforeseen at the time the device is sold. These statements don't make a lot of sense unless they intend to encourage third-party development.
My guess is that the version of Xcode distributed with Leopard will have support for making iPhone applications and widgets. I suppose it's possible that Apple and Cingular would try to control installation, but it doesn't seem realistic. First, it would discourage 3rd party development. Second, these things tend to get hacked, and Apple knows it. The only reason to do it would be if Cingular insisted, but Cingular might just be happy to be gaining so many data-plan subscribers.
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Secret? What secret? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say they did pretty good.
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
I do think there is a bit of euphoria right now over the product launch that is likely to subside a bit as June rolls around and people remember that $700 is a hell of a lot of money for a phone, smart or no.
Re:Secret or not... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say it's potential downfall is the size - it's got a larger footprint than most full-size PDA phones. The HTC TyTN is 4mm smaller in both height and width, though it is thicker.
I'd have preferred the iPhone nano - something I can swap my SIM into when I leave the PDA/phone on my dresser for the weekend.
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:3, Insightful)
If features and extensibility were the key to consumer adoption and sales success, then iPod would have failed. You clearly do not understand the fact that success for Apple in the phone market it is not about supporting feature x that 1 in 5000 users would care about, it's about focusing on the totality of the offering and making sure it "just works"
Re:Secret? What secret? (Score:1, Insightful)
They knocked down the WTC? Whoooooooooa! I never saw that coming.
There are people in this world who are perfectly capable of ignoring the reality of what "everyone" is talking about. People are funny critters.
KFG
Re:Yet Another Phone (or PDA), huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most importantly, related to your last comment, c) When was the last time you paid list price for a cell phone? Like all other phones, I'll bet this one ends up significantly cheaper than $500 to the end user. That being said, I suspect their target market, at least initially, is "people who have both a Treo/Blackberry/Etc. and an iPod".
Re:Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a bunch of bullshit and you know it. Or at least you should. No one has delivered a smartphone that is a joy to use. It looks like the Apple phone will be just that. Every smartphone to date has been a fucking atrocity.
Re:Secret or not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed: it's the "doesn't suck" that's key. Apple's iPod wasn't the first portable MP3 player by a long shot, but they created one that was small, stylish, had a good interface, and was actually enjoyable to use (and yes, marketed the hell out of it). Apple took the portable MP3 player to the masses and led a revolution in how we listen to music. They don't deserve all the credit, but in putting out the first non-sucky MP3 player, and in continuing to push the boundaries of the technology, they deserve a heck of a lot of credit.
The question here is, can they do the same thing to phones that they did to music players? Coming off the successes of the iPod, I wouldn't count them out. On the other hand, the iPod is a tough act to follow, and Apple has created a monster wave of hype that they're somehow going to have to live up to. This thing has to be good enough to survive on more than novelty and buzz, it's got to offer real advantages over your cell phone, rather than just being an awkward chimera of phone and iPod.
I think that Apple is clearly heading in the right direction. But being a pioneer is dangerous. Think back on the Newton- it came out not quite ready for prime time, so even after they got the text recognition working better, they had already lost the brief opportunity to capitalize on the device's novelty and buzz, and it never really took off. One or two major snafus in the iPhone and the same thing could happen.
Re:Secret? What secret? (Score:2, Insightful)
Talk about fanboy. Why don't you go take a look at the specs. Apple has built a smart phone that is unique. While I personally won't buy one no matter what the cost, I have to give apple credit. it's an amazing phone with an amazing feature set. No phone made today is an where close in all the features. No interface is as unique. No other phone uses accelerometers to rotate the display on the fly(to watch movies or broswe), or to turn off the display if placed near the face so you can talk with out a glowing face.
Those two features are the kinds of things that set Apple products apart from every day crap. I won't buy one simply because i like simple phones, I don't need a smart phone. Though I might get it for the ipod features.
Re:Secret? What secret? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Agreed (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the parent's whole point! Nobody should care about the iPhone. It doesn't do anything that hasn't already been done by the likes of Motorola, Samsung, Nokia and a dozen other companies, including Apple itself.
Since when has Apple ever been about doing things that others cannot? The iPod doesn't have any functionality that other mp3 players don't have, Macs don't have any real hardware that your average PC doesn't have already... The secret sauce for Apple is usability and fashion/style. They took bland, boring mp3 players, and made it cool to use and wear. They took clunky laptops and made it sleek and sexy. They are doing the exact same to cell phones. Technically there is nothing the iPhone does that the vast majority of smartphones cannot - but the iPhone looks slick, it looks like it'll be a joy to use, and it'll be cool as hell to have it.
Which, in the end is exactly where they want to be. Why sell bargain-basement hardware for low margins when you can hook the self-proclaimed elite that are willing to pay a premium for ease of use and cool bling factor?
We don't know whether it sucks or not yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of lots of reasons why it may not be very good as a phone, or as a media player, and I'm sure plenty of other people can, but not too many people seem to be doing other than raving about it. One exception was the Register, with a couple of recent "emperor has no clothes" articles (which drove lots of traffic to their letters pages).
So it's going to be released some time in June (or not if it's late), and it'll completely dominate it's market, (or perhaps it won't). We just don't know yet. The thing that we can reasonably assume is that lots of people will buy it whenever it comes out, because Apple's marketing has been so good so far. So we'll find out whether it's any good real soon after it's been released.
Re:Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:1, Insightful)
>failed in the PC business and their current computer business is stalling. They just want to
>control everything. They will not let the creativity of the entire computer industry work in
>favor of their products.
Dude, the only creativity the PC computer industry has shown is in making things as cheap as possible.
Apple don't play that game.
just the beginning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:just the beginning (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember how people said the iPod was too expensive and had no market when it came out? I think the iPhone may be in the same situation. It certainly has a lot going for it, including integration, design and simplicity. When you consider that there is the $4000 Vertu [vertu.com], that is getting bought by people with deep pockets and those who want to make a statement, I believe there is market enough for a well design, easy to use Smart Phone. This may just be the product to bring the smart phone to the masses.
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth remembering that Xcode already has cross-platform compilation built in via gcc, and that likely the APIs used for user-level applications will be Objective-C, which shields programmers from a lot of low-level stuff. ObjC's message-passing even insulates developers from things like function-call ABIs to a large extent. Don't forget that OS X is based on NeXTStep & OpenStep, which (just like the PPC/Intel 'universal binaries') were able to recompile/bundle applications to run on multiple processors. Unless you're doing something fairly close-to-the-metal, writing apps via the Cocoa framework (and probably a separate ObjC iPhone framework) will likely mean that compilation is just a couple of clicks away -- and it'll build an Intel/PPC version for local debugging, and an (ARM? PPC? etc?) for deployment/final testing.
As for the differing UI, it's not all that difficult to change an app to match that -- after all, we're talking about a somewhat slimmed-down device -- because it would use the same standard high-level view, control, and layout code. While something like Delicious Library might have some potential for an iPhone application, it wouldn't look exactly the same, because the current UI for it has been designed -- by the app's developers -- according to a larger available screen. For something with a small screen, it could be tweaked to have each view appear in sequence, like the iPod menus & the iPhone mail application: List of libraries, contents of library (even with the cover browser UI), and select an item to view details. But being Objective-C, it likely wouldn't need a vast deal of changes beyond that; the code for each view might well be exactly the same. Certainly the item information view probably needn't change, nor the library list. The cover/shelf view might need tweaking to optimize it for smaller displays -- then again even that might not be necessary.
Then again, we may be restricted to HTML/Javascript 'widgets' -- who knows?
-Q
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but a cell phone company is going to be selling this.
Since when have you know a phone company not to be full of thieving motherfuckers who will cripple hardware (without labeling it as such and denying that it is crippled) so that they can sell an overpriced, poor quality service to you like $1 to send a 320x200 "picture mail?"
I'm not trying to troll or anything, just take a look at any cell phone provider out there.
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Agreed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not all that's secret (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps this is because of the advantages that candybar offers for some applications. Basically the entire interface on the iPhone would've been impossible if it had two smaller screens rather than one large screen. The Nintendo DS is a great gaming machine but I'm not sure that I'm interested in using its two screens togther to watch Pirates of the Caribbean.
Hipsters have also embraced the candybar, with the Hiptop and Sidekick. That's much more the price point of the iPhone.
It's also important to note that the latest successful clamshell phones -- especially the RAZR -- have been dramatically thinner. It's much harder to make thin with all of the widgets and gadgets that need to go into a smartphone. Apple delivered on thin, which is clearly desired by all market segments.
The "crappy" Cingular network is a common complaint against the phone. One thing to note is that Cingular has never crippled its phones, which was key to Apple here -- as fast as Verizon's network may be, they charge for every feature use, and that would have killed the iPhone. So this is a big win for most users, including those who want to install apps.
Also, the network isn't that bad. Compared to other USA networks, coverage is about the same, and nobody offers the data speed that you can get on other continents. Worry about service more if Apple chooses a crappy European carrier. Cingular and T-Mobile were the only possible US choices for national coverage with GSM, and both are about equal in what they offer.
Back to installing apps: it's not clear if the OS X on the iPhone is similar to the desktop version, if it is, that's a killer app. The creative and executive types who will shell out for this kind of thing would much rather install something they already use on their desktop than some application designed just for the phone. Half of the effort expended in selecting and using a smartphone is finding applications that allow productivity on the phone while syncing in some way with the desktop. If Apple made it possible to run OS X apps on this phone -- and I actually think they didn't, but that's another discussion entirely -- that fixes an entire class of problems that smartphone users have, whether or not other phones offer downloadable applications.
You're right to point out that the iPhone isn't that innovative. It does few things that my Treo doesn't do, or that a Windows Smartphone, Blackberry, Blackjack, etc., don't do. But it seems to do them more easily and smoothly, as well as looking better while it does them. That's a good selling proposition.