The Story of the Original iPhone's Development 221
jds91md writes "Today's NY Times delivers a great story of the development of the iPhone by Apple. It focuses on the events during the leadup to Steve Jobs taking the stage with shockingly buggy prototypes and pulling off the show that is now history. 'Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs. The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.' One of the big problems was the phone's connectivity. The man in charge of the iPhone's radios, Andy Grignon, had to deal with Jobs's anger when rehearsals didn't go well. Grignon said, '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.'"
A testament to engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole story is a great testament to engineers, in that (a) it's incredible they could have made the demo work that well, and (b) Apple actually shipped the thing described in that story just six months later - and it was basically pretty functional and solid.
Even for you Apple Haters out there that have zero interest in reading something like this - well anyone who is an engineer should read it, and if you can't bring yourself to do that at least read the very last paragraph which is fun for everyone.
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also a great testament to what an utter fucking prick Jobs was. An effective utter fucking prick, but an utter fucking prick nonetheless.
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
seems to work in general. https://www.google.com/search?q=linus+torvalds+fuck [google.com]
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
Which if you've been an engineer for more than, say, 10 minutes, is something you've experienced in your career.
Golden Path (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:give proper credit (Score:5, Insightful)
Ford didn't invent the car either, but the Model T was certainly innovative and redefined the automotive industry. The same can be said for the iPhone.
The thing is, it wasn't a flaming disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
never flaming disasters carefully masked.
It wasn't a flaming disaster though, just a lot of components that all worked pretty well already, but very very unstable - especially in combination.
That is very, very far in the live demo world from a "flaming disaster". Flaming disaster would have been a browser that could only parse simple HTML, mail client that ate emails, phone that failed to dial ever, etc.
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:2, Insightful)
Gates wanted to make things useful, Jobs wanted to make them pretty. They both knew their audience, I suppose.
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:3, Insightful)
Gates wanted to make things useful, Jobs wanted to make them pretty. They both knew their audience, I suppose.
Jobs wanted to make things usable. And he did.
Re:give proper credit (Score:5, Insightful)
No. They had low resolution displays and was pretty much an upgraded Palm Pilot with a cell phone built-in and a blackberry like keyboard that made life easier since graffiti required a stylus to input well. I had one. I also had to work with Nokia's offerings. There were absolutely no comparisons between these devices and the very first iPhone. The windows mobile version of the treo was a little nicer, but still had a low resolution display and had very little in common with the iPhone.
There is a reason the smart phone market didn't take off until the introduction of the iPhone.
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:4, Insightful)
This is yet another example of the differences between Gates and Jobs. Gates went on stage and demo'ed their operating system. Jobs went out with his immaculately rehearsed script of things to do in the only order that they had managed to make work. Win95 blue screened when it hit a bad driver, while IOS (arguably a much more immature product when demonstrated) gave the illusion of being ready for consumers.
Absolutely. This is the difference between geeks/engineers, and people who know how to market things. Geeks and engineers in general don't even like the ability to market. They think it is "bells and Whistles" or "Madison Avenue". I suspect that like most good geeks, Gates went out cold, and tried to demo his products, probably the first time he'd seen them in action. I suspect that (almost certain) that Jobs rehearsed his spiel many times before going out. And if there was a stability problem, what ran before what, he knew it and worked around it.
In the end, when everything worked well, the orchestrated marketing meant nothing othre than it did it's job.
Re:if you've only got a highly buggy prototype (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, you are right, what the hell were they thinking? It's too bad they didn't listen to your advice, otherwise they might have been successful. :(
Re:give proper credit (Score:2, Insightful)
Except they weren't really "Apple innovations". Apple did a great job with the design and engineering of the iPhone, and they popularized these ideas and interfaces. But the innovations themselves largely came from Palm, Nokia, and a whole bunch of startups.
In theory, yes, Palm and Nokia could have come up with an iPhone before Apple, but the fact was they didn't.
I have used the Palm V since 2001, and I have been waiting for them to come up with a good PDA phone for years until I finally gave up on them and bought an iPhone instead.
You could have all the great ingredients on your hand, but if you cannot cook up a good dish, you can't say you are a great cook because you "could have" made a great dish, and that other cook who did just copied your ingredients.
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:5, Insightful)
This is yet another example of the differences between Gates and Jobs. Gates went on stage and demo'ed their operating system. Jobs went out with his immaculately rehearsed script of things to do in the only order that they had managed to make work. Win95 blue screened when it hit a bad driver, while IOS (arguably a much more immature product when demonstrated) gave the illusion of being ready for consumers.
Absolutely. This is the difference between geeks/engineers, and people who know how to market things. Geeks and engineers in general don't even like the ability to market. They think it is "bells and Whistles" or "Madison Avenue". I suspect that like most good geeks, Gates went out cold, and tried to demo his products, probably the first time he'd seen them in action.
Haha. People here seem to have forgotten that Microsoft practically invented the term "vaporware" all by themselves. They were undisputed masters in that field. The "Cairo project" arguably existed for the sole purpose of shying customers away from NeXTStep, and was buried as soon as the latter was no longer thought to be a threat. And who remembers WinFS? They probably even shipped some developer previews of that before cancelling it.
In contrast to that, Jobs at Macworld 2007 only promised that Apple would deliver a device 6 months later which would work as could reasonably be inferred from the demo. And they did that. So technically Jobs wasn't even "lying" at that demo, the whole thing can essentially be seen as a somewhat more elaborate slide-show presentation which just happened to include a half-working prototype as well.
Re:A testament to engineers (Score:0, Insightful)
Not someone else's, I'm merely tired of the inaccurate and beaten-to-a-pulp dead horse comments about how much of an asshole Linus supposedly is. Just because of similarly inaccurate articles sensationalizing his "outbursts" which are no such thing. Your comparison was between a competent programmer, who is straightforward, and an incompetent businessman that doesn't know a damn thing about the technology his company was producing yet saw it fit to be a tyrant to those who were working on it. So let me break that down again for you but in a better format:
Now, both of these people can be pricks. But your claim that being a prick in itself works in general is false. Steve's input can be dug down to him covering his ears and saying "NO NO MAKE IT PRETTIER". Linus' input can be dug down to real technical advice and correction. Your type is why there is currently a trend of programmers thinking that being an anti-social jackass = effective management. Was this clear enough?
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither does it mean "popularizing".
Palm, Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft didn't just invent these technologies, they brought them to market and had very successful products with them.
No. They produced entirely different devices and were (more or less) successful with those. The innovation in the original iPhone wasn't in any of the underlying technologies -- those had all been there before. The innovation of the iPhone was in the overall design, the vertical integration of the touch screen with the new "physical" touch UI and the sensors, the unified co-design of hardware and software and applications and later the app store model and so on. All those things constitute innovations in themselves -- and they have since totally disrupted and recreated the entire smartphone market.
Re:Overtime (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the real world, where the tradeoffs are real.