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.
- I know it's already normalized, but...
  Maybe it's just me, but maybe we shouldn't be normalizing outright deceiving people when you're selling a product.
  How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn't actually work yet?
  Just because it's "perfectly normal" doesn't make it okay to peddle propaganda and lie to people for profit.
  It's like the Tesla "robot" that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don't exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?
  I mean holy fuck it's like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days... Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.
  It's all fucking bonkers, man. We've just allowed snake-oil salesmen to rule the roost. The bigger the lie, the bigger the profit.
  
  Oh, I agree with you! And I'm sure we can have this discussion about almost any current product launch, too.
  
  Eh I think it's fine because they weren't selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that's fine.
  
  I had to look up the robot one. I think they tried to get away with it actually being the robot, but since everyone saw through it, they went another route. lmao. It was supposed to be here end of last year too, where is it?
  https://www.autoweek.com/news/technology/a37359183/tesla-robot-human-in-spandex/
  
  It’s not false advertising because it did everything it was advertised to do in the introductory demo when it went on sale six months later. Google is the one faking their demos.
  
  It would absolutely have been false advertising if the first iPhone hadn’t been the absolute phenomenon that it was. That’s literally how simple it is. Apple delivered.
  
  How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
  For Apple, we can stop right here, the product worked as described. Apple did the demo, and then released the things they said they would in the time they said they would.
  It’s like the Tesla “robot” that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don’t exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?
  Snake oil salesman in the dictionary should just be updated to a picture of Elon Musk. Elon has a long track record of saying shit and not doing it, whether that's full self driving, cybertruck (well, that finally came out), solving world hunger, etc.
  I mean holy fuck it’s like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days… Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.
  Yeah, I totally agree.
  
  Beeper stopped charging customers for the time Apple broke their app.
  
  Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn't actually work yet?
  The way Apple does things is insane, but they weren't selling iPhones yet.
  
  There's a very simple reason... The world is absurd, and we've designed an idiotic financial system full of issues
  Here's the thing... If Apple didn't fool investors into giving them money, they might not have had the money to get through the difficult problem of getting to a production chain. And if Apple was honest and Google staged their demo, investors are going to be drawn to the party faking it
  Obviously, there's many problems with this, and the fact that they can just cash out and never deliver cough Tesla cough. There's also the issue that this makes marketing and hype far more monetarily valuable than actual performance... It doesn't matter to investors if Tesla or Apple lies, they made real money if they time it correctly
  The government is supposed to put boundaries on this kind of behavior, because if anyone does this, it lets scammers take resources that should go to companies playing honestly and actually making things
  But know what else produces extreme return on investment? Spending money to shape regulations
  
  Who's normalizing it?
  I have exactly zero control over what these people do. They're gonna do what they're gonna do, and I have fuck all to do with it.
  And don't tell me we have influence en masse. If that were true, then this stuff wouldn't be happening. Quite the opposite, clearly most people don't want to look past the smoke and mirrors for the stuff they're hyped about. (We're all susceptible to this kind of thing).
  A quote from 230+ years ago kind of sums it up nicely:
  Happy will it be if our [decisions] should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected.
  He's talking about public good, but you could insert any subject, eg. Perspective on a sales presentation (all of them are lies, to greater and lesser degrees).
  I'm sure I could find similar quotes from the Stoics (_{1000 years ago), Sun Tzu (}1900 years ago) or even Hammurabi (~3800 years ago), showing this ain't new. It's part of human nature.
  Liars gonna lie, telling myself I can change that is just delusion, which gets me nowhere.
- Maybe a demo should be just that; not a magic show. Normalizing deception for profit doesn’t seem like a healthy thing for anyone, but that’s only because I** didn’t own any stock in apple back then. Edit: Yes, I am still salty about the purchasing Starfield also
  
  Eh I think it's fine because they weren't selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that's fine.
- Yeah I think the industry learned from Bill Gates' flub when demoing Win98.
  For those too young, it bluescreened and crashed on a giant projector screen in front of thousands of people when they plugged in a scanner to demonstrate "plug and play".
  
  That was an early beta of Win95, very iconic. He famously closed the laptop, smiled, and said "I guess that's why we're not shipping yet."
  And yes, that's exactly the kind of situation you want to avoid on stage.
  
  Even more worth a laugh is the Surface presentation where both the presentation model and the backup froze within a minute of each other.

And look where he is now. Dead. Lesson learned.
- cheaters never live forever
  
  idiots who refuse cancer treatment in favor of "alternative medicine" don't live forever...
  also, everyone else, really, forever is quite a long time.
- That's where all of us are headed. What's the lesson?
  
  A fruitarian diet won't help you against pancreatic cancer.
  Or, in other words, you can't fight P.C. with apples.
  
  But are we dead right now, like Steve is? No.
  
  What’s the lesson?
  You can't take it with you.
  Also, if you have cancer, go to a doctor.
  
  Fake it till you make it?
  
  Dead people should be shot at birth
  
  Not me - I'm learning from Steve's mistake.

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.
  
  What competition? At that point it was BlackBerry and WinCE. Oh, and PalmPilot.

- 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.
- Ever heard of Lysenko? The con artists and their bullshit are everywhere.
- You think that's limited to capitalism?
  Edit. Not sure why downvoted. But also, despite the controlled nature of the demo, didn't apple kind of deliver on the marketing to an acceptable degree?
  Also, think of the self proclaimed communist leaders projecting how they solve all society's problems, or will do so, without any proof of concept.

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.
- I wonder where we'd be if the iPhone was a flop. Android was well in development, but as an independent company, the success of the iPhone is what prompted Google to buy Android a year later
  
  Android's interface was all BlackBerry in terms of UI too. The full touch control came after iPhones launch.
  
  Symbian to this day. It would be hell.
- Oh no, stop the presses! They missed a C! ⚠️ Their whole argument is invalid!

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.
- This, all they look for is a poc to prove that its possible then they can sell that to fund the actual development
  
  Apple had already done 30 years of development (starting with ARM and NeXT) when he did this keynote, and the product shipped a few months later. It might have been barely ready for the demo - but it wasn't that far off.

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 article is terribly written and seems to repeat itself a bit. Almost seems like it was written by a GPT system.
- Odds are, it was.

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
- 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?
- Used to be? Why did I just demo a Potemkin village and get drunk in the middle of the week?

Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂
- "You'll cum within 40 seconds by using this iPhone."
  
  Is... Is that something people want?
- 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.

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.

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
  
  That is the one single example when a product was unveiled on stage and the presenter perfectly expressed my feelings on it.

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.

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.
  
  what's your career?
  
  Found the bullshitter

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.
- 99.5% of all on-stage demos have fake elements. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.
- It’s also been a known thing ever since the demo occurred. This isn’t news, it’s been a known thing for basically the last 15 years.
- The problem in all this for me, is that examples like Jobs are pointed to as examples of why this should be done (your entire post basically), and then we have examples like Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos who basically couldn't deliver the technology and kept the "lie" going.
  How does one know they can eventually deliver? In your post, you basically assume the problem is solvable with capital. With some promised tech (like Theranos), at what point does "there is a necessary need to gauge the publics interest in a product to evaluate if capital needs to be invested in this space" turn into fraud if the product turns out to be unattainable? (Think cancer cures, limb regeneration, etc)

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.
- 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.
  
  This is a success because we said so.
- Hey, those executives worked very hard on their coloring sheets in business school!

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

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.
- My company was hired to consult on a startup in the financial industry, a product for banks, that was having bad tech debt and dirty code problems.
  We were on site for a couple of months, pairing with the engineers and interviewing management.
  One of the rules we recommended they implement was that the CEO (who was the sales staff) was not allowed to sell features that weren’t working yet.
  The eliminated ultra tight surprise deadlines on new features, and enabled the engineering team to take it easy and produce better code at a deliberate pace.
  Another rule was that there was one release per week, and no more.

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.

That's amazing they were able to pull that off
- Agreed that it's pretty cool. The vast majority of on-stage demos like this are faked, but it's not usually because they aren't long enough into development that they just can't do it any other way. And as long as what they show is what you get, which is the case here, I think it's fine.

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.

Reminds me of this: http://toastycode.com/besavers/buynow.html

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.

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.
- Yeah, and what's up with these transistors? I want vacuum tubes in my iPhone!
- Buttons? Ew.
  I have consistently been Luddish about moves like this (removign physical keyboard, eliminating phone jack, even the tablet form factor in general) but I think I was mostly wrong, and monimizing hardware features in favor of software seems to improve user experience.
  
  I only disagree with the removal of 3.5mm and microSD ports, and removable batteries. Imo the ports are both 100% needed, and the battery would be nice though I understand waterproofing is important. I'm fine with screens and no physical keys, though I would like a camera cover switch for at least one of the two cameras if possible, like laptops are starting to have.
- Like what blackberry did?

So basically that scammer woman that wanted to be Steve jobs did a better job at it that we had been led to believe?
- Not even close. Jobs had a proof of concept that actually worked.
- Nah, cause she made the mistake of ripping off rich people. That’s illegal.

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.
- Considering I was present at several Microsoft and other vendor events where they laughed their way through blue screens and other crashes, I'm perfectly OK saying Apple did something bad.
- no downfall for sj, pretty standard behavior from him. it was absolutely normal for him to deceive people. as for all billionaires. how do you think they make those riches?

This isn't news, but yes - people forget that Steve Jobs was just as dodgy and a bit unhinged as Elon Musk now is.
- He certainly had issues, but Musks issues absolutely eclipse Jobs by a large margin.
  
  I think given time and the advent of social media Jobs would have ended in the same bucket.
  Again, the way they act, the things they do and say are almost mirrors to one another.

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