Michal Marek They were exactly that last week two years since the death of the visionary and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs. Of course, this man and icon of technological progress was remembered a lot, and many of the memories also related to Jobs's most commercially successful product - the iPhone. Essentially the first smartphone of its kind and the first such mass technological product saw the light of day on January 9, 2007.
Fred Vogelstein talked about this big day for Apple and the difficulties in the development of the iPhone. This is one of the engineers who participated in the iPhone project and shared his memories with the newspaper The New York Times. Information was also provided to Vogelstein by the most key people for the iPhone, such as Andy Grignon, Tony Fadell or Scott Forstall.
The night before the introduction of the first-ever phone with the bitten apple symbol was really scary, according to Andy Grignon. Steve Jobs was preparing to present a prototype of the iPhone, which was still in the development phase and showed a number of fatal ailments and errors. It happened that the call was randomly interrupted, the phone lost its Internet connection, the device froze and sometimes turned off completely.
That iPhone could play part of a song or video, but it couldn't reliably play the entire clip. Everything worked fine when one sent an email and then surfed the Internet. But when you did these actions in the opposite order, the result was uncertain. After hours of various attempts, the development team finally came up with a solution that engineers call the "golden path". The engineers in charge planned a sequence of commands and actions that had to be performed in a specific way and in a precise order to make it appear that everything was working as it should.
At the time of the introduction of the original iPhone, there were only 100 units of this phone, and these specimens showed significant manufacturing quality defects such as visible scratches on the body or large gaps between the display and the plastic frame around. Even the software was full of bugs, so the team prepared several iPhones to avoid memory problems and sudden reboots. The featured iPhone also had a problem with signal loss, so it was programmed to permanently show the maximum connection status in the top bar.
With Jobs' approval, they programmed the display to show 5 bars all the time, regardless of the actual signal strength. The risk of the iPhone losing signal during a short demo call was small, but the presentation lasted 90 minutes and there was a high chance of an outage.
Apple basically bet everything on one card and the success of the iPhone depended a lot on its flawless performance. As Andy Grignon explained, the company had no backup plan in case of failure, so the team was under really enormous pressure. The problem was not only with the signal. The first iPhone only had 128MB of memory, which meant that it often had to be restarted to free up memory. For this reason, Steve Jobs had several pieces on stage so that in the event of a problem he could switch to another and continue his presentation. Grignon worried that there were too many possibilities for the iPhone to fail live, and if it didn't, he feared at the very least a grand finale.
As a grand finale, Jobs planned to show the iPhone's leading features working all at once on one device. Play music, answer a call, answer another call, find and email a photo to the second caller, look up something on the internet for the first caller, then go back to the music. We were all really nervous because those phones only had 128MB of memory and all the apps weren't finished yet.
Jobs rarely took such risks. He was always well known as a good strategist and knew what his team was capable of and how far he could push them to do the impossible. However, he always had a backup plan in case something went wrong. But at the time, the iPhone was the only promising project Apple was working on. This revolutionary phone was absolutely crucial for Cupertino and there was no plan B.
Although there were many potential threats and reasons why the presentation could fail, it all worked. On January 2007, XNUMX, Steve Jobs spoke to a packed audience and said: "This is the day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years." Then he solved all the problems that the customers had then.
The presentation went smoothly. Jobs played a song, showed a video, made a phone call, sent a message, surfed the Internet, searched on maps. Everything without a single mistake and Grignon could finally relax with his colleagues.
We sat—engineers, managers, all of us—somewhere in the fifth row, drinking shots of scotch after each part of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each demo, whoever was responsible for it drank. When the final came, the bottle was empty. It was the best demo we've ever seen. The rest of the day was thoroughly enjoyed by the iPhone team. We went into town and drank.
Great article! Keep it up! :-)
Jobs' presentations are masterpieces and not new product launches. Even if there was a mistake when demoing the first iPhone, I believe he would have come out of that situation with even more credit than anyone expected. Jobs would wring even more popularity out of it and thus even more sales.
Maybe it's a shame it didn't happen. It would be instructive to see the Master improvising at the peak of his career :-)
Sorry for writing out of context (great article), but since yesterday I can't run the iTunes application on iP5, iOS7. Does anyone have a similar problem?
I'll just add that the reason they played this way was because they had some "problems" with the FCC (US Federal Trade Commission) and they would normally show their iPhone to the public themselves, which would be pretty annoying from a marketing point of view.
How to fool a potential customer, Apple has always been good at that :(
It will probably be an advertisement, but yesterday LSAcz sent out a similar but about 3 times more content article, attractively written and at the same time it also contained a presentation video, so it was a good background while reading, and in addition, you can see the bugs in the video, Jobs obviously had no idea what to do there and probably intervened 3rd page after his finger crunching... I'll give it a read, by the time jobs shut up the problem is happening...
and it's been hanging on macrumors since Friday