Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Former Apple Engineer Gives Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Original iPhone Introduction

I love reading stuff like this - it's a very interesting insight "behind the scenes" at Apple and shows they suffer like everyone else with problematic presentations :) I guess it explains why there was no SDK for developers either initially - they had a tough enough time just getting the basic firmware sorted!

The original iPhone keynote was possibly the greatest one since the original Macintosh and there is no doubt at all in my mind that the release of the iPhone shaped the mobile tech market moving forwards and its influence is still being felt today.
 
I still remember watching the keynote for the first time and getting goose bumps as he unveiled it. Elastic Scrolling, Capacitive Touch instead of Resistive.

It was truly amazing and even with only the few apps it came with I still wanted one. The web browsing and email were killer features to me.

Now looking back at what they started he was not exaggerating when he spoke about Apple being fortunate enough to start three revolutions, at the time I thought it was a bit pompous and that it was just exaggeration for the sake of marketing and I'm sure at the time it was, but now looking back it's clear it was more than that. The iPhone really was as big of a deal as the Macintosh and iPod, if anything it's an even bigger deal far outselling those other products.

I had Windows Phones before the iPhone came out. Windows Mobile 2003 XDA devices and I also had a P800 by Sony Ericsson which ran a Symbian based OS. Both of these devices used Stylus for input on a resistive touch screen and they were "ok" but nothing amazing. They felt clunky, the UI's felt dated, especially Windows Mobile it was like if the iPhone was Windows 7 then Windows Mobile was Windows 3.1 that is how big of a leap the iPhone really was.

And it really changed everything if you look at the Android prototypes pre-iPhone it's all Blackberry / Treo looking devices. bottom 40% being a keyboard, they didn't even have touch screens all the navigation was performed by the arrow keys above the keyboard. The iPhone came out and all of a sudden everyone is working on a prototype that looks just like it, works like it, has a UI like it.

Then Apple kept building on it, The App Store which has been just massive. It's incredible the amount of work it took to get that phone off the ground and I cannot imagine the world without it at this point.
 
Tones2 said:
OK - Challenge. Explain specifically HOW, outside of multi-touch?
Click to expand...

A desktop-class rendering engine that eventually became the standard across the whole industry.

I did explain what other OS's had at the time.
Click to expand...

No, you cherry picked a few features off a checklist.

Your turn to tell me of the revolutionary OS features now. :)
Click to expand...

I'm not going to pretend to know all the advantages the OS X kernel had over it's competition at the time. But it sure did provide a foundation that no previously released mobile OS seemed to be able to compete with.
 
Why cheat on benchmarks when you can just lie about signal strength? Glass houses, people, glass houses...
 
TWSS37 said:
Why cheat on benchmarks when you can just lie about signal strength? Glass houses, people, glass houses...
Click to expand...

It was a demonstration of a prototype of a new product that was six months away from going on sale. There's absolutely no comparison to the benchmark controversies reported this week.
 
BaldiMac said:
A desktop-class rendering engine that eventually became the standard across the whole industry.



No, you cherry picked a few features off a checklist.



I'm not going to pretend to know all the advantages the OS X kernel had over it's competition at the time. But it sure did provide a foundation that no previously released mobile OS seemed to be able to compete with.
Click to expand...

You again are pretty much saying nothing at all specific here.
 
TWSS37 said:
Why cheat on benchmarks when you can just lie about signal strength? Glass houses, people, glass houses...
Click to expand...

Again, it was a PROTOTYPE.

We do it all the time. I develop a piece of software that has a bunch of features, but I can only work on one feature at a time. When I give demos to show progress, the features I haven't completed yet (or the ones that are too buggy to show the real thing) I show a faked out panel hardcoded with sample data.

It would be cheating if the real shipping product did that. Or, maybe, padded the numbers by adding arbitrary values to make the signal strength look stronger. (Wait, didn't Apple actually have a bug like that?)
 
OllyW said:
It was a demonstration of a prototype of a new product that was six months away from going on sale. There's absolutely no comparison to the benchmark controversies reported this week.
Click to expand...

But people would have been led to believe that the signal strength on the device, according to the demo, was superior, NEVER going below 5 bars.

It's hypocritical to be able to pick and choose when companies lie and if it's OK in some situations, but not in others. Fact: Apple hard coded signal strength to appear to never crash which in fact, was very susceptible to crashing. Prototype or not, that's still deceiving and a lie. Period.
 
notjustjay said:
Again, it was a PROTOTYPE.

We do it all the time. I develop a piece of software that has a bunch of features, but I can only work on one feature at a time. When I give demos to show progress, the features I haven't completed yet (or the ones that are too buggy to show the real thing) I show a faked out panel hardcoded with sample data.

It would be cheating if the real shipping product did that. Or, maybe, padded the numbers by adding arbitrary values to make the signal strength look stronger. (Wait, didn't Apple actually have a bug like that?)
Click to expand...

But when you give a demo, you generally do call out specific items that aren't complete, right? To hard code signal strength as a static 5 bars not only won't show that the radio would crash, but that the phone would have superior signal strength.

I'm not saying it's not logical - I am just trying to point out that all companies lie about something, and those that believe Apple is above lying when it makes sense to them are just plain wrong.
 
BaldiMac said:
Do you not know what a rendering engine is in a web browser?
Click to expand...

It's true. Before I bought the first generation of iPod touch, the mobile devices I had that were capable of browsing the web were the Palm T|X and, before that, a Handspring Visor (which was a clone of the Palm III series).

Here's what web browsing looked like on the Palm T|X.

palm-tx-20060703091912256.jpg


palm-tx9.jpg


You couldn't really visit any REAL website, you had to go to the mobile edition. And that usually meant, no graphics (or very few), lots of very plain formatting, text-heavy. Crude.

Along came the iPhone and suddenly you could visit real "desktop layout" websites without going crazy.
 
TWSS37 said:
But people would have been led to believe that the signal strength on the device, according to the demo, was superior, NEVER going below 5 bars.

It's hypocritical to be able to pick and choose when companies lie and if it's OK in some situations, but not in others. Fact: Apple hard coded signal strength to appear to never crash which in fact, was very susceptible to crashing. Prototype or not, that's still deceiving and a lie. Period.
Click to expand...

If they had made claims in the demo that the signal strength was superior because it never went below 5 bars then it would have been misleading but they didn't.
 
to all the people crying foul, all manufacturers pull shenanigans like this with pre-release prototypes.
Go to NAMM, CES or Computex some time and see how many fully functional products you can find.

Heck, look up the development of many tech devices that started in "some garage". There is almost always a story about some Wozniak-type engineer staying up all night in a hotel room the night before to get the demo model to "act like" it works.
 
kdarling said:
Yes, which is why it's silly whenever people bring up the old chestnut about how Apple magically integrates software and hardware. Under Jobs they were too secretive to do that, especially with first models.
Click to expand...
I'll bet it doesn't work that way now. Apple seems like much more of a matrixed organization under Cook than it was under Jobs. With Jobs if you were good at something that's all you ever did, which to me seems a bit limiting.
 
TWSS37 said:
But people would have been led to believe that the signal strength on the device, according to the demo, was superior, NEVER going below 5 bars.
Click to expand...

Really? Did anyone until today actually check that video to make sure that the phone always had 5 bars? I don't think anyone had any clue.
 
Tones2 said:
OK - Challenge. Explain specifically HOW, outside of multi-touch? I did explain what other OS's had at the time. Your turn to tell me of the revolutionary OS features now. :)
Click to expand...

The browser on the Palm Treo was one of the best available at the time. It was *roughly* on par with Netscape 3. The mobile version of IE didn't wasn't even up to that level. The Blackberry browser was about like the Treo's, but you didn't get a stylus, so it was like using Netscape 3 without a mouse. And those were the smartphones of that era. Browsing the web on a flip phone, while technically possible, was absolutely painful.

With the release of the iPhone, web browsing actually become *usable* on a smart phone. I'm not sure whether to feel sorry that you aren't aware of what the situation was like when you're attempting to act as though it was nothing new, or feel glad for you that you apparently never had to deal with it back before it actually became good. :confused:
 
BaldiMac said:
Do you not know what a rendering engine is in a web browser? Or the kernel of an OS?
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm an iPhone and Android developer. :rolleyes: Explain to me what specific FUNCTIONALITY the iPhone had over the Microsoft OS at that time. Actual detailed functionality, like the specific things I pointed out. Ouside of multi-touch.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back