iPhone: Running on vapor

[emotion]

The most pertinent comparison is perhaps with the Newton. Even then the comparison is flawed.

The Newton is considered a failure though even though they got it right in the end. Even more reason to make sure the iPhone is good from the off.

 

[MacbookSwitcher]

...

Let me tell you, making a smartphone is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than making an iPod. The iPod software could be written by a computer science student as a senior project. But smartphones run advanced OS's that need to handle multiple unrelated functions, (phone call / play music / connect to wi-fi / connect to cellular network / web browser / email client / advanced memory and process management / windowing system and UI management). Apple has been working on this for years (probably 4 years, which is significantly longer than Blackberry has spent on any product, for example) and has probably learned all this the long and hard way, but they are going to learn even more once the bugs from users start coming in, and the carriers start demanding that they fix bugs!

As the recent official Apple announcement has just stated, Apple has been pulling it's best and brightest engineers away from Mac OS X Leopard development, putting them on the iPhone, to make iPhone ship on time. This tells me that technically, the iPhone was probably more difficult than they had originally imagined.

So it looks like I was right, at least for that one point.

 

[finiteyoda]

If you ask me, it just seems they're just deciding what's more important right now, and re-focusing some key assets. Most companies, when faced with the kind of growth Apple is right now, think the best solution is to hire more programmers... this is usually very inefficient tho, and you just end up with a less-effective workforce b/c you drop your hiring bar to meet your quotas.

Think about a complicated surgery... which has a higher chance of success? A group of 5 expert surgeons, or 20 pre-meds fresh outta school? Borrowing key assets from somewhere sounds like a better strategy than trying to quickly grow your workforce and still hope things get completed on time at the same quality level.

It's true that a project like the iPhone may have been ambitious, given Apple's current resources, and everything they have on their plate, but it could also end up being one of the most important products in their history. I'm always reminded of all the threads about how much the iPod sucked when it came out, and how it'd amount to nothing 🙂