How Apple Kept the iPhone Secret

An anonymous reader writes "Bogus prototypes, bullying the press, stifling pillow talk — all to keep iPhone under wraps. Fortune's Peter Lewis goes inside one of the year's biggest tech launches. One of the most astonishing things about the new Apple iPhone, introduced yesterday by Steve Jobs at the annual Macworld trade show, is how Apple managed to keep it a secret for nearly two-and-a-half years of development while working with partners like Cingular, Yahoo and Google."

Comments

Am I the only one?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one that is really fucking sick of this apple bullshit? It's iPod this, PowerBook that...I mean christ, give it a fucking rest already. Apple is becoming the Starbucks of the computing industry; overpriced, bad taste, and flocked to by the ignorant masses.

iPhone (yes i hate iShit when typing) will fail

[News for nerds]

because it's fugly. Just like Nokia N-gage.

Re:iPhone (yes i hate iShit when typing) will fail

[eboot]

Lol mate, like your face! Seriously looks are subjective but the general consensus was that the n-gage was ugly. Whereas in this case the only consensus is... you. And in my opinion it looks great so now we have 50% of people in a sample size of two think the iPhone is drop dead gorgeous.

Seriously.

[Anonymous Coward]

You tools need to wake the fuck up. Every single apple "i" product I have used is completely shit. The interfaces suck, they scratch easy, and are highly overpriced.

I can assure you that if microsoft or creative or sony had released something that functioned the same way with the same seet of features and even contained ZERO DRM AND played your iTunes-DRM'd mp3's, people would shit all over it because it isn't ***gasp*** apple.

You know what apple is useful for? eating before working out. That's fucking it. Braindead consumers make me want to stab things.

Re:Secret? What secret?

[iMac Were]

No bastard cares a flying fuck, that's the secret, sweetie.

Re:Agreed

[ShieldW0lf]

It's a phone. We've already got phones.

It plays music. We've already got things that play music. Including phones.

Who gives a flying fuck about this product? This is about as newsworthy as a new marshmallow shape in my lucky charms.

miNus 3, Troll)

[Anonymous Coward]

rules to follow 'doing something' wwal: *BSD faces a

Re:Agreed

[ShieldW0lf]

Did you see the keynote. It's not just a phone + iPod, it's a smartphone (with all of the features you expect when you hear "smartphone") + iPod with an interface that doesn't suck. A smartphone with an interface that doesn't suck is truly newsworthy, as the industry has been trying to build that for years and failing miserably.

Agreed: it's the "doesn't suck" that's key.

So:

Being that we all agree that it's nothing new,
and that the entirity of its strength as a product lies in the "non-suckitude" of its user interface,
and that none of us has actually used one and can speak to its ease of use,
and being that it replaces tactile phone buttons you can easily use in dim light while you're on the side of the road with a flat in the rain...
with a touch screen..

What is it exactly that makes this thing so interesting again?

Cause it looks like an overpriced hunk of junk to me.

Re:Agreed

[nomadic]

I think it's clear that Apple has to keep their products secret more so than any other competitor because they are cloned and copied [ilounge.com] so much more than any other competitor.

Nah, the number one reason they're so secretive is because of Steve Jobs' ego. He lives for those MacWorld shows.

Prerelease buzz can serve a purpose. Nintendo used it every game console generation for years to hurt competitors' sales while they milked all they could out of their current system, until people finally got sick of it.