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Origin of the iPhone
rambilly brings us a story from Wired about the origin and development of the iPhone. From the article:
"Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, 'We don't have a product yet.' The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. 'It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,' says someone who was in the meeting."
While, granted, this article has a much more fitting title than the last, this is a bloody dupe from yesterday!
appleguru.org
The other time he got a chill?
The second Windows was successfully put on a mac. 0_0
Tantrum? Real men throw chairs!
Amnesty International
This article reads like one from Reader's Digest.
hey its a dupe
TFA describes how Jobs and co. designed a great device, and makes the point that traditional mobile phone handset businesses has been stifled and denied the opportunity to innovate by network operators.
It is nice that Apple is innovating, and computing on telephone platforms is advancing.
But progress may still be limited by network operators for the time being because to deploy software or services, providers have to go through the network operators.
And to consume services, consumers must first access the networks through the network operators.
Round 1 to Apple with the iphone. Round 2 is software and services.
Can innovation in software and services flourish despite network operators trying to gatekeep and tax all revenue opportunities whether they understand them or not?...that they panicked. They obviously spent tons of cash on the development of this product, and not only that - their image would have taken a nasty knock, and apple is all about image anyway. (Not that they make bad products, Image is one of their products features.)
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
You should see the origin of the original article posted yesterday. ./
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
... gone Ballmer on their asses, dancing and jumping around to get them fired up. They would have had the motivation and fire to get the product out months earlier.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
FTFA : This 4.8-ounce sliver of glass and aluminum is an explosive device that has forever changed the mobile-phone business
What an appropriate metaphor to refer to the success of a product that is powered by a lithium-ion battery.
You just got troll'd!
The article says something like "they had already announced Leopard was to be delayed".... Nope, the announced the Leopard delay AFTER the iPhone had been unveiled. Remember, iPhone stealing the OS engineers was to blame!
So, the ultimate question is then:
For which one do you need to have more bad karma: to reborn as a chair in Redmond, Washington, or as a door in Cupertino, California?
It fell out of the sky, accompanied by a host of angels. Everyone knows that.
Then, hovering in the air, surrounded by a wreath of misty light and cherubim, it received it's first call from God who delivered the three prophecies of Cupertina.
The first was a vision of Hell, which looked like an AT&T service agreement and 900 page bill.
The second was how to save (switch) souls from the clutches of Vista and delivered by the Virgin Mary herself in the guise of Ellen Feiss.
The third is held under tight guard by high ranking members of the Huckabee presidential campaign, and is to be revealed on the first New Moon after the current Pope dies.
So let it be written. So let it be dumb.
The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. 'It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,' says someone who was in the meeting."
The only reason to fear your boss is that your boss can effectively end your livelihood or career. Lauding power over people like that, throwing tantrums, and scaring your employees by staring them down or through false calm just makes me very happy I've never worked for such people. I've had some excellent bosses who've produced some excellent results and none of them have ruled by fear. There's one I remember who got accolades on retiring this year and all anyone could ever say about him was that he was calm and an absolute gentleman under pressure. In contrast when I read about Jobs and Gates I just think "goes to show money won't buy manners".
As for the iPhone can't say I understand what the fuss about this product is. Last time I participated in a discussion about it someone was rabbiting on about hacks to do video, as if video were an advanced feature for a modern phone. Please!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Graphs showing iphone is indeed 'blowing up' competition
http://blogs.computerworld.com/canalys_figures_in_iphone_clear_winner_in_north_america/
"
* Palm is dead everywhere but in the North America, where it is falling sharply.
* Symbian is huge everywhere besides North America, but obviously has the most to lose with the iPhone being released around the world next year. Don't expect Symbian to post these numbers on their website as they have in the past.
* Microsoft's mobile strategy is failing miserably. They don't crack 10% anywhere but in North America where they are behind RIM and iPhone and dropping.
* Blackberry, while strong in North America, has a much smaller global market share.
* Linux is big in China and Japan but insignificant elsewhere.
* The iPhone has grabbed 27% of the North American smartphone market. This is obviously on the sharp upturn.
* Apple is poised to be the number one US Smartphone vendor next year if trends keep up."
The article makes it sound like it really is the CEO who drives everything and everything else is automatic. It's pretty accurate to how Silicon Valley works. The CEO drives it and everything else is mostly automatic.
Consider that Jobless made a few hundred million dollars and adoration from legions of fans while the engineers probably got a few tens of thous in bonuses and increased rent on their dumpy Sunnyvale apartments.
Is this news?
Some boss has a tantrum in the past when a product is behind schedule.
Might have been news if it was reported AT THE TIME, before the iphone was released,
but now?
Nope..
they were at least a little freaked. I get the idea that there were some hearts in their throats, or at least they realized they needed to do some damage control.
I wasn't there though, so I am speculating on second hand info, and could be wrong...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
and makes the point that traditional mobile phone handset businesses has been stifled and denied the opportunity to innovate by network operators.
In fact, several major US carriers (AT&T, Cingular, T-Mobile, probably others) have had GSM systems for years. They work with third party GSM phones, including the fully programmable Palm, Windows Mobile, and Nokia devices. Furthermore, you can get unlimited data for fairly reasonable monthly fees in the US.
The notion that Apple is doing anything to rescue us from carries is laughable. Apple's iPhone is a big step backwards: it's carrier locked, it's tied to Apple's desktop application (the only way to get updates), and it's non-programmable (at least for now).
The iPhone is a giant step backwards for smartphones and innovation.
If you want an innovative phone that doesn't try to shackle you, get a Symbian, Palm, or Windows Mobile phone.
I can't imagine anyone at Sony Ericsson getting so worked up about a smartphone. Their P990i and new products exhibit poor design and are full of bugs. Design by commitee comes to mind. Their solution to customers having problems with their current phone is to tell them to buy the next one where the bugs are fixed.
Frankly, 90% of the vaguely-sourced article strikes me complete and utter made-up bullcrap. It contains all the typical probably baseless preconceptions about Jobs and Apple that these articles and books usually contain. I doubt anyone actually closely involved with the project contributed anything to the article.
Why? Is it powered by a Sony manufactured battery?
If sony does make batteries for iPhone, and if those batteries explode iPhones, then legally Apple's lawyers have hit the jackpot with a huge lawsuit claiming:
1. Sony competes with Apple on mobile phones.
2. Sony makes batteries for Apple phones.
3. Sony-made batteries explode when used in Apple phones.
Even IF it is all smoke and no fire, am sure Sony lawyers would be very hard-pressed to force the judge to not see a conspiracy.
Plus suddenly a sony intern deletes a few innocent emails AFTER the trial starts....
Add to the mix: some a$$ of a rich wallstreet user dies from an exploding iPhone.
Am sure Sony executives would find it very, very difficult to beat those manslaughter charges...
I LOVE IT When corporates clash!
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Increasingly I load up /. and wonder if I accidentally loaded the Ars Technica bookmark instead. If I want Jacqui Chenq-esque fluff articles, picking over every tedious detail of Apple and it's soap-opera-like existence with breathless wonderment then I'll go to Ars. But I don't want that. Please don't let /. become another victim of the Apple Fanboi virus.
Does it matter? What do people use their smart phones for? Personally, I mainly used my Palms and P**s for their calendars. The iPhone does that. It also has a working browser and an acceptable mailer, so it actually does more for me than the smartphones I've owned. And in february, there'll be an SDK, too.
Is the iPhone a smart phone? Depends ony our definition. Will it replace people's current smart phones? Hell yeah.
Jobs and his crew have given us a beautiful device but an ugly product. It is completely locked into its two vendors, and is not a good value.
I hate vendor lock-in. I hate being told how I can use something I bought. It's mine. I paid for it. I've earned the right to control it.
If a vendor wants my business, he needs to EARN it.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
See? That's why Apple is killing the competition. At the top, you have this lefthanded leader Steve Jobs who is motivating his peopel to make the best. You think those cool Apple products come out of thin air? No! They're cultivated, goaded and forced into existence. I bet Bill Gates never motivated his people like this.
Finally, they sell something for those terrists, you know, they have shopping sprees too! ;)
specs: will only explode in a radius of 20 miles; special edition will explode in a radius of 30 miles!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Move along. Nothing to see here. Unless you're in the elitist minority.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
He's a cult leader. He rules by sheer force of personality not by any great people skills.
one tiny little bit.
THE COMPETITION
When the article talks about all the things they needed to work out how the phone connects to networks and how the brain gets microwaved (or not) it fails to mention, that this is only news to Apple, not all the other mobile phone manufacturers of the world. Especially when the article talks about the phone being light years ahead it completely resolves into pure Apple fanboy talk.
Those are just three examples of phones that you could compare to the Iphone:
http://www.lge.com/products/model/detail/ke850.jhtml
http://www.htc.com/product/03-product_htctouch.htm
http://uk.samsungmobile.com/mobile/SGH-F700
I have one just like the last Samsung model. Mine also has WLan and, like the Samsung, it has a full sized keyboard. Nokia is not even on that list. All of the phone makers have a wide variaty of phones to fit every customers preferred style. Candy bar being the best liked. Many have important features that the Iphone is lacking. Like UMTS support to get decent speed for surfing whe web. Opera build a decent web browser complete with a proxy that "refits" webpages so they look good on a small screen years ago. It is written in Java and works on many phones.
The mobile phone market has enough players that the competition actually works (not like the OS market for PCs). Of those three phones up the all of them use a different OS for example. The HTC model even uses Microsoft Mobile, an OS that sucks less and less with each version, because they face a steep competition by Symbian. And Google just joined.
There are just two things that were new with the IPhone. First was the touchscreen that you can operate on with more than one finger. A feature that is pretty cool and was therefore swiftly copied by everyone else.
The second thing is the Apple marketing. The only thing right now that makes Apple stand out. That and their tie in with Itunes. Itunes has such a large market share, it almost became a monopoly. And now they try to extend that power to other products and markets. Sounds familiar? Another reason why the IPod-ITunes connection works so good.
And that brings us to the last little thing which the article good completely right. Back in 2002 (I would say even earlier, but the article says that was when Jobs woke up to that fact) it became clear that phones will aquire more and more memory and computing power, just like the regular PC. Some people prefer to have funtions seperate on different devices. They like their music player, phone and PDA, or just one of them. Other people like to have everything in one device. And Jobs/Apple wanted to sell Ipods to those people as well. So the Ipod needed to become a phone and a PDA.
And it did. Ipod touch is a PDA and the Iphone is a smartphone.
"Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless" Then they un-installed windows ce
http://chimpbox.us
dude, if that sybian link goes where i think it goes, you should have tagged it NSFW, the slightly less sexually frustrated among us might not know what they are clicking towards.
Yes. And?
If I would want a phone with less features, I would bloody not spend 900 euros on itThat's you. I moved from a new P990i to an iPhone. It has a lot less features, but I actually use the features it has, and I'm a lot happier with it.
For example, if I want an MP3 player, I want to be able to mount it like a flash drive and copy music to and from it.Why?
Okay, I get copying from. That's useful. Fortunately, the iPod actually does allow for this. All your music is stored in an invisible directory which can easily be accessed.
I just don't get the "copy to" thing, though. I hate those dumb players which force you to use the OS to put music on them when I actually use software to manage my MP3s, and then take a few minutes after I turn them on to read all the ID3 tags into a database, or even worse, just display the music in the hierarchy it is on the device. Not to mention that it leads to all kinds of cumbersome idiocies if I add new music to my library and then want to add only the new music to my player. Also, I use smart playlists extensively. For example, my music collection does not fix on my iPhone, so I use a smart playlists which puts a bunch of random new songs on the iPhone each time I connect it to the Mac, as well as the most recent episode of my favourite podcasts, and new episodes of TV shows I like. Why in the world would I ever trade this to an MP3 player which makes me do all of that by hand?
I really have no clue why anyone could possibly think that less features could possibly be better, especially after all the other things you've said.
You want crippled? Your crappy MP3 player which forces you to put music on it using the Windows Explorer, that's crippled.
I'm afraid I don't get the point of the rest of your rambling about subnotebooks and Apple.
Fully 50% of the people I've demoed it for, have ordered one. So, if you don't want to want one, don't touch one, don't get a demo of one, and you'll be blissfully ignorant. Me, I always have to take the red pill...
What, exactly, do you mean my 'non-programmable'? Developing Palm applications is quirky but not particularly hard, and I'm not aware of any Palm phone ever that wouldn't let you load third-party apps. The vast majority of the apps I use each day on my Treo 650 are third-party.
Do you mean the phone functions themselves aren't programmable? Maybe that was true at the introduction of the early Treos, I didn't have one. Even those would take third-party apps for other functions, though. Nowadays there are multiple applications that add phone and SMS and other functions, and the API is available. I have a hard time believing that the Windows side is much different.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
While I cannot argue your point today... Wait one month. That's all I can say. ;) (SDK will make the iphone cool all over again)
hey might not be carrier exclusives [...] but both are ALSO tied to their own exclusive programs
You're bullshitting. Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile have been available unlocked and have not been tied to any carrier for years.
and both at first where also non-programmable (yes they where and anyone who says otherwise is a liar), and only opened up a year or two later.
Again, totally wrong. All three of those systems developed out of programmable PDA platforms. Even if they had been non-programmable a decade ago, it's 2008, and the standard is that smartphones are user-programmable today, both via native APIs and via Java. Apple's iPhone is neither, and it's carrier locked, and it is tied to Apple's desktop.
It has not even been a year for Apples product and they have already promised to open up their programing before the year mark.
Apple has been vague on the specifics; just because Jobs calls it "programmable" doesn't mean it is. iPods are "programmable" as well, that doesn't mean that ISVs can create software and offer it for download. Furthermore, iPhones remain locked and tied to Apple's desktop.
So your argument is basically null and void.
You are an Apple apologist, and you don't even know your facts.
"The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless." I got an iphone 2 months ago. Every single word in that sentence still applies. Battery has charging issues they say is a firmware problem,, but it hasn't been fixed yet after several firmware updates, it drops calls constantly (even at full signal strength), and I routinely have to reset the phone to make crashed applications work again. As to problems, howsabout the iphone plan includes MMS, but the phone doesn't support them at all, or the inability to check relatively simple information like your call history while you're in a call?
I guess now we know why the iPhone is a security nightmare... because it was slapped together in a few months to satisfy a pointy-haired boss.
Namely, that the dupes are not intentional.
Of course they are- Slashdot is a commercial site. I'm guessing that the income from advertising page views far outweighs that from subscriptions.
If you get a good story that is generates a lot of discussion- and hence views- it's still eventually going to get pushed off the front page by newer stories. The most plausible way to get more life from it is to repost it and (implicitly) play along with the "whoops.... the editors duped it again!" consensus. It makes them look implausibly incompetent (IIRC Zonk once posted the same story twice himself), but they can probably live with that. Plus, it provides a focus for endless flawed discussions about why the editors keep "missing" these dupes.
I don't hate Slashdot for this, because (like the majority of us) I don't subscribe and never have. They have to make money somehow, and they'd probably get more stick for openly reposting and recycling stories. But for people to discuss this assuming that the editors really *are* that incompetent- yet somehow remain in employment, and that Slashdot- somehow- hasn't solved the problem of dupes after 10 years is just silly.
Where's Occam's razor when you need it, folks?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This is the difference between Apple and the other cell phone manufacturers and software makers. If this barely-working device had been produced at a board meeting at Palm, they would have patted themselves on the back and shipped it. If the Microsoft Windows mobile team had showed such a horrendous device - same story, it would have been on everyone's phone within a year. The bottom line for most companies is "is it good enough to make people buy."
This is the difference between a good, revolutionary CEO and an average one when it comes to running a technology company. All a CEO has to do to become good is say "no" to the first several iterations of whatever it is they're working on. Steve says no and demands greatness. It's not that greatness is impossible, people just need to be pushed to achieve it.
or else!
Its as simple, as ... .. a social network of stories.
Slashcode (ergh), i mean, the system the beloved editors use to "submit" their stories, shall check if there another story, with a link to the same article exits previously...
well..... when you want to give EXTRA publicity to some news... that system would be a pain in the ass.
at times i think such looking for perfection (as no duped stories), kills the point.
This is a good article. Looking forward to developing iPhone apps with next week announced SDK. This is going to be cool.
The one that talks in length about how the iPhone will pretty much break the existing stranglehold the carriers hold over phones? That alone is the most innovative "feature" any cell phone has come up with thus far.
You're just repeating the article's assertions, which are unfounded. Apple has shipped GSM phone with the ultimate lock in: non-easy-user-accessible SIM card. And Google's Visual Voicemail works fine on lots of phones, so it's obviously not that big a deal. And the Samsung touchscreens with the haptic feedback - they are the touchy hotness, not Apple's dead glass screen that can;t be operated without eyeballing it.
Da Blog
there are certain feature sets unique to the iPhone that required a carrier to change their services to work with the iPhone(I believe the visual-voice mail is the example being thrown around)
Others have responded to you, and I did above, but I will repeat again. Given a fast 3G service, visual voicemail is trivial to implement. Google/GrandCentral and others have been doing it before last year browser and then, even better, using just SMS. No carrier backhaul massive reingineering required. That's what network neutrality gets you. The real deal with 3G now is doing video VOIP - so far Microsoft is ahead of the others with Portrait.
Da Blog
I doubt they'll be impressive, otherwise I'm sure they would be widespread knowledge by now.
Your lack of faith in the power of the RDF is disturbing.
Da Blog
But that's the whole thing: you're not "copying files" to an MP3 player.
Well, okay, if you want to move your presentation on your MP3 player so you can copy it to the laptop in the conference room, sure. That's copying a file. And you can do that with an iPod just like with any other external memory device.
But your MP3 songs aren't ordinary files. They're songs. They have metadata, they're part of playlists, they have relational data such as CD cover images and songtexts. Almost nobody uses Windows explorer to manage songs, so why force people to use Windows explorer to put songs on an MP3 player? It makes no sense. You listen to your songs in an MP3 player application. You manage your songs in this application. You probably also subcribe to a bunch of podcasts, which are also in your MP3 player application. And if you have iTunes, you probably have some movies and TV shows in there, too. So ther's an application which knows everything about your songs. Yet you want to throw all of that away and copy your songs by hand?
I have an iPhone and an iPod nano. I use the iPod when I go jogging and the iPhone for everything else. I synchronize podcasts to both devices. I put movies and TV shows on my iPhone, and I put music on my iPod. My iPod is connected to my Mac whenever I don't use it, and my iPhone is connected to the Mac once a day. I always have a random selection of songs on my iPod, selected from well-rated but "not listened to for some time" songs. I automatically have the latest TV shows on my iPhone. When I start listening to a Podcast on my iPhone and then listen to the same podcast on my iPod, the device starts exactly where I stopped listening on the iPhone. It all just works automatically; other than plugging the devices into the Mac, I do nothing at all. If I rip new music, it's automatically included in my playlist. If a new TV show comes out, it's automatically put on my iPhone. If a new podcast is published, it's automatically put on both of my devices. I don't have to think. I don't have to copy. I don't have to manage. I don't even see that as "copying."
There is no reason at all why people should be forced to look at this as "copying" when it has nothign to do with what we normally call "copying" other than being the same "technical" action. I honestly don't understand why people want MP3 players which have to be managed manually, in the Windows explorer. I have yet to hear one actual argument which explains to me why this is a good thing, and what I gain from throwing away all the functions I have for manual copying.
I have to give you that :-)
A must read, pretty interesting, though typical inside Apple story. The iPhone was the easiest product to develop but Steve Jobs willed it into existance.