This is old news, and perfectly normal for stage work.

And look where he is now. Dead. Lesson learned.

Calling the stage units prototypes is being nice. The reality was that at that point the iPhone had barely gotten to a proof of concept stage. Months before this event, the developers were still using a giant desktop tower to simulate the phone's hardware.

That the photos of the phone were real and not concept art, that the stage units weren't just unusable rubber dummies was a magic trick itself.

When the developers revealed years later that the iPhone presentation (just the presentation, not even the actual launch) was a make or break moment for the company, they absolutely were not kidding.

And then they went from "should not even be working" test units to fully functional production units in six months!

Whatever your opinion of Jobs or Apple, credit where credit is due.

Not saying all these necessarily apply to Steve jobs but I really hate how capitalism gratifies liars, fakers, cheaters, egomaniacs, narcissists, psychopaths and selfish exploiters in general.

This is old news. We all know this. These were prototypes and still buggy but Steve knew he had to present it first, ASAP, to the public to earn and keep the excitement.

It was a gamble they worked. People were super exited and for months the anticipation built resulting in a strong launch with massive sales.

Even to this day, it's that presentation they keeps the fans buying.

Every tech demo ever is fake, with the possible exception of the original Cybertruck demo, but I suspect even that one just wasn’t faked very well.

People laughed their assess off at Bill Gates’s epic failed demo of usb on windows 95. Live on stage he plugged in a peripheral and the machine blue screened. No way in hell would Jobs have taken that risk.

This article is terribly written and seems to repeat itself a bit. Almost seems like it was written by a GPT system.

so it was like every demo ever? k

This is how all demos used to be. If the author/publisher of the ai prompt wasnt born less than 20 years ago they would know this

Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂

Find a demo that Apple/Jobs didn't fake. He was infamous for this shit.

"Demo magic", it's everywhere. Always has been, always will be.

Hey... at least the ruse worked...

honestly selling a product based on a prototype is really common

You got to say he was a master bullshitter, but he had some miracle workers engineers that made it happen.

Slow down your thinking and consider this: why would any practical person fully develop something without getting market feedback and understanding demand?

This is by the book “Preto-typing”. You can frame it as lying, but the reality is Apple had faith that all of the “faked” features in the demonstration would be fully developed before launch.

IBM did something similar before voice-to-text existed. They faked the technology during market research and discovered that people didn’t enjoy speaking to their computer as much as initially thought. It showed them that they could better invest that money elsewhere.

It would make zero sense and be a foolish use of capital to fully develop a product that complex and expensive without understanding market preferences.

This is a non-story, rage-bait headline.

And then when you have issues with this kind of stuff when your own managers do it, they'll just turn to you and say, "you don't understand how business works"

You're right, yes, business is a field made for liars.

Why is this published now as news when every one of these anecdotes was published over a decade ago? This story leaves out all the better juicy details.