quote:

Development had continued on the Rokr throughout 2005. “We all thought the Rokr was a joke,” Williamson says. The famously hands-on CEO didn’t see the finished Rokr until early September 2005, right before he was supposed to announce it to the world. And he was aghast. “He was like, ‘What else can we do, how can we fix it?’ He knew it was subpar but he didn’t know how bad it was going to be. When it finally got there, he didn’t even want to show it onstage because he was so embarrassed by it,” Fadell says.

During the demonstration, Jobs held the phone like an unwashed sock. At one point the Rokr failed to switch from making calls to playing music, leaving him visibly agitated. So, at about the same moment that Jobs was announcing “the world’s first mobile phone with iTunes” to the media, he was resolving to make it obsolete. He helped by lavishing praise on the new iPod Nano, clearly elevating it as the star of the show and reportedly leaving Motorola execs fuming.
"Rokr’s sheer shittiness took Jobs by surprise"

“When he got offstage he was just like, ‘Ugh,’ really upset,” Fadell says. The Rokr was such a disaster that it landed on the cover of Wired with the headline “You Call This the Phone of the Future?” and it was soon being returned at a rate six times higher than the industry average. Its sheer shittiness took Jobs by surprise — and his anger helped motivate him to squeeze the trigger harder on an Apple-built phone. “It wasn’t when it failed. It was right after it launched,” Fadell says. “This is not gonna fly. I’m sick and tired of dealing with bozo handset guys,” Jobs told Fadell after the demo.

“That was the ultimate thing,” Fadell says. “It was, ‘gently caress this, we’re going to make our own phone.’ ”

qirex posted:

the first iphone wasn't very good, the 3gs was the first decent one and the se was ultimate steve perfection

qirex posted:

the first iphone wasn't very good, the 3gs was the first decent one and the 4 was ultimate steve perfection

mishaq posted:

Boiled Water posted:

lol the SE is the pinnacle of iPhone development

cinci zoo sniper posted:

SE stands for second after 7 plus

infernal machines posted:

3d touch is a usability/discoverability nightmare

cinci zoo sniper posted:

SE stands for second after 7 plus

Boiled Water posted:

I'm sorry I can't hear your over my plugged in headphones

Boiled Water posted:

my phone lasts 18~ hours I'm fine

FMguru posted:

i guess theres a definitive history of the iphone coming out (to coincide with the tenth anniversary) and the verge has some excerpts

should be some fun dirt in there

e: lol the rokr


mission accomplished, im definitely picking this book up when it drops

Perplx posted:

the 4 was feature complete (minus 3d touch), all iphones since are just spec bumps

in 100 years the iphone 4 will be the model T of phones

carry on then posted:

touch id

Boiled Water posted:

why not take it home with you, was it chained to your desk?

The Management posted:

because you can't take unannounced prototypes out of the office. unless you're in a special program but that's a pain in the rear end.

I had an older proto that I was using at home, but I had to give that back too.

Boiled Water posted:

makes sense,

NeXT question: why not pick one up on your way home?

qirex posted:

stupid optional fabric keyboard is the only feature they copied from anyone else

the only person who deserves to be fired is jony for shipping the pencil with the world's most idiotic charging scheme and that also prevents there from being an eraser end

The Management posted:

because you can't take unannounced prototypes out of the office. unless you're in a special program but that's a pain in the rear end.

I had an older proto that I was using at home, but I had to give that back too.

Stymie posted:

steve rightfully laughed at the idea of touchscreen laptops

Pinterest Mom posted:

The iPod phone was losing support. The executives debated which project to pursue, but Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, had an answer: Neither. He wanted a keyboard with hard buttons. The BlackBerry was arguably the first hit smartphone. It had an email client and a tiny hard keyboard. After everyone else, including Fadell, started to agree that multitouch was the way forward, Schiller became the lone holdout.

He “just sat there with his sword out every time, going, ‘No, we’ve got to have a hard keyboard. No. Hard keyboard.’ And he wouldn’t listen to reason as all of us were like, ‘No, this works now, Phil.’ And he’d say, ‘You gotta have a hard keyboard!’” Fadell says.