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Valleywag
In its February issue, Wired promises "The Untold Story" of the iPhone. But as typical for the magazine, they instead deliver a rehash of things you mostly already know, spread over 3,336 lavish words. Here, instead, are 378 words, in bullet points, containing the truly juicy tidbits Wired writer Fred Vogelstein was able to turn up. My favorite? That when Steve Jobs gets really mad, he doesn't scream. He stares.
- In the fall of 2006, in Apple's boardroom, the prototype flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly. 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.
- For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.
- Just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show wireless boss Stan Sigman. Sigman, uncharacteristically effusive, called the iPhone "the best device I have ever seen."
- About 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T's rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier's volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco.
- In February 2005, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.
- At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down.
- Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
- Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2.
- Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter.
- Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes.
- By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.
Comments
Wired does more legitimate journalism in a year than you do on your worst day.
Chew on that one.
The lengths they went to in order to keep it a secrt is pretty impressive
Other little known facts:
The iphone contains an unknown substance that fell to earth in the late 70's.
If the iphone was accidently dropped, engineers were instructed to immediately leave the vicinity and head to their nearest fall-out shelter.
The engineers code name was HaFoP, or Happy Fun Phone
Engineers were not to taunt Happy Fun Phone
@TorkLugnutz:
Either that was a very bad diss or I totally missed the <sarcasm> tag
I was just thinking a minute ago that the Gizmodo Bill Gates interview sucked. I wouldn't be surprised if he declined to talk to you guys again. I checked your front page after having read the Wired article and expected that the "real" untold story would contain novel information. However, you've done the opposite. You have created a cheap rehash that displays not one whiff of authorial or even editorial skill and completely misses the broader important point that the Wired article was making (namely, that the iPhone's introduction was instrumental in beginning what we can only hope is eventually a total transformation of the wireless industry). You, sirs, are a low, low form of Ad-whores. Please remove yourself from the internet.
And that is the reason that M$ does not have the zune phone yet. Apple learned their lesson, which is why Steve is so secretive about everything they do.
Hey! What's the deal? They didn't talk about the cancelled cocksleeve add-on, the iFap?!
You totally missed the main point of the article, which was the impact that the iPhone is having on the industry, specifically the relationship between device manufacturers and the telcos.
Hrm. So what would this be revision 2 of? Surely, not this.
-Verizon turned them down because Apple wanted a piece of the monthly specifically $7-10 a motnh- which they are getting from AT&T. I have a "friend" who works for the company that lobbies for AT&T.
So when all you macf@gs are shelling out the clearly outrageous fees for a device that doesn't support the full and free web-kuddos. Nothing like paying monthly fees for individual apps that are free on the web. YAY!! Intels MID smoke the iPhone!
P.S. To all the blog haters out there-I'd rather read 140 words of funny, bottom line, meat only content, than read some journalist ramble on because he gets paid $.20 a word. The whole point of this kind of blog is to fill a need where other "journalists" have been wasting our time. Sum it up! I don't have time to read a hashed together bible of crap especially when the article is wrong about the industry.
@danz32: No; keeping hardware and software teams from seeing each other is a recipe for a prototype that doesn't work.
@B@tM@n: I totally agree with your point about the blog haters. This is hardly a "story" in the first place, so I definitely wouldn't want to waste more than a minute on it.
And Wired is one of the most tedious tech rags out there. It would have been nice if you guys gave them a link though.
@smacm: Why did I omit it? Because that point is so obvious, made so many times. Does Wired somehow deserve credit for the "insight," so obviously and unnecessarily tacked onto the end of this feature?
@parjoe: A link, like the one right up there in the first sentence, you mean?
"Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart"
... and it shows.
@TorkLugnutz: God bless you, man, god bless you.
@TorkLugnutz: Yeah, but they also do more shameless product whoring, too, so it balances out.
I would be interested in the real smut, some sort of "inside baseball" account of the iPhone, something like Soul of a New Machine that would delve into the politics and the engineering.
I agree with Owen that there wasn't much new in the article.
@fishneversleep: Nevermind. I need a few more Diet Cokes right about now.
We don't have a scoop yet <with chilling, intense, level stare at the Wired article>
@Owen Thomas: Yeah, that one. Duh...sorry bout that!
Shame on them for that damned Cingular deal.
Who keeps an aluminum baseball bat at work? Must be a tense environment.
TORKLUGNUTZ : Didn't you mean the other way around? ;-)
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