This is old news, and perfectly normal for stage work.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I know it's already normalized, but...
Maybe it's just me, but maybe we shouldn't be normalizing outright deceiving people when you're selling a product.
How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn't actually work yet?
Just because it's "perfectly normal" doesn't make it okay to peddle propaganda and lie to people for profit.
It's like the Tesla "robot" that was clearly a person in a weird suit. Why are they allowed to advertise things that functionally don't exist? Why are they allowed to sell unfinished products with promise they may one day be finished (cough full self driving cough)?
I mean holy fuck it's like Beeper offering paid access to a service that allows Android and PC users to use iMessage, but Apple keeps breaking each new iteration every few days... Like there was no long-term plan to make sure that the service would work long-term before asking people to pay for it.
It's all fucking bonkers, man. We've just allowed snake-oil salesmen to rule the roost. The bigger the lie, the bigger the profit.
Oh, I agree with you! And I'm sure we can have this discussion about almost any current product launch, too.
How is that not false advertising? Why should companies be allowed to magic up a fake example of their product actually working, and sell that to customers, when the real product doesn’t actually work yet?
If when they ship the actual thing to the customer it's not like they claimed then it's fraud (or "false advertising" which is the lenient version).
Strictly for presentation ahead of time I think it's borderline. Negative hype can kill a product that could have been good. Sure, complete honesty would be ideal, but if you say "well it sucks right now but we promise it will be ok when you buy it", not many people would rush to order one. Many good products never made it to market because of insufficiently good perception. On the flip side, creating positive hype out of smoke and mirrors can be used to kill a competitor's product for no good reason, so it's not quite ok either.
Negative hype can kill a product that could have been good.
Positive false hype can deceive people into wasting money.
Sure, complete honesty would be ideal, but if you say "well it sucks right now but we promise it will be ok when you buy it", not many people would rush to order one.
And they shouldn't. It's just another way of saying "people acting rationally based on truthful information"
Many good products never made it to market because of insufficiently good perception.
That should be a separate issue. It's not the only available path, just one often taken because it's the most forgiving of shoddy business practices, doesn't justify its existence, either.
On the flip side, creating positive hype out of smoke and mirrors can be used to kill a competitor's product for no good reason, so it's not quite ok either.
I think people are starting to realize the depth of corporate deception and bad-faith practices and how that affects everyone at large, and so they're rightly tired of them and trying to reset it all back to simple, effective, and fair ethical standards.
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I agree, but what’s more, I am not trying to defend the behavior of Jobs here. But…to me anyway there is a material difference between say this, where the product did live up to the demo ultimately. In this case the demo was done on pre-release versions and so problems were expected and planned for.
Contrast this with say the cyber truck launch. Similar situation but 1. they failed to properly anticipate and plan for failure (broken window?) and 2. they made promises about wishes and desires, because the delivered product thus far does not live up to the promises.
The whole behavior is shitty to be sure, but I’d be ok going back to demos about planned yet achievable and deliverable features.
Eh I think it's fine because they weren't selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that's fine.
It’s not false advertising because it did everything it was advertised to do in the introductory demo when it went on sale six months later. Google is the one faking their demos.
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Maybe a demo should be just that; not a magic show. Normalizing deception for profit doesn’t seem like a healthy thing for anyone, but that’s only because I** didn’t own any stock in apple back then. Edit: Yes, I am still salty about the purchasing Starfield also
Eh I think it's fine because they weren't selling the public engineering samples, they were selling finished devices. As long as the product they sold worked as shown on stage, that's fine.
Yeah I think the industry learned from Bill Gates' flub when demoing Win98.
For those too young, it bluescreened and crashed on a giant projector screen in front of thousands of people when they plugged in a scanner to demonstrate "plug and play".
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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.
Jobs: Ass
Apple: Ass
Engineers: overworked
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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.
You say that like there’s a single system in the history of the world which doesn’t. Capitalism isn’t novel with regard to humans taking advantage of one another.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This article is terribly written and seems to repeat itself a bit. Almost seems like it was written by a GPT system.
Odds are, it was.
so it was like every demo ever? k
"Demo magic", it's everywhere. Always has been, always will be.
Find a demo that Apple/Jobs didn't fake. He was infamous for this shit.
Hey... at least the ruse worked...
That was on him for going out the script. He could have made a cult like Apple.
Instead he did whatever the hell this is
Somehow it still has a cult like Apple
That is the one single example when a product was unveiled on stage and the presenter perfectly expressed my feelings on it.
Still more honest than some game trailers. 😂
"You'll cum within 40 seconds by using this iPhone."
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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
Used to be?
Even as early as a few years ago, game demos at E3 were extremely controlled environments to avoid the journalist player crashing the game.
I have a hard time even figuring out what the issue here is? it'd be one thing if the first iPhone shipped and was riddled with bugs and promised/demoed features weren't there, but that wasn't the case. Launched more or less rock solid, and iPhoneOS 1.0 (as it was called then) was far from the buggiest wide release.
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You got to say he was a master bullshitter, but he had some miracle workers engineers that made it happen.
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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.
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.
Had this on Friday.
- Boss: Have we hit the milestone?
- Me: No, our performance is low and we don't know why? We need to analyse it.
- Boss: ...but we've done what we said we'd do. We shouldn't beat ourselves up over some metric. I think we've should say we've made it.
Net result is that we've pushed a major problem into the next phase without giving ourselves more time to do anything about it. ...and people wonder why projects are "late" at the last moment.
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