Fake Steve

The iPhone was highly, highly anticipated. For years, people were conjecturing about it. In 2006, Dan Lyons, under the pseudonym "Fake Steve Jobs", joked coincidentally that the iPhone would have only one button: "Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less. One."[1]

One of the reasons for all this speculation is that smartphones totally sucked back then.

Russell Beattie, one of the main mobile/smartphone bloggers at the time, wrote a great piece in 2004:
"Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows he could do it better. He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world."[2]

It's hard to understand how bad the situation was without actually using the mobile computing technology that existed at the time. In the late 90's, I had owned a couple generations of Palm PDAs, which were pretty good, but I stopped carrying a PDA around because I didn't want to fill my pockets with both a Palm and a…

http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/there-is-no-spoon.html

"Probably the biggest thing I’ve taught the team at Apple is that people never know what they’re supposed to think about anything. This is true in Hollywood, in the book business, in the art world, in politics. And especially in technology.

"So we put out a new phone and everyone is sitting there wondering what they should think about it. What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.

"So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.

"It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it."

....

"Which brings me back to iPhone 4 and the antenna issue. Right now you’re confused. You’re worried. You don’t know what to believe. You just wish someone would come along and tell you that everything is squared away and there’s nothing to worry about."

"Well, stay tuned for that. And remember: There is no spoon."

It's worth pointing out the one major relevant fact they didn't cover, that Fake Steve Jobs pointed out at the end of last year: every quarter after the first "iPhone Christmas" (4Q07, the first Christmas after the release of the first iPhone), AT&T's had lower wireless capital expenditures (capex): http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/att-by-the-numbers.html (through 3Q09 at least).

AT&T made a conscious choice to maintain its operating and net earnings at the expense of its quality of service (something we've heard detailed bits and pieces about, e.g. insufficient backhaul, like this article's comments on the not much used in the US market chip Apple used/uses). We'll see if that was a good choice as Verizon et. al. converge on LTE along with AT&T.

Fake Steve was eerily prescient here. From June 24: "First of all, this is not a big issue. If you’re experiencing this, most likely it’s not the phone at all — most likely you’re just living in a place where there’s bad reception, in which case the solution is simple: you need to move." http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/you-assholes-need-to-stop-sending-emails-to-me-about-this-antenna-issue.html

Compare that to the real thing: "Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place."

Perhaps the real attitude is summed up best by Fake Steve through satire (http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/there-is-no-spoon.html):

"So some guy says his iPhone 4 is having reception issues. I say there is no reception issue. Now it’s his reality against my reality. Which one of us is living in the real reality?

There’s a two-part answer: 1, there is no real reality, and 2, it doesn’t matter.

The only thing that matters is which reality our customers will choose to adopt as their own.

Of course most people would rather live in a reality where everything works and there are no problems. And now, thanks to me, that reality exists. Because I’ve created that reality for them."

I had a comment on why I think articles like this one are silly, but remembered Fake Steve did a much better job here:

http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-and-get-some.html

For example, from this Atlantic article:

"Microsoft never got its collective head into competing against the simple and free stuff available on the Web."

Fake Steve:

"They're starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business."