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A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

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Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#51

Post by freehunter »

ceejayoz wrote: post #41
vacri wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the ipods were overpriced and underfeatured. They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors. I once bought a video ipod - that was a mistake. And no radio? Crazy.

Apple has a long history of ditching features that power users demand and call omission "crazy", then seeing the industry ditch those same features a few years later. Floppy drives. CD drives. Ethernet ports. Flash support.

Well power users complain because they still need to use those things. Mainstram users don't. I can remember starting my career well after the introduction of USB flash drives and still getting software on CD or even floppy if we went back a few versions. We laughed at the fact that our computers still had floppy drives even while we were loading software from a handful of the bastards.

Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#52

Post by phaus »

ceejayoz wrote: post #41
vacri wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the ipods were overpriced and underfeatured. They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors. I once bought a video ipod - that was a mistake. And no radio? Crazy.

Apple has a long history of ditching features that power users demand and call omission "crazy", then seeing the industry ditch those same features a few years later. Floppy drives. CD drives. Ethernet ports. Flash support.

If you buy a device that lacks flash support, and five years later everyone else finally gets around to trying to stop making things in flash, then it was a stupid idea for the device to lack flash support at the time you bought it.

Sure, a device can still be wildly successful even if its missing something important, but that doesn't magically make it a good idea at the time it was done.

The replacements for flash suffered from poor performance for a long time.

Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#53

Post by billyhoffman »

tonylemesmer wrote: post #23
possibilistic wrote: post #18

I think it's incredibly interesting that Apple is one of but a handful of companies that seems to enjoy a steady proliferation and preservation of its past company lore, both in the popular media and amongst technologists. People take a great deal of interest in the historical artifacts this company produces; for an outsider, it really stands out as unusual. I can only think of a few other companies that manage this…

You're right. Other companies are doing the same thing as Apple: prototyping, testing, iterating. Just not at the scale or speed that Apple does it. The media interest in Apple justifies the approach - with the curtains and the smoke and mirrors, other companies don't have to bother with all that. Apple has the scale, diligence and is being held up as the blueprint of how to do things the right way. There's no harm i…

You hit on something, but didn't follow it through. Yes, other companies are doing the same business process that Apple is doing: Prototyping, testing, iterating. I would argue that other companies are also doing it at the scale that Apple does. Google's Street View and Book scanning projects have a huge scale

As you said, the difference is how Apple does it: out of the public eye. While all companies do internal dev and iterate a few times, it feel like Apple will keep something internal and iterate on something longer than others. The result is a product that feel more developed. It is often said that Microsoft needs 3 public releases to make some good (i.e. Windows 3.x was the first reasonable and "good" GUI). Apple hides those first 2 internally.

Go back and watch the iPhone launch video. Try and remember how crappy phones were in 2007. There are a lot of things the iPhone famously didn't have. However, the iPhone didn't feel like a 1.0 product. Clearly they had done a ton of work and iteration to make the features that did ship pretty well done and a great UX.

The first Samsung smart watches introduced last year were jokes with terrible compromises. Will they get better? Sure, But that happens in public.

Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#55

Post by autism_hurts »

Retric wrote: post #38
arrrg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still only one product. The innards and the software are exactly the same, no matter which watch you buy. Functionally they are all identical. The customisability of the exterior is something new, sure.

Don't forget, the iMac G3 had five plastic color cases for some reason. Apple also sells a range of iPhone/iPad cases. Also, a major early selling point on the iPad was the magnates to better integrate with a case.

"for some reason"

Yeah, cars should only come in one color, right?

Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#56

Post by ceejayoz »

phaus wrote: post #52
ceejayoz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has a long history of ditching features that power users demand and call omission "crazy", then seeing the industry ditch those same features a few years later. Floppy drives. CD drives. Ethernet ports. Flash support.

If you buy a device that lacks flash support, and five years later everyone else finally gets around to trying to stop making things in flash, then it was a stupid idea for the device to lack flash support at the time you bought it. Sure, a device can still be wildly successful even if its missing something important, but that doesn't magically make it a good idea at the time it was done. The replacements for flash s…

Apple's ditching Flash with essentially no downsides beyond short-lived and short-sighted marketing mockery from competitors is evidence it wasn't a "stupid idea".

Flash still suffers from poor performance to this day, let alone back then, and even on full desktop devices (hell, it'll turn on a Mac Pro's fans). Flash on phones was a miserable idea to start with.

Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#57

Post by jmulho »

vacri wrote: post #33
rmc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't just the iPhone. Remember the Slashdot review of the iPod? "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame."

A lot of the ipods were overpriced and underfeatured. They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors. I once bought a video ipod - that was a mistake. And no radio? Crazy.

>> "They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors."

Actually the iPod had a click wheel interface that left the competition in the dust and catapulted Apple from a niche computer company for designers to a world power. Maybe you liked your Sony mp3-man better, but the rest of the world didn't care for it. That's just history.

Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#58

Post by grapecable »

95015_refugee wrote: post #20

'Skank' as in 'awful'. More recently known as the 'Factory UI'. If you see an iOS device running this software, it's almost always a factory escape (something that got boxed up too soon), not a prototype.

Prototypes usually have red colored PCBs.

If I remember correctly, you can see the PCB color of the M68 prototypes through the dock connector.

It is also conceivable that this was a prototype and it had a replacement case retrofitted which would explain why it has an FCCid.

There was also a case of a skankphone being lost and sold after it was loaned to a member of Cingular's senior management, that one wasn't a factory escape.

Re: A look at the Apple ‘Skankphone’, built before the original iPhone release

#60

Post by saurik »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #49
vacri wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the ipods were overpriced and underfeatured. They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors. I once bought a video ipod - that was a mistake. And no radio? Crazy.

The point is it was still a huge success.

No: that product was not a success. A later product in the same product line released years later that had more benefits and fewer limitations became a huge success, but the original iPod was actually a flop that only held on to its mediocre sales due to brand loyalty, and its limited storage space and requirement to sync via a physical FireWire cable (as opposed to even USB) were in fact key to this failure.

(In particular, I will point out that the iTunes Music Store experience was what made the iPod really stand out, and that wasn't launched until 2003, in time for the 2004 release of the first truly successful iPod model, which also had a reasonable amount of storage and USB support.)

There is an awkward tendency in this space to fault people judging a specific product because they aren't taking into account that the same product line next year might actually be good, but unless users of the iPod are going to get a free upgrade next year, that's really a disingenuous way of judging new hardware.

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