[youtube]http://youtu.be/9hUIxyE2Ns8[/youtube]
In 2007 Steve Jobs go up on the stage of a conference Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), to present to the whole world a device that would change the smartphone industry, but what happened behind the scenes remained a mystery to most people around the globe. In the course of yesterday, those from the New York Times they published the story of a former employee of those from Cupertino, he talks about the launch of the device and about the burden that weighs heavily on the shoulders of those who had to prepare the presentation event. Steve Jobs was one of the people who liked live presentations, but they could give rise to unpleasant moments due to the erroneous functionality of some equipment used for presentations, and despite the fact that most companies in Silicon Valley avoided such events, Jobs was firmly convinced that they must be done.
Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 am the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone. But as Grignon drove north, he didn't feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.
The engineer who recounts the moments spent behind the scenes of this public demonstration says that all those involved in it were terrified of Jobs and of the effects that the non-functionality of some equipment could have during the iPhone presentation event. The former employee claims that his colleagues, present at the event, were so stressed that after each segment of the conference each person responsible for that segment took a mouthful of scotch to calm down, during the entire presentation they finished a portable container with several hundred grams of alcohol.
By the end, Grignon wasn't just relieved; he was drunk. He'd brought a flask of Scotch to calm his nerves. "And so there we were in the fifth row or something — engineers, managers, all of us — doing shots of Scotch after every segment of the demo. There were about five or six of us, and after each piece of the demo, the person who was responsible for that portion did a shot. When the finale came — and it worked along with everything before it, we all just drained the flask. It was the best demo any of us had ever seen. And the rest of the day turned out to be just a [expletive] for the entire iPhone team. We just spent the entire rest of the day drinking in the city. It was just a mess, but it was great."
The good part for them was that everything went without any problem and Steve Jobs was satisfied, they had the opportunity to celebrate the successful presentation without restrictions. However, in addition to the work of preparing the events, there was also a complicated process of convincing those at the top of the Apple company, who believed that the iPhone would work without problems if it had a case made only of aluminum. Being focused on design, Steve Jobs and Jony Ive initially did not realize that a smartphone with a case made entirely of aluminum would not be able to connect to mobile networks, and this is where the real work of persuasion began. The experts in telecommunications technologies had to convince Jobs and Ive that they had to change the design of the iPhone, in the end the terminal had a plastic case at the base to be able to connect without problems to mobile phone networks, but even so he had quite big problems with the signal.
It incorporated a touch-screen and OS X, but it was made entirely of brushed aluminum. Jobs and Jonathan Ive, Apple's design chief, were exceedingly proud of it. But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn't realize they created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don't travel through metal well. "I and Rubén Caballero" — Apple's antenna expert — "had to go up to the boardroom and explain to Steve and Ive that you cannot put radio waves through metal," says Phil Kearney, an engineer who left Apple in 2008. "And it was not an easy explanation. Most of the designers are artists. The last science class they took was in eighth grade. But they have a lot of power at Apple. So they ask, 'Why can't we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?' And you have to explain to them why you just can't."
In conclusion, Apple events are beautiful, interesting and expected by tens of millions of people, but behind them there is a lot of work and a lot of stressed employees.
