Imagine having Steve Jobs in front of you and, as an authority figure, telling you to turn off the data on your iPhone, put it in airplane mode. Do you listen to him, no one wants you things fail at the most crucial moments of a presentation. If you’re not used to speaking in front of an audience, you don’t know how to react and nerves can play tricks on you. Inevitably, it happens at some point in our lives. It happened to Steve Jobs.
Presentations for events or opening speech from Apple are always measured to the letter. And with teams who work so that nothing fails. But nothing is perfect. NOW, Apple’s CEO showed he knows how to get out of these situations successfully when the auditorium’s WiFi went down during the iPhone 4 presentation.
“Can you help me if you disconnect from WiFi”
Let’s put ourselves in a situation: it’s June 2010. Steve is presenting the iPhone 4 to the audience at WWDC, and the challenge was to demonstrate that his design change (leaked in a now historic Gizmodo leak) was not the only shocking novelty. . But when the executive wants to demonstrate the resolution of Safari’s Retina displays by comparing it to that of an iPhone 3GS, New York Times website takes too long to load. You can see it at 10:35 of the event:
After a few tense seconds, Jobs He comments that local networks “are unpredictable” and it seems they are slow that day. Immediately afterwards, seeing that the load continues to fail, he comments:
Can you help me if you disconnect from WiFi, I would appreciate it. [Risas del público] I don’t know what’s going on with our networks, I’m afraid I won’t be able to show you much today.
Jobs immediately jumps to show the differences with its Retina display with photos saved locally on iPhones. If a website can’t load, it won’t load, and it seems the anecdote ends there. But later, (minute 32:15 of the video), Jobs stops opening speech address the audience and be sincere:
We already know why the demo failed. There are 570 operational WiFi hotspots in this room. We can’t stand it. We have two options: either we turn off all these devices and watch the demos, or we give up and leave without watching the demos. Do you want to see the demos or not?
After a big “yeah” from the audience, Jobs leaves no room for margins:
Let’s turn on the lights in the auditorium. Bloggers, turn off all WiFi hotspots and laptops. Place them on the ground. Keep an eye on each other. [Risas del público] Turn off those laptops, turn off the MiFi, put them on the floor, come on… look around… bloggers are allowed to blog, but if you want to see the demos we won’t be able to unless you turn everything off and put it on the floor.
‘I have time,’ Jobs says amid public tension while reflecting on the influence Apple has of concentrating 570 WiFi points in a single room. A clear example that Steve Jobs was above all versed in the subject.
A problem that will never happen again
Ultimately the strategy worked, because after this request the first FaceTime call from an iPhone with Jonathan Ive could be demonstrated. Despite this, you can see how the call suffers some interruptions and Jobs initiates a last “puyita”: “These calls don’t stutter in our tests, that’s because you haven’t turned off all WiFi.”
I don’t think we’ll see such an error again, for two main reasons. First, current WiFi networks and 5G mobile networks already operate at a speed fast enough for participants at any given time. opening speech Apple needs to bring its own hotspots. The second is that Apple events are now pre-recorded. All. So there is no room for “live failures” when we are shown information. Although we miss them.
Image | Emile Guillemot
An older version of this article was originally published on 11/20/2023.
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