Comment by masklinn
5 years ago
Nah Apple has had plenty of hardware issues over the years.
However Jobs was a master presenter and showman, and extremely anal about getting L&F just right (go check the calculator story, or recounting of his preparation for keynotes — you can also see how things broke down as soon as they started bringing in third parties, or after Jobs’ death).
Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up.
[0] I expect detrimentally so at times, Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised — at least under Jobs; go check the history of the iPhone for flagrant examples of that where you’d just see colleagues disappear into unknown voids and HIG went full SCP
> Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up.
I sat across from a Graphic Designer at Apple who accidentally published some of the iPods marketing assets to the website a few days before the launch. It was discovered soon after by a rumour site and there was a flurry of meetings to fix it.
The designer was never fired or reprimanded. And he never received a screaming phone call from Steve Jobs.
I am not privy to vendor negotiations but would be really surprised if Apple was making multi-billion decisions based solely on a vendor leaking something. Especially back then when Apple wasn't out of its recovery.
> Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised
Oh, I have been told that Apple could only build such great products because of the tight integration that would never be possible if Apple was split into e.g. a hardware and software company.
Apple only feels compartmentalised if (a) you're a low level engineer and (b) you're working on a secretive project. Otherwise it's a normal big tech company.
But the team responsible for writing all of the Forth firmware code very much worked closely with the hardware teams as you would expect.