iPhone X: The Demo Gods Are Cheeky
by Jean-Louis Gassée
The latest Apple product unveiling, with its overly-reported Face ID glitch, reminds us that the demo isn’t the product. That can be good or bad.
It’s Full Moon over Cupertino. iPhone X specs leaks ahead of the official presentation and kommentariat inmates howl in their cages. This isn’t new, we’ve long known how psychotoxic Apple products can be, but the phenomenon seems to be reaching a new paroxysm. A few choice examples, starting with the grand prize [no links, no feeding the master baiters]:
The iPhone X proves the Unabomber was right
Steve Jobs gave us President Trump
Apple’s Face ID Could Be A Powerful Tool For Mass Spying
But let’s not lament these and many similar howlers. For Apple, they have a positive side: They attest to the power of the brand, to the magnetism of its products. Well…most of them. I maintain a list of Apple products that remain unmagnetized and fantasize that someday I’ll have a quiet conversation with the DRIs (“Direct Responsible Individual” in Apple’s parlance) in charge of these warts.
But we’ll leave the somber jeremiad for a different day.
The sun is out here in Paris; tomorrow I head to Vézelay and the start of a two day walk along the Camino de Santiago (the pélerinage de Compostelle as it’s known here). So, let’s have fun with Craig Federighi’s iPhone X FaceID demo glitch and, more generally, with the Demo genre. (The full two-hour September 12th keynote video is here.)
Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior VP of Software Engineering — affectionately known as Hair Force One — is an infectiously happy, eager demo-meister. But the demo gods challenged Federighi’s disposition and caused his first attempt to unlock the iPhone X with his face to fail, leaving him staring at the standard unlock code screen.
Fortunately, a back-up phone was at hand — a testament to Federighi’s lack of faith in his own work, or to years of demo hiccups. The stand-in phone worked as expected, and the demo proceeded without further divine retribution.
The glitch was manna for the basket of excitables mentioned above. They jumped on the incident with tales of the failed demo, speculations on Apple’s face recognition technology shortcomings, dire predictions for the new phone’s life on the market…
As a veteran of product demos — I gave my first one 49 years ago this very month — I feel for Federighi and admire his composure. As I quickly learned, something almost always goes wrong. Sometimes it’s the demonstrator. For the first demo of the HP 9100A I was to give at the Orly Hilton in September 1968, I forgot to bring the Samsonite suitcase containing the magical machine.
More often, though, it’s the product that behaves erratically or, like a stubborn mule, altogether refuses to work when rebooted. That’s why you always have one or more spares. Or, in the case of delicate prototypes that travel poorly, one brings along a medic. When we flew around the country during the Be, Inc IPO Road Show, one of our engineers who had also studied dentistry came along to revive our Internet Appliance’s delicate hardware whenever it was manhandled too vigorously as it entered and exited the cargo hold.
On some occasions, rare ones to be sure, demo machines are “specially” configured for better effect, leading to demonstrations that are hard to reproduce in real life. This led to a series of demo jokes featuring tech kings presenting themselves at the Pearly Gates and asking Saint Peter for admission, only to be sent to various configurations of Hell for their mendacious demos. Unfortunately, these jokes are a bit too salacious to be featured on this family-oriented publication.
Proudly rebellious techies love demo pranks. The March 1987 Mac II intro featured a quick series of beautiful color screen shots paced to the rapid tempo of the Overture to Carmen, all produced by the machine itself. Rousing music, the novelty of color, the crowd was enthralled…and then:
Nervous Apple employees scattered throughout the audience at the United Artists theatre sat frozen in humiliating horror…except for a few engineers over in the corner who could barely contain their laughter. The music kept playing, the next slide appeared, the bomb was fake.
Later, the demo gods took their revenge on me when the Mac II I was exhibiting crashed during a live interview on ABC. The editor back in the booth switched to a head shot while I kept talking and reached behind the machine to hit the reset switch. Knowledgeable viewers will have recognized the restart bong, but the demo continued.
Later yet I tested the wrath of the gods — and that of my boss — by plugging a second mouse to the Mac on which Apple CEO John Sculley was rehearsing his presentation. Watching him from behind, I could see when he was about to grab something on the screen…and I would abruptly move the object just out of his reach. Good sport, my benefactor waited another two years before firing me.
Over time, I came to see how random the correlation between the demo’s success and the market’s reaction to the product is. Two good examples are the well-received Mac Portable demo where I assembled the machine on stage or, even better, the BeBox demo performed at the Agenda conference by my colleague Steve Horowitz that got a standing ovation. Market success didn’t follow.
On the other hand, we have Steve Jobs’ exquisitely edited and rehearsed Apple 2.0 demos. The best example is the January 2007 iPhone intro; a thrilling demo that marked the beginning of a new era, of more than one billion iPhones sold. The video is here, a resonant classic, the master at the top of his expository powers.
This brings us back to the aptly named iPhone X, ten years later. As it turns out, Face ID didn’t fail Federighi. A stagehand had unwittingly and repeatedly triggered Face ID when arranging the device before the presentation. As designed, a security algorithm kicked in when the camera had seen too much of the stagehand’s unrecognized face and thus it sent Federighi to the security code entry screen. Both disconcerting and reassuring.
I haven’t had the opportunity to form a Third Impression of the new iPhone X, that is putting my money on the table, getting the product and using it long enough to reach a stable gut-level feel, the one that triggers the ultimate marketing weapon: Word of Mouth. There’s always a chance that Face ID won’t work, either technically in spite of what appears to be a thorough development process, or “humanly” because knowledgeable engineers failed to predict how normal humans would take to the new Face ID flow of thoughts and gestures.
This doesn't seem likely, it’s hard to see a now very cautious Apple — overly-cautious, some armchair critics say — replace the proven Touch ID with an unreliable technology.
If iPhone X isn’t made of unobtainium, we should know in less than two months.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
