Although everybody has known about the iPhone for years it was just rumour and speculation rather than hard facts. It is amazing in the day of the internet that few people leaked a story about the iPhone before its announcement this week.
With companies like Cingular, Google and Yahoo on board along with the factory workers producing the handsets there must have been thousands of people who were in the loop and knew all the details but who did not leak anything.
Senior managers at Apple as well as Yahoo and Google were as much in the dark as the general public and only saw the iPhone for the first time during the keynote. With development taking 30 months there was plenty of time for some details to leak out. Even a look back at all the iPhone fakes that were released its clear that they were all fakes – not one has proved to be anywhere near accurate.
This secretive nature has created a desire and buzz in the market place totally unheard of for a mobile phone. As we reported last weekend two of the 7 things we might hear about at CES were about the iPhone and Apple were not even attending CES.
Most of the top journalists actually left CES on Monday night to fly to the Macworld Keynote in San Francisco, a decision they are no doubt pleased to have taken.
By using a touch screen Apple have been able to present generic touch screen devices to programmers and develop the software stage by stage without revealing the whole phone to too many people.
Steve Jobs is known to have enjoyed working with Cingular after they collaborated with Motorola on the ROKR phone. Some two years ago Jobs forged an agreement with Stan Sigman, Cingulars chief executive, to work together on the iPhone. Crucially Cingular were happy to let Apple build the phone without any interference. “They let Apple be Apple,” one Apple executive said.
Cingular did help with some of the revolutionary features such as the visual voicemail which allows you to view messages in a list on the screen and listen to them in the order you choose.
Amazingly Apple didn’t show the final iPhone prototype to Cingular until a few weeks before the Keynote announcement. Apple even crafted bogus handset prototypes to show not just to Cingular executives, but also to Apple’s own workers.
While Apple strived to keep the iPhone a secret Jony Ive, Apples designer, was completing the final designs.
Apple executives were forbidden from telling even their closest family about the iPhone. With dinners and family plans disrupted over the Christmas period and no doubt many other times over the last few years it must have been increasingly hard to keep the phone a secret.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing and one of the few Apple executives involved with the project from the start, said he had to keep the iPhone development secret even from his wife and children. When he left home for the official unveiling yesterday, Schiller said, his son asked, “Dad, can you finally tell us now what you’ve been working on?” Jobs paused during the keynote to acknowledge the strain and sacrifices that the past months have brought not just for the employees who kept the secrets so well, but also for their families. “We couldn’t have done it without you,” he said, with obvious sincerity.
