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Comment by macintux | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs had to follow a very narrow happy path in his first iPhone demo because the product was still very buggy. It still amazes me that the iPhone shipped so (relatively) soon after.

Failing to prepare for a business-critical demo was absolutely the CEO’s fault.

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I saw Jobs give a demo of Enterprise Objects (when he was at NeXT) at a trade show. He wasn't actually operating the keyboard and mouse, but he was on stage directing and explaining and suddenly the whole demo crashed with a kernel panic on the big screen. He handled it pretty smoothly, just said "oooops!" and waited for the reboot and then continued.

He was also Steve Jobs. Not some random entrepreneur.

Yeah, the demo malpractice was the thing that stood out to me as peak idiocy.

I mean the general toxicity was awful, but even in a functioning company with sensible timescales and staffing that's 100% how to end up with a mid-demo disaster.

You only had to hold it differently and you'd have no issues ^_^

"Everybody gets a case." - Oprah Jobs, Humility Inc.

There's nothing wrong with the keyboards.

You're kidding, right? Google "macbook butterfly keyboard"

It's a shame you're getting dogpiled for echoing something Jobs himself suggested. Let it live in infamy, "you're holding it wrong"

When Jobs demoed the original iPad, half of the NYT front page failed to load because it used Flash, and Flash was not supported (and in the end, never was).

That was clearly a deliberate choice on his part to emphasize Apple’s decision to not support Flash. He lingered over the blank content.

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