Vol 6 Chapter 16: Anxious apple

Silicon Valley, Apple's headquarters at 1 Infinite Loop Street, Cupertino.

Looking at Jobs who was furious, and his quiet colleague, Joshua wanted to slap herself twice, making you so stupid and naive.

He clearly remembered that he was very happy and honored the moment he was selected as a member of the rehearsal team.

But look now, what's so happy about this?

Most of the other members of the rehearsal group felt the same as Joshua at this time. After experiencing the difficult years before, why are they still so naive?

How silly this is!

Fortunately, Jobs's roar finally stopped.

Even if it was temporarily stopped, it would be a great comfort to those present.

However, when everyone looked at Jobs’ hand and stretched out to the fourth of the few prototypes on the stage, everyone’s hearts were suspended again, and more than one person began to pray, Almighty God, the Merciful Virgin Mary Ya, let this mobile phone successfully demonstrate the functions Steve wants to demonstrate!

The above several of the same model, different from all the mobile phones on the market at this time, are the results of Joshua and more than 2,000 outstanding colleagues who have struggled for nearly three years.

In fact, if you count that Jobs had the idea of ​​making a mobile phone, this time will be as long as 5 years.

In the IT industry, 5 years is actually the same as 5 centuries.

For those Apple employees who are lucky enough to participate in this project, those years are indeed no different from centuries.

In the past two days, Joshua heard many colleagues talk about a topic more than once: resignation.

At the beginning of next month, that is, early 2007, to be precise, on January 9, 2007, after the epoch-making product they developed was officially released, many colleagues who had worked alongside Joshua would choose to leave. apple.

There is only one reason. In the past three years, the pressure has been so great that many of them are close to collapse.

Joshua believes that their work in the past three years must have been very uncomfortable for Chinese workers who are known for their hard work.

In the past three years, they have worked more than 80 hours a week, which has long been not news.

But what makes them the most uncomfortable is that even if you work more than 80 hours a week, tired like a dead dog, go to a bar to have a refreshing, or relax, you can’t talk to anyone about what you are doing. the work did.

Whether that person is your friend, your partner, or the girl you are about to tease.

If not, you will be fired immediately.

Before joining the project, everyone will sign a confidentiality agreement with the company, and then they will be told what project you will participate in.

At this time, you have to sign another document to confirm that you have signed a non-disclosure agreement and cannot tell other people.

In front of the building that Feng Yiping had looked for but could not find, they put a label on it, "Fight Club".

This is a famous movie in 1999. The most well-known line of that movie is, "The first rule of a fight club is that you must never talk about a fight club."

Even their employees who have signed two confidentiality agreements have to swipe their cards at least twice a day when they enter this "fight club"-the most restrictive place requires six swipes.

Jobs seems to like to set such boundaries.

Of course, Joshua and the others at that time still felt a little proud.

Because of the place they entered, most employees of the company have no right to enter.

And after they were selected to sign the agreement, they were told that the founder of the company, the soul of the company, Jobs sent them a message, "You are now the stars of the company,"

But that kind of pride can only maintain a good mood for a short period of time.

After entering, they have to stay in the laboratory like sitting in confinement. All communication tools are handed in, even the communication between colleagues is restricted.

Even the same people inside the project cannot discuss with each other.

For example, engineers in charge of electronics design cannot talk to R&D software.

Joshua speculated that within Apple, including Jobs himself, there must be no more than 10 people who understand the entire framework.

Even now, when the outside world, especially the technology sector, can basically confirm the fact that Apple is developing smartphones, and knowing that they will definitely release a mobile phone product at the next press conference, the company is still implementing strict rules. Confidentiality system.

For example, just now, the Moscone Exhibition Center, which is under their contract and is under construction, at the beginning, Jobs asked all the workers involved in the construction, from the builders in the exhibition hall to the lighting engineer and the sound engineer... to the press conference. No one was allowed to leave the building the night before.

Later, after being persuaded by many people, including the company's legal adviser, he finally gave up this idea.

It’s better to say if it’s just keeping secrets, or just working overtime.

However, they often work more than 80 hours a week in a highly confidential studio, and most of these more than 80 hours have been facing unprecedented challenges. Many colleagues describe the challenges they encountered. , "It's like the first moon landing,"

An iPod, a mobile phone, and a network device combine these three together. It's simple to say. At the beginning, everyone thought that this was the development of a small Macintosh, but after doing it, I realized that it was really true. Not so difficult.

For example, touch screen.

This is not an ordinary touch screen, because Jobs hopes that even in the bathroom, he can easily browse news and send and receive emails through his mobile phone. Therefore, the touch screen must also support multi-touch.

Although in early 2003, some employees of the company had already developed embedded multi-touch technology, the question was how to shrink the large screen of the Mac and mass-produce it.

First, you must find an LCD manufacturer who knows how to embed this technology into glass; secondly, you must correspond to their production line time; then you must also come up with compensation and calibration algorithms to prevent the pixel electronics that touch the screen from generating various noises …….

There are many other problems.

For example, Apple is a design company, so, including Jobs, they often focus on the pursuit of design, that is, more emphasis on art, while ignoring other issues, including some very critical technical issues.

At the beginning of this year, they made the second prototype, which well continued some successful experience of Mac computers, all using brushed aluminum material.

Jobs was very satisfied with it.

But Joshua and the others were a little dumbfounded.

Then, a scientist, an antenna expert had to say to those designers who hold the power, "Using such a material, there will be many problems in the realization of many functions, because radio waves cannot penetrate metal."

The excellent designers in the team are also artists. The last time they were exposed to science courses, perhaps in junior high school, they asked very seriously, "Why can't you open a small mouth and let the radio waves pass through?"

There is also the size of a mobile phone. Some people think it should be as big as an iPod. Some people think it is bigger than the final size...

Then, when about 100 prototypes were finally produced, Jobs suddenly became angry again, "The screens of our products are not allowed to be easily scratched like this. I want to change the scratch-resistant glass screen. I will solve this problem within six weeks. "

Fortunately, this problem was quickly resolved. Jobs' good friend, Mr. Feng from China, his company, relying on a patented technology purchased from Corning, can perfectly meet Jobs' requirements.

These are hardware aspects.

On the software side, there are similar obstacles.

Jobs wanted this mobile phone to run a modified version of OS\X. How to put such a huge system into the mobile phone chip?

Because of the limitation of mobile phone hardware, the mobile phone system must be modified to one-tenth the size of OS\X, which means that several million codes need to be removed...

No part of the work is easy.

Including now, so many problems encountered at the beginning have been solved with cost savings, but with this press conference, everyone has to solve many new problems.

Other companies developed conferences and put the equipment on a big screen to show the audience. They all used a camera to shoot at the equipment, but Jobs did not agree with such a plan.

Because according to that scheme, when he demonstrates, when he clicks on the application on the phone, his finger will also be displayed on the big screen, which will block the phone.

So he requested that during the presentation, only the screen after he operated the phone could be simultaneously seen on the big screen, but his fingers could not be seen.

For this reason, the team of engineers had to work overtime to find a solution. Finally, some circuit boards and video cables were installed on the back of the mobile phone, and then connected to the projector, which met the requirements of Jobs.

But do you think this is a happy ending, and everyone will be able to reach the pinnacle of success immediately? of course not.

Because all the prototypes produced at present have only 128M of memory, and all the applications currently running are very bloated. The result of the superposition of these two is that the precious prototypes will collapse and collapse at every turn.

In addition, there is no radio expert in Apple's core team, so no radio expert is included in the smartphone team, so the signal of the prototype is not good-so the signal of Apple's mobile phone is not good.

There are also some phenomena that they can't find a reasonable explanation. For example, it is good to send an email first and then browse the web, but on the contrary, if you browse the web first and then send the email, it will immediately start to strike.

As a last resort, after repeated trial and error, Joshua and the others finally worked out a plan they called the "golden channel", which is the sequence of a series of tasks.

Only by operating in a specific way and order can this mobile phone ~www.wuxiaspot.com~ which has cost them countless people look normal.

But even so, these current prototypes that look tall and beautiful, apart from the different sizes of the seams on both sides of the screen, there are also various problems that everyone can't grasp.

For example, the mobile phones used in today's rehearsal, the first one, because of the poor wireless signal of the receiving operator, crashed and restarted not long after it started.

On the second channel, a song was played halfway through and it collapsed.

On the third station, in the process of zooming in on a photo, the phone once again arrogantly strikes. No matter how you click it, it won't move. Finally, the screen goes black.

Everyone can see that Jobs really wanted to throw it out.

Now, this is the fourth station, Joshua and the others, watching Jobs' operation nervously.

Not bad, it can play music smoothly; the signal is also good, so it can receive incoming calls; it is also smooth to plug in another phone call; select a photo from the photo library and send it by mail, and it is also completed smoothly, book appointment They were all excited at once, and this performance was unexpectedly good.

At the next moment, Jobs decided to return to music playback. The Beatles’ classic song Yesterday rang, and then, it got stuck, shit!

Joshua and they immediately lowered their heads.

Sure enough, Jobs patted heavily on the table, stared at the people in front of him, and shouted again, "You ruined my company,"

"If we fail, you will take full responsibility,"

Joshua saw that he had gained at least 50 pounds due to excessive pressure, so he had a prominent belly, and his heart was full of regret. Why did I try to be a member of the rehearsal team so many times?

Hasn't it been enough for the past two years?