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Comment by kyleyeats | Hacker News Reader

Software and hardware people both do this "golden path" demo stuff all the time. Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?

Imagine you read an article with damning testimony from an Apple engineer who said the prototype was crap, and only really worked for the demo. That's what this article is.

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> Was Steve Jobs lying when he showed a barely-working iPhone prototype on stage for the first time?

If Apple never delivered the features that he demo’d and went on to sell the phone for $650 with the promise of those features existing, then yes.

That's fair. I don't even pre-order games so I can't get in the mindset of pre-ordering features. But from a cynical, capitalist viewpoint, it looks like Elon found a way to sell hype directly and his fans were happy to play along.

And for a long time, and still now, a lot of the verbiage around FSD implies that "Availability of FSD depends on regulatory approval" which makes it sound like regulatory approval is holding Tesla back from giving this to you. Ironically, there's actual very little "regulatory approval" required if things work. So it requires very little regulatory approval and a whole hell of a lot of "actually make it work".

Imagine they went on to sell that prototype with the implication it would soon do what the demo showed. And it still wasn't doing what it was supposed to 7 years later

There were multiple prototypes and he switched them during the keynote when running out of memory or having other problems. They also built a cell tower backstage + modded the OS to always show full signal strength.

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