Hey, it's your friend David Pierce here. This week, we're bringing you another episode from season two of Version History. Like I mentioned last week, if you want to get these episodes as soon as they arrive, follow the Version History podcast feed wherever you get podcasts. You can find it ad-free if you're a Verge subscriber. This is a really fun episode, though, and we wanted to make sure you heard it too. Let's do it.
It's early 2010, and in a few months, we're probably going to get a new iPhone. We get a new iPhone in the spring of every year. But there's something different about the one this year, which is that maybe you've already seen it. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and on this episode, we are talking about the iPhone 4. The iPhone that lived before it lived.
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It's time for the iPhone 4. Maybe the best iPhone, maybe the most interesting iPhone. We have a lot to talk about. Eli Patel is here. It's the best iPhone. Stop getting ahead of me, Patel, all right? Walt Mossberg is here. Hi, Walt. Hi, David. This reminds me of the old days, except back then I was getting paid to do this. I like it better this way, personally. Yeah, I'm sure you do. This is new media, Walt. Everyone's doing it for brand deals. I'm just a poor pensioner, and here I am. You're just here to say wild things that make for good TikToks. That's your job on this show, Walt.
So the reason I asked you both to be here, I would say, is going to become very obvious very quickly here. Not only is the story of the iPhone sort of intersecting with a lot of work that you were both doing at the time, you both actually figure into this story personally in some really interesting ways. We picked this phone to do. This is the first iPhone we've done on the show. We picked this one to do because there is so much story both about and kind of around this iPhone. And it features many more characters, including both of you, than it normally does. All of this is going to come up. But first, like, Neil, are you serious? You think this is the best iPhone ever? This is the best iPhone ever. Why?
easily the best iPhone ever. It's the one that changed phones forever. Like the mobile phone is a design object. started with the iPhone 4 in a real way. It introduced the Retina display, which is maybe the single biggest innovation in display technology outside of very core innovations, but increasing the pixel density to make it look great was just a huge step forward. And then all the stuff you're talking about, it was a cultural moment. The phone was being covered on the local news in the context of scandal and crime, and that had just never happened before. And there's just something about this phone that really captures not only where the iPhone had been going, but where it went.
And actually, the specific line, when Steve Jobs introduced it, he said, it's a beautiful Leica camera. And then he talked about the camera on the back. And there's nothing more important, I think, in smartphone history than the fact that they are incredible cameras. It is the thing that has made the smartphone era, I think, what it has become and made the social media era what has become. And the iPhone 4 is the one where Steve Jobs said, this, the comparison I'm making in its design is to a Leica camera. And I think that was just, it was a clear vision of what was to come. Walt, do you agree?
I'm not sure I agree it was the best iPhone, but I think it was probably the most seminal iPhone. And the reason for that is if you look, I think this is the 3GS. I have trouble telling it from the original, but it's bulbous. I mean, look, we were all incredibly excited about it and amazed because it was so different than other phones. But the iPhone 4 set, in terms of designs and in some respects features, set the template, I think, for the rest of not only iPhones, but Android phones and so forth.
It introduced the kind of shape and thinness, even though phones got thinner, it introduced the kind of what you expect to see when you see a mobile phone, a smartphone. And in addition to the screen, which I agree with Neelai was an enormous breakthrough, it had FaceTime. It was the first thing with FaceTime. And FaceTime is used, I don't know, a billion times a week now or something. And I remember...
I was I was there at the announcement and I remember Jobs, Steve Jobs, placing a FaceTime call to, I believe, Phil Schiller, who was the at that time the head of marketing and who was in the room. It wasn't a dramatic test, but it was it just it just blew everyone's mind. I do remember I had forgotten how big a deal FaceTime was at that point. Like now video calling is so like it's so commonplace that it's like deeply uninteresting to think about. But at that point, the existence of FaceTime was incredible.
Like it seems nuts that this was like a possible thing to do. Oh, we ran story after story over whether AT&T was going to let FaceTime run over the cell network. And like, I mean, the iPhone 4 was still on 3G, right? It wasn't LTE yet. So the idea that the 3G network could carry this volume of video calls. I mean, I have probably a dozen blog posts from Engadget where, you know, tired AT&T representatives like we were working on the project with Steve. Like they didn't know they weren't aware of it, but they knew what the promise would be. And then while I'm sure you remember this, the carriers wanted all that for themselves.
Because that was their dynamic with all of the cell phone companies at the time. And the idea that Apple would make its own video calling service and not cut AT&T or whatever other carrier into it was very controversial. Again, looking back, this all seems bananas. I will say AT&T is going to catch a lot of strays in this episode. That's what I came for. Tough day for AT&T in this version of history. Let's just back up to the beginning of the story and kind of walk through the, I would say, first six months of 2010, which turned out to be pretty eventful for Apple. It's early 2010. The iPhone, like you're saying, is off and running. The 3GS, the one you have with you, we think, well, shipped in the spring of 2009.
It's not like the most exciting iPhone in the history of the universe, but that's fine. They can't all be. Well, I would like to read you from your own review of the 3GS just to see if you'd like to amend anything. You said, I regard these changes as more evolutionary than revolutionary, and I don't think this latest iPhone is as compelling an upgrade for the average user as the 3G model was last year for owners of the original 2007 iPhone. Feel good about that in retrospect? Feels right. I'll stick with it. And at this point, the iOS and iPhone momentum is super strong. iOS 3.0 had just come out. It did copy and paste, which was like a huge deal. Again, I feel like part of the job of this show is to remind you of things that don't seem like a big deal, but were a big deal. By the way, they hadn't even named it iOS yet. It was still iPhone OS. That's right, yeah. And it was hilarious that the original one didn't do copy and paste. But yeah, we were still early in this whole making good smartphones game. But the App Store is off to a good start. The iPod Touch is still a hit. It's like things are going well.
So this is where we are. And the story of the iPhone 4 starts kind of in, I would say, January of this year when one Nilay Patel publishes a post on Engadget.com saying, is this the Apple tablet? So the other thing that's happening right now is Apple is gearing up to launch the iPad. And you somehow got a leak or some images of what we thought was going to be. This is in my life as a gadget leaker. Yeah. I've had many lives. One of them has leaked gadgets. So again, the context of this is so funny. Engadget and Gizmodo were the gadget blogs. This is going to come up, I think, in this episode at the highest level.
Engadget and Gizmodo were, we were ferocious competitors. I worked at Engadget. A lot of the people who started the verge worked at Engadget. We had great competitors at Gizmodo, then other friends, although I pretended to hate them for years and years. And every single day was a ferocious fight to break new gadget news. And sometimes that gadget news was as small as like, there's a new SD card. It holds more than last year's SD card. And sometimes that news was we would leak gadgets. I think Engadget leaked the first Xbox. We leaked dozens of Android phones over the years. And so we would get these tips and a lot of them would be fake. A lot of them would be mock-ups or Photoshop. They were much easier to tell.
when things were bad Photoshop back then. But I got this picture right before the iPad came out. The morning the iPad was coming out. I think in the post, it says 13 hours before the keynote was supposed to start. And it was a picture of a development table with an iPad on it. They're just sitting there with like the screen. And I remember I had this conversation with Josh Topolsky and the rest of our team. I was like, I think I have a picture of the iPad.
And, you know, it was like 13 hours. The stakes are very low. So we're going to run it. Like, this is just exciting. Like, we think it's real. Here it is. And then over time, it got confirmed. Gizmodo matched it. This is like hot stuff, right? And then later that same year, around the iPhone 4 time, someone pinged and was like, you know, you've had a picture of the iPhone 4 this entire time. You just didn't notice. You're so focused on the iPad. You didn't notice it in the background is the iPhone 4. And Apple never said anything. They never demanded the picture come down because no one noticed. And I think they realized it's better to not call attention to this. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. So anyway, so this one kind of comes and goes. The iPhone 4 is just live on the internet and no one notices. And then...
April 19th, 2010. Kizmodo, out of nowhere, publishes a story. And it's by Jason Chen and Jesus Diaz. And it says, the lead of it is, you are looking at Apple's next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look like an iPhone 3DS. We got it. We disassembled it. It's the real thing. And here are all the details. So they showed up a bunch of features that this thing would have. It was going to have a front-facing camera. It was going to have a larger lens on the back. It was going to have a camera flash, a better display. It was going to split the buttons for volume, which I remember people being really excited about instead of the rocker. But the big thing was, this thing was a big design change. It had a flat back. It had the aluminum border around the outside. It was just like squarer and sharper and nicer. And it was the design in particular.
that made everybody both in and out of Gizmodo wonder if this was the real thing. And so immediately, this thing causes a crazy firestorm all over the internet. Do you remember the day these stories came out? What was this like? Oh, it was crazy. Because first of all, again, we're in ferocious competition with Gizmodo. So we lost. So what are we going to do? We're just going to talk shit about their story. I don't know how else to explain that. Losing newsroom does nothing except throw cold water on the scoop that someone else got. So we're like, is this real? Could this be real? How will the antennas work was a big conversation. And then we've got to cover it. So then we write post after post.
There's like social media fighting going on about all of this, like you would do. And then the turn, and you mentioned this in the latest story, they had disassembled the phone. And whatever weird code of gadget blogger honor existed, we knew that they had gone too far. We absolutely knew that they had gone too far. And then we also started hearing that Apple was furious about this. Absolutely furious. And then we're going back through our emails and just seeing like, did we miss this? How do we lose? And we realized that we'd been offered the phone and we just missed it. And then we'd heard later that Steve Jobs had called the COVL where we worked and said, you are not going to touch this. Oh, wow. And so there was just some in the background. It became very evident that Apple was furious about this. Yeah, it was. It got.
publicly confirmed that this was real very quickly. John Gruber at Daring Fireball posted something like right afterwards being like, yes, I have heard that there is a phone missing that they are trying desperately to get back. And it's like, well, two and two. What was your day like that day? Well, it wasn't something I was going to write about, to be honest. I think the Wall Street Journal, where I worked at the time, had a beat reporter covering Apple who might have written about it. I haven't gone back and checked.
As I recall it, the first stories or at least rumors were that Gizmodo had stolen this phone in this bar. And eventually it turned out that the Apple employee had left it there and the Gizmodo person had picked it up. And I think that's an ethical issue, a journalism ethical issue. So you're right. Steve Jobs was utterly furious about it for.
A few reasons, one of which was his insane devotion to secrecy. And the other was they wanted to control the timing of revealing things. They always did. So I got a call from him during this one day. And I think we spent about an hour on the phone arguing. He said, I'm going to sue these bastards. I've reported it to the police, but I'm going to sue them. I'm going to pursue criminal charges, blah, blah, blah. And I said.
look, I sympathize with your situation, but that would be a terrible idea. That would be a terrible idea in terms of freedom of the press. And I went through all the stuff about how freedom of the press covers even things you find repulsive and you don't like. And if you don't adhere to it in those cases, you can't adhere to it in the more noble cases. You know, during the hour, he wavered a little back and forth, but I failed. I mean, I failed to convince him. He was just ripshit about it. I don't think I knew that you'd gone to bat for the gadget blogs during this time, Walt. This is like amazing to hear. Well, I mean, I...
I read the gadget blogs. I didn't always trust the gadget blogs, to be honest. I mean, you met Neelai. That was the right call. Well, I hadn't met Neelai, I don't think, back then. But Neelai is a different... I mean, he's an excellent journalist. He does not... His job is not leaks. But the point is, I felt strongly that you had to go to bat for them. Even though I said to Jobs, and I believe this, I think I said it to you a few minutes ago, this was not good journalistic ethics. Gizmodo should have given the phone back.
This is, I think, the most interesting piece of this puzzle, right? The how they acquired the phone and then what they did with it are two separate problems. And, you know, looking back on it, the culture of Gizmodo is the culture of Gawker, which is maybe a whole other episode of a whole different show. But they were definitely the faster, looser, more aggressive Gawker as a company style itself is... Much less ethical. So let me just run through what actually did happen here. And I think over time we figured out what seems to be more or less the correct sequence of events here. So it starts almost a month before this story comes out.
in March, when a software engineer at Apple who's working on the phone call capabilities of the phone is at a bar in Redwood City. It was his birthday, we learned later. He leaves the phone on a bar stool, and the person next to him picks up the phone, waits a while to see if he's going to come back looking for it, tries to get the phone to work, it crashes a bunch, ends up just taking the phone with him and going home. The next morning, wakes up, sees that this phone is actually not a 3GS, it's something else disguised to look like a 3GS, and discovers it's a completely different phone. So this person then, what they say is that they then called Apple.
and tried to get a support person to understand what had happened and tried to give the phone back and couldn't, like, couldn't get someone to tell them what to do with his phone. Yeah. And then in a strange turn from that decision, starts emailing tech bloggers asking for money. And so what ends up happening is Gizmodo pays $5,000 in cash for the phone. Which is another thing we would have never done. Like, this is what I mean, like, I don't want to do journalism ethics too much here, but like, there are choices they made that as competitors, we were sometimes jealous. Yeah. Like, we don't pay for tips. It's just a thing we don't do. And Gawker as a company did.
Right. And so, yeah, so Gizmodo ends up paying cash for it. And this ends up being a part of the story, right? Because it's the buying of something changes the nature of the something, right? And Giz said at the time, they weren't even sure it was the real thing. It was like, it seemed plausible that this was an actual leaked, unannounced iPhone, but they weren't sure, which is why they did things like disassemble it. And one of the things that convinced them it was the real thing was that there was, I forget which part, but there was a part in it stamped with Apple's logo.
And that's the sort of thing that it's like, no one who is faking this thing is going to go to the lengths of stamping Apple's logo onto the internals of the device, which is famously a thing that Apple did, right? This is the like paint both sides of the fence company that cared deeply about the way the internals were organized. So like, those are the things that are like, okay, this is, it's now clear to us that this is real. And they post the thing. And it came with a very short and very 2010 era video. Can I just play this video for you very quickly? Yes. It's a delight. This comes out when Giz first leaks the iPhone.
Hey, I'm Jason Chen. This is the new iPhone. Here are some of the new features. You have the front camera, which is finally there. The two volume buttons are now separate. The whole outside is metallic instead of plastic. The bottom duct character is the same. The SIM slot has moved from the top.
to the side. And when you pop it out, it's a micro SIM. The back is flush. So this is like, again, I just, I play this to reiterate the point that this was like every single detail of this was a huge deal because this phone was brand new and also nothing like this had ever happened before. Like Apple was, Apple was famous for its secrecy. Apple stuff didn't leak. This was, this was like a completely new experience. I want to say your boy leaked the iPad.
Come on now. Sure. You had a picture of it. That's true. Kudos. You did leak the iPad. But this was just like, I had forgotten until I went back and re-read all these stories how big a deal this was. Gizmodo ends up running a separate story just debunking everybody's conspiracy theories about it. One was that it was an Apple plant, that Apple was strategically leaking its own iPhone. We got this all the time. Straightforwardly. Insane.
No. That's very simple. There's a line from Joel Johnson with a story for Gizmodo, and he said, there had been some that questioned why we ran our story on the same day the HTC Incredible reviews hit the stream. Sure, yeah, yeah, that's the one. So this is the conspiracy theories Apple is doing this to take away from the shine of the HTC Incredible. The HTC Incredible. Amazing. Which was incredible. Yeah, incredibly bad. He says, here's why, because it was a Monday. Good news day. If you really think Apple cares so much about mucking with the release of yet another Android phone that they'd screw up an iPhone launch, you've got an out-of-kilter conception of Apple's fear of Google. I think that is largely correct.
So this becomes a huge thing. People start writing stories like, is this the end of an Apple era? Is Apple going to be a whole different company after this? This just becomes a whole thing. And then it turns into a whole long investigation that I don't really want to get into. But Jason Chan's home eventually gets raided. The San Mateo County police gets involved. This becomes a sort of long and messy legal battle that sort of largely recedes from the purposes of this episode, but goes on for a very long time. And Walt, to your point, Steve and Apple decided to go after this thing. Like this was not given the choice to just kind of live and let live. They chose very deliberately not to.
Despite my genius. Can I say just like one thing about that? Again, over time, my two great competitors at Gizmodo, like on the, we're going to write about SD cards faster than the next guy, were Matt Buchanan and John Herman. I'm friends with them. Brian Lamb was the editor of Gizmodo at that time. He is living his best life in Hawaii woodworking. He founded the Wirecutter after all of this. Brian made the choice. And I'm just saying this out of love. Like these are all people I care about and respect and I'm very friendly with. Brian made the choice to try to bribe Steve Jobs.
And it was just such a mistake. Like from the outside, even in real time, we're like, what are you doing, man? He wrote a blog post, basically. He was like, here's a letter I sent to Steve Jobs. And he was like, hey, we'll give you your phone back. But you've been so testy and aggressive to us that we'll only do it if you're nice to us and invite us to your events again. And there was one other condition. Jobs had to acknowledge that it was Apple's phone. Yeah. He like he needed to give the last win. Yeah. And it was like, you know, the other way to play this was to publish the pictures of the phone, say you have it, make your video and then give the thing back, which would have absolutely confirmed that it was Apple's phone. Right. I think this would have come to nothing.
But the aggression to not only disassemble it, but then to say, we are only giving you this back upon all these conditions, including the last one, which is you cave and say it was real. Man, I was like, you're all going to jail. Steve Jobs is going to build you a beautiful white and glass jail and put you in it because he's never going to agree to this. I mean, maybe it would have worked with some other tech executives, but Steve Jobs was pugnacious and he had a hot temper. He was already furious.
It was crazy for them to think they could do that. It was just crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And so I think, to Brian Lamb's credit, he wound up writing a story about a year later where he said basically exactly what you said, Eli. He said, the scoop was big. People loved it. If I could do it again, I'd do the first story about the phone again. But I probably would have given the phone back without asking for the letter, and I would have done the story about the engineer who lost it with more compassion and without naming him. I think that is the correct outcome. And I think we all sort of learned that lesson together. I mean, this is a class of people that was coming up together, was competing, you know, to whatever extent Walt wants to pretend I'm a good journalist now. It's like, oh, these are the stars. Right.
right? Like an entire industry sort of like gained these cars together and the boundaries of what you should and shouldn't do, I think changed because of the FN4. Yeah, I agree. Okay. And then, well, before we get off this story entirely, I do, I want to go back to the D conference that you were talking about a few minutes ago, because you interviewed Steve Jobs at the D conference that year and you talked a bunch about this. I have just a short clip I want to play because I think it's relevant to kind of the piece of this that we're talking about. And then I want to know just how you remember this whole ordeal. But here, let me just play this bit for you first. When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened,
I got a lot of advice from people that said, you've got to just let it slide. And I thought deeply about this. And I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can't do that. I'd rather quit. Well, what do you remember about how this interview felt? I remember thinking that I was quite surprised.
at least at the moment, not so much after I thought about it, that he identified the core values of Apple really as being secrecy and protection of IP. Really, that's what he was doing. And when he started talking about core values, I wasn't sure where he was going. I had had this conversation with him, so I knew the freedom of the press thing wasn't going to work, particularly with a blog. I was surprised that he said he would rather quit than, you know, lose essentially the element of surprise. Yeah. Because really he wasn't going to lose IP from this. And I mean, it was just a question of timing and taking away his opportunity to be the one to announce it. Yeah. You could tell he just felt burned in a bunch of different ways by the whole experience. All right. So let's pause here and take a break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to launch this damn phone into existence. We'll be right back.
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And Steve Jobs gets to finally launch the phone on his own terms. He did a thing that in retrospect actually surprises me, which is he kind of like sideways acknowledged that people had seen this before, that it had leaked. It was a rare sort of out of the reality distortion field moment. But it also, it played big. Let me play you this very short clip from the actual intro that I just very much enjoy. This is, he starts out by saying, you know, it's the best iPhone in the history of iPhones, whatever. And then he says this. Now, stop me if you've already seen this. Believe me.
You ain't seen it. You've got to see this thing in person. It is one of the most beautiful designs you've ever seen. Steve Jobs is very good at this in general. And that was one of, I think, Steve Jobs' best. The Stop Me If You've Seen This, Trust Me You Ain't Seen It, is just, like, it's very good. We've lost this. Yes. As a culture, as a society. Truly. And it humanized him.
And he did a lot of things to humanize himself. But I mean, you can see that the audience took it as a joke and laughed and clapped. At the same time, the FBI is breaking down. By the way, the conceit of that structure is it's not real until I show it to you, which is like only Steve Jobs in this universe gets to pull that off. Like if Mark Zuckerberg is like, you haven't seen the new Instagram until I show it. Is it more goggles? Did you make more VR goggles? Mark, good job, buddy. Like he doesn't have legs yet. But Jobs got to pull it off because he had the history. He'd done it enough times that he could deliver that. And just watching it back, it is hard to imagine a character who can do that today.
Yes, I totally agree. No, there is nobody. No, I think that's right. So he shows off the iPhone 4. This was, fun fact, the last time an iPhone was launched at the June event. It's only slightly fun fact. There it is. They moved to the fall release schedule right after this one. This is also when they started calling it iOS. This is iOS 4. So like kind of a new idea about how we're going to do iPhone stuff here. We actually have the iPhone 4 right here. If you'd like to hold it and have feelings about it. Well, we're going to talk about holding it soon, I'm sure. Oh, sure.
Yes, we are. Easily the most beautiful. Although this is running iOS 7, so. Yeah, it's not quite the same. It's not quite the same experience. So the iPhone 4 was, just to refresh your memory a little bit about it, the new design was the thing, as we talked about, but there was actually a lot of new stuff about this. It was the thinnest smartphone in the world at the time. It had the A4 chip, which was the first custom Apple Silicon in the iPhone. Look at this. Look at what I'm saying. This is my 17 Pro Max. Look at this. It's like two iPhone 4s. This is nonsense. It's outrageous. It's smaller than the cell window on the back of my 17 Pro Max. No, that's great. This was the first time.
custom Apple Silicon had shown up in an iPhone. It had shown up in the iPad earlier in the same year, but this was like a big chip move for Apple to make this phone. The A4. The A4. It had the retina display, it had a front-facing camera, and it could do FaceTime. It had a five-megapixel rear camera that was a big improvement over what it had before. Battery life was still measured in talk time, which is a fact that I just find adorable. That's true. But this one had 40% more than the previous one, so you could talk on the phone, because that's apparently what people did. Even though, ironically, Walt, as you point out in your review of this phone, the single worst thing about the iPhone was making phone calls with it.
But anyway, it also, this was the first iPhone that, foreshadowing for a thing to come here in a little bit, worked on CDMA networks. So this is like, this is actually, whether you like this phone the most or not, kind of a like step change in a bunch of directions for Apple in terms of like how it makes the iPhone and what the iPhone is. Well, that's what I meant about how it set the template. I think seminal is exactly the right word for it. And it was seminal. Part of it was the design, which despite that size difference Eli just showed, and I remember saying the screen was the same size, but it was.
considerably thinner. It was actually not lighter than the 3GS. It's a pretty serious piece of equipment. They put a bigger battery in than the 3GS had, and I think that they could have made it lighter, but they took the opportunity to put a bigger battery in. They sold 1.7 million of them in the first three days. Jobs called it the most successful product launch in Apple's history. The reviews were universally great, except for one thing. This is about as...
as consistent a set of reviews for a product as I can ever remember. Everybody said, like, Walt, I'll quote you to you. You said, I'd say that Apple has built a beautiful smartphone that works well, adds impressive new features, and is still overall the best device in its class. And then you wrote like three paragraphs about how much you hated AT&T. And this is a theme. Like David Pogue, who was then reviewing stuff for the New York Times, also loved the phone, also had network issues. Ed Beig, who was writing for USA Today, also loved the phone, also had network issues. Josh Sapolsky, writing for Engadget, also loved the phone, also had network issues. Like this was the thing. It was very clear that this was a great phone, completely hamstrung by the network that it was.
working on i also in that column and in a number of subsequent columns or previous columns uh said you definitely want this but you should not buy it unless you're certain that you have reasonable at&t coverage because otherwise forget it yeah yeah it was a brick without good at&t coverage in a very real way um and so so again this thing is like doing super well people are really excited about it at&t is a disaster uh and then drama number two hits almost immediately. Like within a few days of this phone starting to ship to people, a bunch of people start to notice the same thing, which is that if you hold the phone in your hand with your hand covering the bottom left corner of it, so basically if you sort of nestle it into the palm of your left hand is generally what people were doing, your reception starts to die. And you can sort of watch it tick down bar by bar by bar. This becomes a thing people start making videos about, people start talking about on nascent social media platforms. Here's just one video that I enjoyed very much that I think is like, again, a very
on-brand and of the moment YouTube video that actually did pretty well. Pick it up. I'm going to hold it in the same direction and just slightly elevated, but my hands are wrapped around the size of the iPhone. And as I do that, you can see the bars begin to decrease one after another. Oh my God, I have like a physical memory of this video. Yeah, right? And you can see up in the, it's got the reception in the top left corner and it just ticks down. Bar after bar after bar. So this, if memory serves, like almost immediately goes from
a thing a couple of people have noticed to like full-blown fiasco. So the gadget blogs, which again was my universe of time, we're going to cover every inch of this, right? The iPhone 4 is out. It's the thing that everyone's talking about. We're going to publish every video of everyone trying to make the signal drop when you hold it. We're going to test holding it ourselves. You know, our comments are all lit up. You know, the design of the phone was new. The antenna was incorporated into that outer band.
there's a million stories about how Apple's sense of design has gotten over, you know, traditional wireless engineering. You got your Nokia fanboys, Motorola fanboys in the comments being like, the real cell phone companies would never let this happen. I mean, this was, at least in our corner of the universe, as big as stories could exist. The thing that really surprised me is that it broke out. Yes. It broke out into the mainstream. And this is a thing I always think about is when does a gadget story hit the local news? And I lived in Chicago at the time. And like, when does ABC7 in Chicago start covering gadgets? Like, you know, something is going to go sideways, right? You know, something else has happened.
the story will take on a different shape. And it's always, that's the symbol to me, right? When does the local news decide this is important enough? And the iPhone 4 antenna hit the local news in like two hours. I don't think there's been a gadget story like it ever since where it immediately went to Steve Jobs' baby has a problem. Yes. No, I think that's exactly right. One thing I very much enjoyed about this is I think one of the moment that helped it break out was somebody sent Steve Jobs an email basically being like, this is a problem. Are you aware of it? And Jobs replies and he says, not.
you're holding it wrong, which is how everybody remembers. This is like a weird Mandela effect thing. He doesn't say you're, he never says, as far as I can tell, you're holding it wrong. What he says is just avoid holding it that way. And this becomes like an admission of guilt. Right, because he's saying it happens. Yeah, it is broken. Just don't hold it like that. And so everybody takes this and this pours so much more fuel on the fire that all of a sudden it's like, okay, this is not an isolated incident. You've now acknowledged you have a problem. And this is when it becomes antenna gate. And once it has the name.
It's all over. It's great. As soon as it becomes a gate, it's out of hand. I do feel like this slightly diminishes both the actual events and the history and legacy of Watergate, but it was intended. Yes. It got the name because he sent that email. So Steve Jobs, basically like three weeks after the phone launches, ends up giving a press conference to address this, which is like unheard of. He flew back from a vacation in Hawaii, and this was one year before he died. He was very sick. Interesting. He was very sick. In fact, the first time I saw the iPad, which Neil I leaked, but the first time I saw it,
I had to go to his house and seat in his living room because he was so sick that he wasn't consistently going into the office. And he still had it covered, by the way, in a gray cloth on his coffee table and he just pulled it out. But anyway, so he was sick. He was in Hawaii, presumably to try to get better. I don't know. And he flew back and did that press conference. And he was, I can't describe this press conference as anything other than just like a 20 minute exercise in passive aggression. That was there. It was aggression, aggression.
That's fair. I agree. You're right. I was in there. Josh Jabalski and I were in that room together. Yeah. Walt, I bet you were there. And he was just like, you idiots. Yeah. All the phones do this. And then he showed us all the phones from all of his competitors attenuating their signal when you held it anywhere near the antenna. Yeah. And he was like, did you even check? I checked. Here's all the phones. All the phones are doing this. And by the way, they ran that video or they made a more cohesive video showing all the other major phones doing this, which they somehow, I don't think it was a TV ad, but they put it out into the world.
for about two days, and then it went away. Forgot about that. That's really funny. Yeah, because they wanted everybody to see it. They wanted this idea. But it was incredibly convincing. It didn't let them off the hook totally because none of these other phones had external antennas where, you know, you could block it. You couldn't attenuate it, but you were attenuating an internal antenna by pressing on the outside. Let me just tell you a short clip from it just so you can get the vibes. We started getting some reports of people having issues with the antenna system, which is a very advanced new antenna system. And...
The problems they were saying, obviously Gizmodo put their video on the web, people were touching, X marks the spot here, and they were seeing a large drop in bars. And this has been since dubbed AntennaGate. We heard about this not long after we started shipping, just 22 days ago from today. And so we've been working our butts off for the last 22 days to understand what the real issues are here. Once again, I would just like to say to every tech executive out there, they listen to our show, they pay attention to us. They certainly listen to Walt. Walt, if you could underline this message for me, that'd be great. If they could start talking like regular people and say we've been working our butts off a little more often, I think we'd all be better off. But so Jobs ends up, I think I agree with you, Walt, that he ends up making a very convincing case that this is like a normal thing that happens to a lot of fans. And then he offers two actual reasons that this is happening, maybe more to Apple.
than to most other phones. One is we've sold a lot of phones and nobody else cares, which is a very funny and iPhone-y way to think about it. I think they said like 0.1% of the calls to Apple support were about this. Yeah, but then he offers two things about the device that I thought were really interesting. One, and he says in that clip, X marks the spot. The thing that Apple did is show you where the antenna is in a way that a lot of phones didn't. And it's a phone you touch and move around and they both put it in the wrong place and showed you where it was for it to be in your hand. I think it was the scene between two antennas. I don't know if it was the Wi-Fi antenna and the...
phone antenna, but it was a seam between them. Yeah. And then he also blamed, as you were talking about, well, the algorithm that determines how many bars Apple shows. And you'll notice that in that clip he played, he said people have been noticing that the bars are increasing. He did not say people have been noticing that the calls are dropping more. Right. And I went back and reread my column just as you did. And in my tests, I did find the bars dropping more on the new phone in certain places.
the usual dead spots I knew about around my area. But it was the bars. I mean, it wasn't necessarily the cause. Right. And I think, yeah, it was very funny going back to this because I find myself basically completely thinking Steve Jobs was right because they issued this offer change to change the bars and they offer these free bumper cases to everybody because if you had a case on your phone, it didn't like conduct electricity on your hand the same way and it more or less solved the problem. So they're like, we'll give you, he very passive aggressively says, we'll give you a refund if you want it. Yeah. Knowing full well, nobody was going to take Apple up on this, but then offers free bumper cases to everybody who has an iPhone 4, but is clearly just so enraged that this is a scandal at all.
So at the back end of this presentation, he does a presentation, he makes this offer. He then took the press into Apple's wireless testing rooms at the Apple office. So a really interesting thing about that video you just showed is the spaceship had not yet been built. And that room that he was in was tiny. That theater at Infinite Loop, I don't know if you remember this. It was teeny tiny. It was called Town Hall. Town Hall. It was teeny tiny. And there was an even tinier one called the Piano Bar, like right down the way. And they would do events in these tiny rooms. And so he was talking to a room of, I don't know, maybe 200 people that were right on top of him.
Like we were right there. There was no distance the way there is at Apple Park or in the big theater or on the internet now. And then we all were taken to like look at the wireless testing facility because they're like, look, we tried hard. We're better at this thing. And what they came up with was the bars are confusing you and here's a bumper, shut up. And I think they added a bar. I think they went from four bars to five or three bars to four. It seems very clear that they changed the algorithm to just have more bars. Yeah. And he even said, we've been doing this wrong the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. We have screwed up the bar thing.
But now we're fixing it. But what I want to highlight is the extent to which this wasn't like a presentation the way people perceive Apple events to be presentations now. It wasn't like Tim Cook swooping around in CGI being like, you will have a new iPad to millions of people. It was Steve Jobs basically like this far away from you being like, shut up. He was like just telling this group of people that they were going to get over it. And here's how we were going to get over it. And it's that does not happen.
It also worked super well. It worked perfectly. The scandal just immediately went away. Like immediately went away. It's crazy. But anyway, so yeah, so they offer the bumper cases, they issue the software change, and it just absolutely antenna gate just disappears. And my memory of it had been that this was like an actual...
scandal. And it just wasn't. It was like, it was like 10 days of everybody being like, oh my God. And then Steve Jobs was like, shut up. And everybody just did. And this goes down, you know, in the various biographies and the oral histories of all the Steve Jobs moments. This, I think, is in, among the people who knew him, who talked about it, this is one of his finest moments. That he was like, I'm going to come back. I think he brought his son with him to all the meetings. His son was very young. He's like, I want him to see how I do this. And he's like, I'm going to shut this down. And then his ability to tell a story and make good, because he did make good.
He did offer the refunds as fast and aggressively as he offered the refunds. He offered the refunds. He said, we're going to do the bumper. But he told the story of what the problem was, how Apple was going to solve it, and why you were stupid. And everyone was like, yep, master storyteller Steve Jobs has done it again in a way that I think no other company, no other tech executive has ever really been able to do. He did. And I was surprised. I know there was a lot of news coverage, even on the local station in Chicago and other local stations. But when I went back and read not only my own review, but the Engadget review and the Times review and all those other reviews, people hardly ever mentioned having any.
I mentioned it. Mine was one graph, much less than what I wrote about FaceTime, for instance. And I said, it's a bug. Apple couldn't explain it, but they say they're going to fix it. And the bug was the bars, not the calls. As it turned out, it was very funny going back and watching this press conference because it sounds like shenanigans to just be like, no, it's not a real problem. We're just going to fix how many bars it shows. That'll make it go away. But it turns out that did, in fact, make it go away. But the Verizon piece is the last turn of this story because antenna gate blows over. The phone keeps selling super well. This winds up being a huge success. After all of this chaos, the iPhone 4 is a wildly successful iPhone. But the biggest last turn...
was in January of the next year. So we're into 2011 when Verizon starts selling the iPhone for the first time. And Verizon ran a Super Bowl ad advertising that it was getting the iPhone. And I have that ad for you and I'm going to play it because it's hilarious. Shadowy pictures of the iPhone. It's beautiful. It's intelligent. It is beautiful. Even genius. But does your network work?
Yes, I can hear you now. This is America's largest and most reliable network, Verizon, built so you can rule the air. This is just an attack ad against AT&T. That's all this is. It's fabulous. And they used that guy who was the symbol of their other ads. So that even before they said the word Verizon, you immediately knew this was a Verizon ad. It worked super well. As it turns out, Verizon and Apple had been negotiating to do something since 2008.
So it's like Apple was desperately ready to get out of this exclusivity deal and jumped, as far as I can tell, the first moment it was able to. Well, because Verizon was the other biggest company. There's a sequence of events that happened starting around this time where every quarter Apple sells more iPhones than had ever been previously considered. And it's because they were just lighting up new carriers in new countries. And eventually, like some smart analyst is like, they're running out of countries. Like this growth will stop because.
There's not just another China mobile out there. You can't just turn on another place. Yeah. They're like, they're going to have to go to Mars. But at this point, there was a long way to go. There's a long way to go. And this is the beginning of the just sharp upward turn in iPhone 6. Yeah, totally. And so the other part I like about this is the Verizon iPhone also shipped with the personal hotspot feature for the first time, which is just another flex on AT&T. Not only can you come do things, come do more data on our network. Let's do this. Do you remember where they announced the Verizon iPhone? I don't. It was at CES. Of course. So Apple loves to upstage CES. And so in the middle of CES, we're all in Vegas. We're covering whatever Palm Pre 2 is happening, whatever nonsense is going on. And we get Apple invites. And so everyone in Vegas.
gets on a plane and flies to San Francisco to, I believe it was the Moscone Center. We go to a big press conference and C-Drive's like, yes, same phone on a different network. Also comes in white now. And everyone's like, that's it? And this is the biggest story on all of our traffic fronts. Everything in CS is like down here. White iPhone 4 on Verizon is way up here. The white iPhone 4 was sick though. It never shipped. It looked so good. It looked really good, but the white iPhone 4 on Verizon did not ship. It took until the iPhone 4S. They couldn't figure it out.
Yeah, they actually ended up giving a statement on the white one because it was such a thing. I wrote this down. It says, white models of Apple's new iPhone 4 have proven more challenging to manufacture than expected. And as a result, they will not be available until the second half of July. The availability of the more popular iPhone 4 black models is not affected. Shut up. I love them saying the iPhone 4 in black is more popular than the non-existent iPhone 4 in white. Don't look too hard at this. It's very good. Also, before it died, the iPhone 4 became the first iPhone to sell on Sprint.
Yeah. Like this, this was, this was Apple opening up in a big way. And this was like, yet again, this is a seminal iPhone, right? Like this is, it escapes the confines. So, all right. So this is basically where the iPhone 4 story ends. It ends up being, it's the most popular phone in the world until it's replaced by the iPhone 4S, which becomes the most popular phone in the world. Because they lit up more carriers. This is, this is the beginning of that sequence. Apple is, like truly like legendary run of phone growth is, is fully kicked off. We need to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to answer the eight version history questions, including whether this thing gets into the Hall of Fame.
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All right, we're back. It's time for the version history questions. We ask the same eight questions about every product to see where it lands. The first question is, where does this thing belong on the time matrix? The time matrix is idea versus time. It belongs in one of four quadrants. Was it the right idea at the right time? Wrong idea at the wrong time? Where does this one belong? This is the easiest one. This is just the top right. Right idea, right time. There's no... Yeah, I 100% agree. The only argument here is that AT&T was not ready.
AT&T was not ready for sure. But yeah, I think the things this phone was doing, it did correctly and at the right time. We have not even talked about FaceTime, which Apple promised to open source and never did. I'm fully shocked that Apple didn't open source a hugely successful piece of software. All right, I think this one's easy. I think you're right. I think it's right. Right idea, right time. Yeah, this is maybe the easiest one we've ever had. This phone just, it hit the way that it was supposed to hit. Best iPhone ever.
Okay, so question number two, was this peak anything? And the first version of this was this peak iPhone. For as much as Apple wants to pretend that it changes the design of the iPhone every so often, they haven't. They still look exactly like this. It's just much bigger now. They still make, yeah, they still make glass and metal sandwiches. This one also had a headphone jack, which makes it better than everyone that didn't have a headphone jack. You know, I don't want to say it, but it did have a headphone jack. This was a design object. When you look at, John Gruber says a lot, when you look at the icons of phones out in the world, they look like iPhone 4s. Yes. This is what phones look like. You know, until folding phones.
hit whatever cultural moment they'll hit next, this is a phone. This is what a phone is. I actually prefer the size. Like, I think if phones never got big, like, maybe democracy would be safer. You know? Like, we might live in a different world. I would like that to be a crazier theory than it actually is. I'm just saying. Yeah, I think this is peak phone. This is that moment. Wait, peak... Let's rein this in a little. Peak phone...
shape is what you're saying. Peak phone design. Peak phone, everyone, there's no way this is peak phone. No. Well, okay, let me define peak phone. And I'm curious for Walt's perspective on this too. If you were in it at that moment, you knew it was happening. Like you could tell, like, oh, things are changing now. People care about these phones in a way that they didn't before. And this one is beautiful and it's the one to have. And it is culturally important that this phone exists in a way that a new iPhone event.
It does not feel like that anymore. I agree. Well, what do you think about all this? Peak phone? I hate to agree with me again, but I do. But I mean, I think we need to explain and I hope this is we agree on this. Peak means not necessarily the best. It means a moment where nothing that has come since has fundamentally changed the idea of the product. That's right. It's the spikiest spike in the chart, I think. Yeah. And I just everything Eli said is right. I mean, just to remind you.
This changed the world in a way that the four didn't because nothing like this existed before. But you don't see any bulbous phones anymore. You just, you know, compared to the iPhone four, which I agree with you, like all the phones, except the foldable ones, which as far as I'm concerned, might as well not exist in terms of people's use of them. They look like the iPhone four. Yeah, they're there. I mean, Apple certainly has glass on both sides.
flat phone the corners the whole thing tiny changes but really this is this is if you looked at this today if they brought up this out today with all the current specs but they design a bit and the fact that it had FaceTime and a front camera. And a headphone jack. And the headphone jack. If Apple brought out a phone to the headphone jack, instant. There are a bunch of iPhone mini fans out there who are just screaming with joy at this idea. And I would just tell you that the sales of the iPhone mini may put a damper on that theory, Walt, but I like where your head is. My wife still has an iPhone SE. That's what she likes. Fair enough. I do feel I should say out loud once before this episode ends that the iPhone 5 was a better phone.
I just, I need to be on record having said that the iPhone 5 was a better phone. There's a lot of people who write the iPhone 5 was the ultimate iPhone because it was the one I think it was the best iPhone that has ever been made. All right, question number three. If knowing everything we know now, if you could time travel back and be the person in charge of the iPhone team around the iPhone 4 launch, is there anything you would change to make the product more successful? One I will offer you is move the antennas. Would it matter? Which they did with the iPhone 4S. Yeah. They did redesign the antennas. And there is some history that Johnny Ives and Steve Jobs wanted the antennas to look like this. And the wireless engineers at Apple told them this would be a problem in the design one over the engineers, which is a very common Apple thing. So I think that's the one. Okay. I wouldn't have open source FaceTime. Open source FaceTime? Yeah. Shut up. I wouldn't have open source FaceTime. Neither would Apple. But look, if I was the head of the iPhone team at any point in history, it would have been a disaster. So just to clear that up. Sure.
But yeah, the one thing I would have done was listen to the engineers, if Nelai is right, about their objections. And I wouldn't have, no matter how beautiful it was, and I've already said I considered it part of the beauty of the thing, I would have. put it inside or done something different. Maybe I would have had one of the antennas as the outside bar, so there wouldn't have been that seam and the other antenna inside. Whatever would have spared them this issue, which I agree with you, turned out to be basically a blip. The only other one I could think of is, would I have tried to find a way to sell it day and date on Verizon and have this be all one launch? We have this new iPhone and it's available now to everybody on Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T. I don't know if that makes a difference. That's a business decision, not a...
an engineering or a design decision. That's true. And they obviously were working with Verizon. Verizon had already caved on who gets to control the phone because this was only, what, six months? But in a way, it gave them another opportunity to surprise everyone and jack up iPhone sales. Yeah, they got to upstate CES. That's a victory. Also, I think they had some timing with the AT&T contract that they had to overcome. Right. Yeah. Okay. All right. So question number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again? Could the iPhone 4 have a retro nostalgia moment?
I do love this phone. I'm not going to lie. Like everyone in the office who has picked up this phone since we got it is immediately like phones should be like this again. Yeah. Bring this back. I mean, this is one of those things where the revealed preferences of people say much more than the things they actually say. Yes. Everyone says they want this phone and then everyone has the biggest phone. Big ass phones. Yeah. Not me. There you go. What do you have? I have never bought the big ass phone. I always have a standard phone and I just like the feel of it better. It fits in my pockets better. So I have a 16 Pro right now because I no longer upgrade every year because I'm a poor pensioner.
And it's because we're not paying you. I get it. Yeah, I'm using a theme here. Question number five. What feature, I fear this one's going to be very easy as we all look at this phone for two seconds. What feature of this device would you lift off of it and put onto current versions?
The answer is the headphone jack. The answer is the headphone jack. The answer is the headphone jack. The headphone jack. What's funny is there aren't all that many options because this actually originated so many things that are still in so many modern smartphones. Yeah. That like, I think the only two you could plausibly choose are the screen size and the headphone jack. And to me, the headphone jack is like the clear choice. Yeah, it's obviously the headphone jack. 100%. Okay. Yeah. All right. So now we have the three. I do want to point out that I have been over time extraordinarily vindicated about the headphone jack thing.
You have. You've been annoying about it, but you've been right, which is the Neelai Patel special, I would say. Did you know I was right? It's nice to meet you. Now we have the three Version History Hall of Fame questions. And, well, just so you know, we decide at the end of every episode whether something makes it into the Version History Hall of Fame. And in order to get in, it has to satisfy three criteria. Criteria number one, did this product do something truly new? Yes. What?
it created the phone as a cultural object in this specific way. And FaceTime. I don't think you can look aside FaceTime. I think FaceTime is the more credible argument of the two. Like the one is kind of squishy. It made FaceTime is more plausible. But like something truly, the first iPhone did something truly new. Sure. This is mostly in that lineage to me. Well, what do you think? Is there something truly new here for you? Two things, both of which we've all mentioned, or I've mentioned at least one of them, which is FaceTime, obviously. And I devoted.
A big chunk of my review to that. And then the template idea. This belongs in your Hall of Fame because this set the template. In order to be Hall of Fame worthy, this would have to be one of probably two iPhones that belongs. It's the first one and this one. I actually don't think you can make a case for any others. Really? Well, do you agree with that? If we're talking Hall of Fame. Yeah. I mean, I can make a case that newer iPhones are better. I think they are better. But Hall of Fame, because of that template thing and because of FaceTime.
Hall of Fame. Okay, all right. Well, that's criteria number one. Criteria number two, was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? And this one, I think you can make a case that it is neither one. Yeah. And that actually, in fact, this thing is going to miss out on the Hall of Fame because its networking was bad. Like, AT&T might kill this phone from the Hall of Fame. But it was on Verizon. Eventually. But it was the iPhone 4. No, it was. You're right. But even then, it only had 3G. You can't. I'm kidding. But I think being like the HTC Incredible keeps the iPhone 4 out of the Hall of Fame is brutal. This phone was very good. There's no question about that. But was it?
Was it remarkable in that sense, even at the time? Yes, I'm going to say remarkably good. I think the design of this phone, the idea that a tech product could be this beautiful, could connect to the lineage of other extraordinarily high design, expensive devices like Leica cameras, but be mass market that had never existed before. That's all Steve Jobs. Like whatever legacy you have, that's the real legacy, right? Is you're going to care about design because I'm going to make you and I'm going to do it in the most mass market way possible. That's the iPhone, really. There's nothing else. Nothing else was in the ballpark for years. All right. And then.
Hall of Fame criteria number three is did it have a lasting impact? Yeah, I mean, that's the whole episode. So what I wonder in the frame of impact is this was clearly the first of lots of things. But did it change the curve of anything because of its existence? Do you know what I mean? I think if Apple had put out an iPhone 4 that looked like the iPhone 3GS.
no other manufacturer ever steps up its game to make aluminum and glass phones. It just simply does not happen, right? If Apple doesn't push forward, we're going to really care about the camera. And they really cared about the camera. I remember Phil Schiller talking about the camera on this phone in the 4S. This is when they really started to care about the camera. And by the time they got to the 6, that's when they started doing shot on iPhone. This is a very compressed period of time to Apple go from, oh, we threw a camera on the first iPhone and it looks like a potato, to we really care about this camera, right? Instagram launches a few months after this phone does. Yeah, like there's just a moment in time where Apple...
you know, we keep calling it the template, but the template is defined by how much Apple cares, right? They care about the way this phone looks. They care about how it's built. They unfortunately care about how the antenna works to its own detriment. They care about the camera, which I think is the lasting impact of the smartphone is cameras. I just don't think the rest of the industry does that without Apple pushing. I agree. I was surprised to see this in my review when I went back of the iPhone 4. I noted that, you know, there's this and that about the photos, but the videos are way better than anyone else's. And to this day, their videos are better than anyone else's, I think. And so,
Yeah. It's a Hall of Famer. I'm not going to lie. This feels bad to me. Like, all of your points are right, but inducting just the iPhone 4 feels insane. But I have no successful counter-arguments to this. The only thing I think it might fail is I think it might not have been remarkably good. I think it was remarkably good. What I'm realizing is going forward on version history, we're going to have to start doing many worse gadgets just so not as many things get in. We've got to stop doing bangers here on version history. Yeah. We need some garbage. I think I'm okay. I think this one gets in. All right. Well, can I say in my defense, in a Walter Isaacson book, the Steve Jobs biography, the authorized biography that...
The title of the chapter about Antenagate is called Design vs. Engineering. I didn't just pull this out of a hat. Oh, it makes perfect sense. Completely perfect sense. I'm not just a journalist. I'm a good writer of book reports. I'm a good reader of other available journalism. All right. We are done here. Thank you. Thank you, Walt. And thank you, Nelly. This has been a tremendous amount of fun. Thank you to everybody for watching and listening. If you want to support all of this that we're doing so that we can pay Walt for this next time, for the love of God, subscribe to The Verge. It's a good website. We're out here. We just need to buy more iPhones on eBay so we can keep seeing if they're any good. We will be back soon with much more version history. We'll see you then.
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