I realise that this was probably said in an effort to appear worldly in an “I knew the dog before he came to school” sort of way, but it does a good job of illustrating how working with cool tech can sometimes desensitize one to the fact that it is, after all, cool.

I bet rocket scientists think rockets are kinda boring too, after a while.

"Very dull content for anyone who has worked on anything related to rockets during the past 20 years. Every manufacturer has similar prototype rockets and there is nothing special in this rocket prototype." :)

I can't imagine somebody would say this, but you might be right!

I worked (for a short time) at the Norwegian Rocket Range.

While it was never boring as such, there is no denying being around actual rocket science soon became commonplace and nothing to be particularly excited about.

The notable exception being the actual launches, but the old hands claimed one eventually became quite blasé about those, too.

No. There truly isn't anything Hacker news worthy about an article about a HW prototype of a phone. It's perfectly normal electronics.

It may only interest some iPhone/Apple fanboys.

Yeah, it bugged me that they were suggesting it was for secrecy. This is just what prototype hardware looks like. You break out as many electrical connections as possible to enable verification and debug.

Quite interesting for anyone who hasn't worked on anything related to mobile phone HW during the past 20 years.

Poor Verge, missing out on that infinitesimally small market of people who work on prototype phone hardware. They must be kicking themselves.

Yup. It would be a mildy intresting tweet. The Verge's aggressive salivating just made me annoyed.

Very dull comment for anyone who has been on an internet forum during the past 20 years. Every group has similar members who feel the need to make other people feel bad for enjoying something.

Maybe it's old hat for phone devs. But the fact is this is the _iPhone_ prototype - a major inflection point in not just mobile phone history, but in world history. So even if its physical form is nothing special, its significance is.

World history? Give me a break.

question 1. Does the introduction of the first iPhone divide the history of the mobile phone into two distinct, and radically different, segments (say Before iPhone (BI) and After iPhone (AI)?

question 2. Do AI-era smartphones represent a major augmentation of the capabilities of average human beings?

When answering question 2, step out of any jaded First World bubble you might find yourself in and consider people in all parts of the world.

> Very dull content for anyone who has worked on anything related to mobile phone HW during the past 20 years

Not just mobile phone development, any HW job or embedded engineering usually involves these proto/dev boards.

It's just a tool that was used for the development of an electrical device. What's next? An article about the screwdriver that was used to assemble the first prototypes?

Laypeople and technical people from other domains are usually not privy to these things, and they can be very interesting indeed.

Imagine if all the machine learning guys came out of the woodwork whenever someone posted an "inside look at the machine learning black box" type of article in order to declare that the article is pointless because everyone knows this stuff.

Well an article about the technical history of the screw driver would be interesting.