Having the clarity over what's important allows teams to perform rather than endlessly debate over tradeoffs.
It still feels like a shaky premise to me because had USB-C not been mandated, they'd never have prioritized it. I think they waited until the last minute simply because they could.
Again, all speculation but the point is how a defined end point allowed teams to receive clarity over tradeoffs and move quickly. It's very typical of how Apple works (which you can see in Vision 1.0 where certain things were wildly overspecified and other were wildly under for that reason). The exact details may be wrong but the logic of how they got to this place feels right.
PS: A summary of the method https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...
Likewise USB-C: "We can make more money if we have a special proprietary charger". It's never that complicated really, it's all in execution.
And they didn’t do that: as far as we know, the keynote for the iPhone 15 Pro was not shot with iPhone 15 Pro.
Reading the story behind the story, I think what happened is that several years ago, Apple execs were looking at a range of plausible technologies that were becoming feasible and were trying to find some kind of coherence among them through the story they wanted to tell. The story that was really speaking to them, as Gruber identified [1], was that finally the professional and consumer market were about to merge in really interesting ways.
I think what happened was at that point in time, they decided that the iPhone 15 Pro was going to be used to film the keynote for the iPhone 15 Pro and that this was the target given to all teams to give them clarity and focus to deliver a coherent end product.
Even tiny things like, why did they delay the introduction of USB-C for so long? Start making sense under this framework. If you're not used to this mode of thinking, a lot of the things I'm saying can sound like a stretch but if you adopt the framework, a lot of tiny things they mention suddenly make sense.
People are focusing on the specific output which is a single video but the power comes not from the output but from understanding the process that resulted in that output. Apple knows that other companies will always struggle to reproduce their exact process which is the core source of a durable sustaining advantage.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/10/31/downplaying-sho...