[95014_refugee]

These dev boards were modular, so that engineers without a need-to-know for e.g. the screen or radio didn’t get one. But this is not a retrofit; if you needed a display or touch then this is what you got.

The video out ports were only used for the 30-pin video out, the main display never ran on them (could not run on them).

iPhoneOS kernel developers could hardly care less about the display; everything was done with the serial port and JTAG (I don’t recall whether Ethernet debug was ever supported).

There are a bunch of other errors / misconceptions in the article sadly. These boards were pretty cool & highly functional and it’s sad not to see justice done to them.

[sjwright]

I'm not saying you're wrong—I'm just some random person on the internet. But I find it surprising that they'd even have that many pieces of iPhone shaped glass attached to working touchscreens early on in the process.

Of course people working on developing the UX would want to see and touch a contextualised screen so I suppose the configuration we see here would make sense for them.

[95014_refugee]

This board’s not from “early on in the process”. Making touch work well was once of the major undertakings, and there had been various iterations of display around for literally years at this point. By the time this board was made, the display / touch was largely a done deal and they were being built in respectable volume.

Likewise the UX development started years before, some of the earliest hardware was just a handheld display & touch tethered to an old G3 PowerPC Mac (to get the performance constraints about right). The purpose here was to get representative displays into the hands of relatively large numbers of engineers.