Why Steve Jobs Is (Legitimately) Pissed at the Media

July 16th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

I wasn’t present at Friday’s spe­cial iPhone 4 Press Conference held by Apple at their Cupertino Campus, but I fol­lowed the excel­lent live cov­er­age from Jason Snell at Macworld. Ignoring the specifics of the announce­ments (spoiler: there is no fuck­ing recall you fuck­tards), one thing jumped out at me: Steve Jobs was pal­pa­bly angry with the media.

In the process of pro­vid­ing actual hard data regard­ing the impact of the antenna issues (hint, not fuck­ing much) Steve called out no less than three sep­a­rate orga­ni­za­tions for their shoddy cov­er­age. First, of course, was the douche col­lec­tive over at Jizzmodo. The less said about those felo­nious fuck­wits the bet­ter, so I’ll leave it at that. In addi­tion, dur­ing the Q&A por­tion of the event, Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall denied anony­mously sourced reports by BusinessWeek and the New York Times regard­ing the issue call­ing them “bull­shit” and patently false” respectively.

In addi­tion to those spe­cific exam­ples Steve had some choice com­ments about the press in gen­eral. Here’s Jason Snell’s report of what Steve Said:

In search of eye­balls for web­sites, peo­ple don’t care what they leave in their wake. So I look at this whole thing and say, wow. Apple’s been around for 34 years. Haven’t we earned the cred­i­bil­ity and trust from some of the press to give us a lit­tle bit of the ben­e­fit of the doubt, of our moti­va­tions, the fact that we’re con­fi­dent and will solve these prob­lems. I think we have that trust from our users, but I didn’t see that in the press. This thing was blown so far out of pro­por­tion. But I’m not going to say we’re not at fault. We didn’t edu­cate enough.

Now to be clear here, unlike some oth­ers in the Twitterverse I don’t think that Steve is ask­ing for a free pass from the press here. I think that he’s express­ing his dis­may over how the press, in the com­plete absence of any actual hard evi­dence, blew this issue com­pletely out of pro­por­tion to the point where a camera-hog Senator felt com­pelled to get in on the action.

And let’s be clear here. This story was blown out of pro­por­tion. Does the iPhone 4 have a spot that, when blocked, causes sig­nal atten­u­a­tion? Yes, as do all mod­ern smart­phones. Is this sit­u­a­tion acer­bated by the fact that the iPhone 4’s antenna is placed out­side of the cas­ing? Yes, but that deci­sion demon­stra­bly improves recep­tion in the vast major­ity of sit­u­a­tions. The bot­tom line is, this was a “deba­cle” almost entirely cre­ated by the press.

As I was dri­ving to get lunch after the press con­fer­ence it came to me why I so iden­tify with Steve Jobs’ reac­tion: I’ve been in the same position.

More than once in my career I’ve been in a sit­u­a­tion where some­thing has gone wrong, some­times cat­a­stroph­i­cally wrong. During sit­u­a­tions like that, when every avail­able hand is on deck try­ing to fix the prob­lem, the most enrag­ing thing in the world is a cho­rus of peo­ple who have no data, no real under­stand­ing of the issue, or even an under­stand­ing of the prin­ci­ples involved with the issue demand­ing answers NOW!

That’s the role that the press has taken dur­ing this deba­cle. Unquestioningly repeat­ing the claims of any­one who was will­ing to make a com­ment, spec­u­lat­ing about tech­ni­cal issues that they were patently unqual­i­fied to com­ment on, and demand­ing that Apple act NOW NOW NOW to resolve the issue. And speak­ing of just hor­ri­ble report­ing; the less said of Consumer Reports embar­rass­ing flip-flopping the better.

In a sit­u­a­tion like this there comes a time when some­one has to stand up and say “enough.” Again, I’ve been there. I’ve had to stand in the mid­dle of an engi­neer­ing bullpen and tell the CEO of my com­pany that every minute I spend answer­ing pan­icked emails and attend­ing blamestorm­ing con­fer­ence calls was a minute that I wasn’t spend­ing fix­ing the fuck­ing problem.

That’s basi­cally what Steve Jobs did on Friday. He got up on stage, explained that this issue wasn’t as bad as it was being made out to be, told the peo­ple that mat­tered how it would be resolved, and told the harpies to shut the fuck up. I’m glad he finally got pissed off enough to do it.

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  • JC

    LOL fan­boy much? My phone is a “mod­ern smart­phone” and it doesn’t have that magic spot you’re claim­ing.
    Bottom line is, they knew it was a prob­lem, could have given free cases from day one(and this would have been a dead issue), and they get all the media praise, so when things go wrong, Jobsie can’t claim it’s unfair.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/John-Beaty/1554483983 John Beaty

    So, should motorola give out free cov­ers too?

    You just haven’t found the spot yet. They are there for all phones, because of the way anten­nas work. (hint, there is a dead spot where the con­nec­tor is.)

  • http://www.adrianmcmillan.com/blog WeaponII

    I’d like to know what phone that is.

  • http://twitter.com/StirlingHewitt dillinger23

    I’ve got your fuck­ing fan­boy right here. The bot­tom line is it’s a fuck­ing multi­bil­lion dol­lar com­pany with a hier­ar­chy, dead­lines, and a fuck­ton (met­ric) of peo­ple work­ing for them.

    22 days is fuck­ing EPIC speed for a cor­po­ra­tion of this size to respond to the issue. And all the while the douche repub­lic led by Jesus Diaz was whip­ping this into a page view fuck fest. The bot­tom line, like the real fuck­ing line where real­ity starts and bull­shit ends is the actual users were not lin­ing up return­ing the phone, the actual users if you knew any, were so busy enjoy­ing the phone that it’s a non issue, Just like the data sug­gests.. Those that weren’t were most likely group thinkers that spend 10 hours a day cov­er­ing the thing inten­tion­ally on youtube and say­ing SEE! SEE WHAT I MEAN.

    BTW com­ing here and call­ing him a fan­boy after read­ing his arti­cle, shows that you have a ten­u­ous grasp on the eng­lish lan­guage.

    Other than that lack of data this whole fuck­ing frenzy was all for page views as steve said. I dare say Engadget was the most pro­fes­sional of the blogs about it. They didnt post 55 dif­fer­ently worded arti­cles a day.

  • http://twitter.com/StirlingHewitt dillinger23

    Also has any­one else Noticed that Fandroids are now prob­a­bly the sin­gle most obnox­ious thing on the inter­net? Like worse than MacMacs.

  • JC

    Nope no dead spots. Maybe I “just haven’t found it yet”, but after hav­ing a phone for 3 months, and not find­ing it, nor hav­ing any reports of it hap­pen­ing with my phone any­where, I’m stick­ing with my orig­i­nal analy­sis that it doesn’t have the magic iPhone4 spot.

    That doesn’t mean that the iPhone4 is crap or that Apple sucks. I’m not anti-Apple, just anti-fanboy and a lit­tle bit anti-Jobs.

  • JC

    Actually, peo­ple that type in all caps and lose their tem­pers over online dis­cus­sions of phones are the most obnox­ious.

    As far as “actual users” I know three per­son­ally. One hasn’t enough of an issue to com­plain about, one lives in the sticks and has com­plained since day one(but to be fair, he has never had good cov­er­age), and the third had his com­pany ‘recall’ his iPhone4 due to some Exchange issues.

    My main rea­son for ini­tially reply­ing was directly related to the blog post regard­ing Jobs anger at the media. He had no prob­lem when every media out­let wor­shiped at his feet, but now when they are report­ing neg­a­tively he gets his panties in a wad. The guy at cult of mac​.com had the same opin­ion.

    http://​www​.cultof​mac​.com/​s​t​e​v​e​-​j​o​b​s​-​h​a​t​e​s​-​h​i​s-b…


    to Weapon II – It’s an HTC Touch Pro2

  • http://twitter.com/StirlingHewitt dillinger23

    Are you imply­ing that I TYPED IN ALL CAPS? BeCAUSE i’M NOT seE­ING iT.

  • http://twitter.com/torkelh Torkel

    Steve didn’t com­plain that they were get­ting neg­a­tive press from the media. He com­plained that they were mak­ing shit up and crit­i­cis­ing Apple for a prob­lem that most smart phones have.

  • Nick Norman

    I can’t find a dead spot on my iPhone 4 either — whoop de do. In the UK we have the iPhone on 5 net­works. I have man­aged to repli­cate the sig­nal drop on one iPhone on one net­work. I live in Central London which has good cov­er­age. There clearly is an issue for some peo­ple, but a very small minor­ity, and always in mar­ginal sig­nal areas. Just so you know — I know the death­grip, but my sig­nal is good enough that it doesn’t make any dif­fer­ence. I sus­pect yours is too,hence you can’t ‘find it yet’.

  • JC

    He didn’t mind when they were prais­ing the iPhone for hav­ing capa­bil­i­ties and fea­tures that most smart­phones had…

  • JC

    Quite pos­si­ble.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    So the fuck what?

    The fact that the tech media is con­sis­tently incom­pe­tent doesn’t give them some sort of pass. You have a prob­lem with overly glow­ing praise of Apple prod­ucts, get your own fuck­ing blog and whine about it there.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    It’s mainly an arti­fact of the cur­rent moment in his­tory. The MacMacs were the same level of obnox­ious­ness a few years back when Apple began their upswing. Now the major­ity of them have either grown up or moved on when Apple “sold out.”

  • JC

    And if you have a prob­lem with dif­fer­ing opin­ions, turn off the com­ments. Just a thought.

  • http://twitter.com/torkelh Torkel

    So because the press have given Apple praise in the past means they can never again com­plain about criticism?

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    I have no prob­lem with dif­fer­ing opin­ions. I do have a prob­lem with sloppy argu­ments. Arguing that Apple can’t be pissed at shoddy neg­a­tive jour­nal­ism because they choose not to be pissed at shoddy pos­i­tive jour­nal­ism is an exam­ple of the later.

  • JC

    Point taken, how­ever, that wasn’t my argu­ment. Instead of recre­at­ing an entire arti­cle, I point you towards the link pro­vided above which some­what sums up my thoughts. Somewhat.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    Sigh…can you make the call? yes? Then the num­ber of bars is kind of imma­te­r­ial. Can you make the call? No? Then the num­ber of bars doesn’t mat­ter.

    If you can get work done, bars are, MAYBE a POSSIBLE indi­ca­tion of con­nec­tion qual­ity, but not as often as you think. If you can’t, then get­ting 1, 3, 5, or eleventy bars doesn’t much fuckin’ mat­ter does it?

  • Kingen_blue

    Thanks for (finally) admit­ting your biases. Discussions are best served when either we know of the biases or , bet­ter yet, there aren’t any. And don’t spew out the “every­body has a bias” argu­ment — if a bias inter­feres with with a dis­cus­sion it ruins the nat­ural pro­gres­sion of dis­course. It’s like piss­ing in the soup.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    You’ll take my bars from my cold, dead DeathGrip®

  • cthellis

    Seriously, why didn’t Apple just add more bars? If it went to seven or nine, they would have FIXED this whole prob­lem by now!!

  • http://haggersnash.wordpress.com/ hag­ger­snash

    Just watched the press con­fer­ence video http://​bit​.ly/​b​3​Z​8es (h/t @ihnatko). The adjec­tive “seething” imme­di­ately sprang to mind.

    The press should be thank­ful that Jobs only cas­trated them fig­u­ra­tively. I’m sur­prised that blood wasn’t spilled.

  • http://twitter.com/StirlingHewitt dillinger23

    Just for our sake, go look at the pop­u­lar tech blogs sto­ries over the last 2 weeks. They have taken 2 data points. Sj email to a cus­tomer, and an anandtech arti­cle and turned it into over 300 arti­cles with almost 500k words. And that is with no real data.

    This is purely unnac­cept­able. If you can’t under­stand that the 22 days since the iPhone has launched and Apple respond­ing is fuck­ing fast. And this isnt even an oil spill. This is a fuck­ing cell phone that for all intents and pur­poses works just great.

    If you look at the com­ments on those tech blogs, you will also see a amount of fud spread­ers say­ing shit like “too bad it doesnt work like a phone” which is bull­shit hyper­bole. It works bet­ter than the 3gs as a phone, it just has a soft spot, like a lit­tle baby. Can you not man­age to take care of a baby with­out putting your thumb in it’s head? ? /jk

    PS: No all caps, except that PS, fuck and that one.

  • http://twitter.com/StirlingHewitt dillinger23

    I dont know how many fuck­ing times I have to tell you this John. Apple only owns like 30 mil­lion bars. There is only so fuck­ing many bars to go around, for­tu­nately as you said bars mean jack fuck and they are taller now, so there is that.

    So play nice and share motherfuckers.

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    ELEVENTY BARZZZZZ

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    It would almost be worth jail­break­ing an iPhone to make it have 11 bars.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    “I’m glad he finally got pissed off enough to do it.“

    I’m just sad it were basi­cally respectable news out­lets that drove him to be this angry and dis­ap­pointed.
    You can see Steve didn’t par­tic­u­larly care about tech blogs and the ran­dom NMD; he was angry that jour­nal­is­tic insti­tu­tions gave into the temp­ta­tion of pro­duc­ing badly researched, exag­ger­ated and unver­i­fied link bait.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Than you’re a lucky man, because by habit you hold your phone in a way that doesn’t ham­per recep­tion.

    Just to give you an exam­ple of the dead spot issue:
    I’ve used the Sony Ericsson W550i (http://​www​.liv​in​groom​.org​.au/​c​a​m​e​r​a​p​h​o​n​e​/​s​o​n​y-e…) for quite a while. I bought it because it was attested the best recep­tion of all (!) cell phones in the mar­ket back then.
    The rea­son for this? All of its anten­nae sit inside the arch at the top of the phone.
    I was able to place and hold onto calls in the rel­a­tively weak E-band net­work (E-Plus in Germany, 1850MHz) where nobody else could.
    Now comes the big BUT: Sony Ericsson explic­itly wrote in the man­ual not to touch the arch, because it would ham­per sig­nal qual­ity and it did. Put a fin­ger on the antenna and it would loose the sig­nal quicker than any other phone I had before.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    I’d just wish peo­ple would read the AnandTech arti­cles about this issue and the real­ity of how well bars reflect the abil­ity to send and receive data.
    Then again, most peo­ple don’t have the com­pre­hen­sive skills to under­stand them.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    You’re per­fectly right and it goes even fur­ther than this:
    Most pub­li­ca­tions, actual press and blaghers seem to have aban­doned the use of phrases like “from what I have heard”, “this isn’t sci­en­tif­i­cally proven data”, “these com­ments come from a lay­man”, “the source of this infor­ma­tion is”, or a plain and sim­ple “in my (hum­ble) opin­ion”.

    Lately, humil­ity, pro­fes­sion­al­ism and logic seem to have taken an extended leave from the tech press/blogosphere when it comes to mat­ters Apple.
    I’m blog­ging for fun and hope that the fact that I have no stake in this hole busi­ness will keep me grounded.

  • Mieses

    The iphone 4 has a spot that when TOUCHED, not “blocked”, causes sig­nal inter­fer­ence. There is a big dif­fer­ence. Putting tape over the spot causes the prob­lem to go away, even if you “block” the spot. This is noth­ing like the issue with other phones. It’s a design defect, pure and sim­ple. The exter­nal antenna was a bad idea. If it was a car, it would be called a lemon.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Blocking or touch­ing… it’s atten­u­a­tion in both cases.
    The error in your logic is, that the observed issue has no stronger effect on sig­nal qual­ity than ‘block­ing’ on other phones, which was shown by Apple yes­ter­day. Yes, the design has this par­tic­u­lar draw­back, but in most other cases it deliv­ers bet­ter reception.

  • Mieses

    “no stronger” .. You don’t have enough data to make such a com­par­i­son. Apple’s pre­sen­ta­tion is not a reli­able sci­en­tific study. Their com­par­i­son with other phones has con­fused you. In one case you have a con­duc­tive object (a fin­ger­tip) mak­ing direct con­tact with an antenna. On the other hand you have phones that are prop­erly designed with anten­nas encased in a non-conductive mate­r­ial. Apple had to cover those phones with an entire hand to see a change in sig­nal strength. Who knows what other tricks they used in test­ing. (Apple’s never been too rig­or­ous about their bench­marks either).

    to quote a com­ment from another thread: “Anyone that knows any­thing about anten­nas and rf, knows that if you touch a antenna with a con­duc­tive object (your hand) it de-tunes the antenna, killing the effi­ciency and absorbs the energy like a rf load.“

    So, your state­ment “in most other cases it deliv­ers bet­ter recep­tion” is incor­rect. The ini­tial iPhone4 antenna design is an infe­rior solu­tion in ALL cases because the antenna is exposed. This is why they rushed out a fix. Unlike the ini­tial iPhone4, the cur­rently ship­ping iPhone4 anten­nas are cov­ered with a non-conductive coat­ing — a tem­po­rary improve­ment until the iPhone 5. When that coat­ing chips or rubs off the users will have the sig­nal prob­lems again. The exter­nal antenna is a stu­pid, bro­ken, failed design — a lemon.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    It would’ve been nice of you to reply to my post, but alas…

    Let’s begin:

    “On the other hand you have phones that are prop­erly designed with anten­nas encased in a non-conductive mate­r­ial.”
    — What makes you think this is the only proper way to design anten­nae? Just because it is done like this most of the time, doesn’t mean it is THE proper way. You’re biased.

    “Apple had to cover those phones with an entire hand to see a change in sig­nal strength.”
    — Yes, they did, but Jobs also said, that with the iPhone 4 you don’t need an entire hand, just this lit­tle spot.
    You’re biased and you didn’t lis­ten to the press con­fer­ence care­fully.
    I had and have phones were you only need one fin­ger to pro­voke a sim­i­lar effect: Treo 650, Sony Ericsson W550i, Ericsson T39m, Siemens SL45.

    ”(Apple’s never been too rig­or­ous about their bench­marks either)”
    — Yes they are, take their bat­tery bench­marks and their graph­ics bench­marks and check for your­self. You’re biased and you didn’t pro­vide proof for your state­ment.

    “to quote a com­ment from another thread”
    — Where is that quote from? Who made it?

    “So, your state­ment “in most other cases it deliv­ers bet­ter recep­tion” is incor­rect.”
    — No, it’s not, I took it from the AnandTech review of the device, which I didn’t link to in my response to you, my bad. Check the link at the bot­tom and read the review. But go ahead, dis­prove me.

    “The ini­tial iPhone4 antenna design is an infe­rior solu­tion in ALL cases because the antenna is exposed.”
    — No, it’s not. I don’t know squat about RF tech, but this I know. It has dis­ad­van­tages, but it is not infe­rior per se. You’re biased.

    “This is why they rushed out a fix”
    — They didn’t. They fixed the euphemistic dis­play algo­rithm for the bars and an Exchange bug.

    “Unlike the ini­tial iPhone4, the cur­rently ship­ping iPhone4 anten­nas are cov­ered with a non-conductive coat­ing — a tem­po­rary improve­ment until the iPhone 5.”
    — Source? So far I’ve heard noth­ing of that sorts, again, check the AnandTech review, this time the sec­ond link.

    So far all you did was make biased, unproven alle­ga­tions, didn’t deliver sources for your infor­ma­tion and crit­i­cise the device.

    http://​www​.anandtech​.com/​s​h​o​w​/​3​7​9​4​/​t​h​e​-​i​p​h​o​n​e-4…
    http://​www​.anandtech​.com/​s​h​o​w​/​3​8​2​1​/​i​p​h​o​n​e​-​4​-​red…

  • http://quetwo.com/ QueTwo

    You are cor­rect, in that there is /some/ atten­u­a­tion if you touch the sweet spot, or sim­ply block it. You will also get some mea­sure of atten­u­a­tion if you ‘block’ the antenna on any other phone. This is a mat­ter of physics. However, you will ALWAYS get more atten­u­a­tion if you touch the antenna. This is also a mat­ter of physics, because as your hand touches the antenna, you will essen­tially become part of the antenna. Antennas are finely tuned to cer­tain fre­quency bands by the length of wire and the resis­tance that is added to them. By bring­ing your­self in as an antenna ele­ment (or even worse, mak­ing your­self a bridge between two antenna ele­ments which seems to be caus­ing the worst issues), you change the prop­er­ties of the antenna, and it will no longer be tuned for the fre­quency band that you are try­ing to get.

    To think of it another way — lets say you are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with some­body. ‘Blocking’ is sim­i­lar to the per­son you are talk­ing to putting their hand in front of their mouth — the same sig­nal still comes through but it is qui­eter. When you change the prop­er­ties of the antenna it is sim­i­lar to talk­ing with your mouth com­pletely full of food — the words will get gar­bled and most likely not under­stand­able to oth­ers.

    I was lucky enough to run some tests in my lab to see what the dif­fer­ence was. While all phones drop some sig­nal when you hold them, (most aver­age about 5 — 10dBm), the iPhone 4 lost nearly 20 dBm worth of sig­nal when you touch it’s sweet spot. The most I was able to get the iPhone 3 to drop by touch alone was only 4 dBm. “Death Grips” (which are imprac­ti­cal to study, because they are not nat­ural usage of the phones) caused sig­nif­i­cant sig­nal loss in all phones tested — how­ever the iPhone lost nearly 27 dBm in our tests, while our aver­age smart­phone (in our case the BlackBerry 8900g) lost only 21 dBm. My test results mir­rored those of Anandtech’s avail­able here : http://​www​.anandtech​.com/​s​h​o​w​/​3​7​9​4​/​t​h​e​-​i​p​h​o​n​e-4…

    Before you ask, my back­ground is that of an RF Engineer, and I am a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Michigan. Our lab uses its own BDA in an RF neu­tral envi­ron­ment for testing.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Thanks for the great expla­na­tion.
    I’m aware of that prob­lem, I used to build/drive RC cars back when I was younger.
    The effects of a touched antenna were quite funny some­times.

    To be hon­est, I had a thought sim­i­lar to the peo­ple at AnandTech when I saw the fin­ished prod­uct: Is there some kind of coat­ing on the anten­nae?

    But since you have made some tests, maybe you can answer this: How big is the loss in sig­nal qual­ity, when you hold the phone with­out (!) bridg­ing the gap between the GSM/3G antenna and the WiFi/GPS/Bluetooth antenna?

    I don’t have an iPhone 4 of my own so far, but I’ve tried a friend’s iPhone 4 and couldn’t repli­cate this prob­lem, as long as I didn’t touch the sweet spot. I know of one sit­u­a­tion where I’d bridge the gap unin­ten­tion­ally (when hold­ing the phone with my left hand dur­ing a call), but even then I wasn’t able to drop a call
    (we do have good recep­tion, though).

  • http://quetwo.com/ QueTwo

    It’s really hard to actu­ally hold the iPhone 4 with­out bridg­ing the two anten­nas (part of the design flaw). The GSM/3G antenna runs along the right side and bot­tom, where the other antenna runs along the top and left. If you are care­ful and only hold it along the bot­tom, you can do it.

    By hold­ing only the GSM antenna ele­ment, the drop is about 8– 11 dBm, which is about an 5% drop of the nor­mal scale.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Interesting. So when you don’t touch the sweet spot, the atten­u­a­tion effect isn’t much greater than with other phones. Please cor­rect me, if I read this wrong.

    Did you by any chance mea­sure what hap­pens when your right pinky touches the GSM antenna on the lower left side, the phone rest­ing in the palm of your right hand and the ring and mid­dle fin­ger touch­ing the WiFi antenna? That is inci­den­tally the way I would hold the iPhone 4 (always held the 3GS in the same man­ner).

    I can accept that Apple was too opti­mistic when plac­ing the anten­nae around the device, but a ‘defec­tive by design’ ver­dict I can­not.

    I guess there’s going to be a big mar­ket for 2cm long stick­ers to put over the gap on the iPhone 4 :)

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    can you release all the data on your phone test­ing, includ­ing raw measurements?

  • http://www.bynkii.com/ John C. Welch

    actu­ally, it doesn’t always “de-tune” the antenna. To be blunt, it doesn’t “de-tune”, it “re-tunes” or alters the antenna recep­tion char­ac­ter­is­tics. in the case of the iPhone, because of the wave­lengths and fre­quen­cies involved, this reduces sen­si­tiv­ity. At other wave­lengths, such as VHF TV ranges, grab­bing the antenna with your hand can increase the sen­si­tiv­ity. Same thing with car radios, at least older mod­els. Put your hand over the radio, or reach out and grab the antenna, some­times, you lost sig­nal, some­times, it came in more clearly.

    so there, now we’re all on the same page.

    Also, exter­nal anten­nas on cell phones? not new. Not even slightly. In fact, they used to be the norm, until the obses­sion with small phones forced all the anten­nas inter­nal. That was never an engi­neer­ing require­ment, it was a fash­ion state­ment. The last phone I had with an exter­nal antenna, the Kyocera 6035, got calls in places your ‘supe­rior phone with an inter­nal antenna’ would think was an ane­choic cham­ber.

    It was also ugly as sin with the antenna extended, but damn, it got calls. While you’re bitch­ing about the atten­u­a­tion from the human hand, keep in mind that the iPhone antenna design is far more sen­si­tive than the iPhone 3GS, (by almost 20dbm). Actually, given the mea­sure­ments i’ve seen of sen­si­tiv­ity between the iPhone 3GS (-107dbm) and the iPhone 4 (-121dbm), worst case with the atten­u­a­tion, the iPhone 4 is still in the –100dbm sen­si­tiv­ity range. So, it’s not like you’ve a brick. in fact, true net loss between the 3GS and the 4 is about 6dbm.

    If you enclose the antenna, you lose sen­si­tiv­ity, but you mit­i­gate the hold­ing it issue. If you expose the antenna, you gain a lot of sen­si­tiv­ity, (around 14dbm), but you have more issues with skin inter­fer­ence. There’s no free ride in engi­neer­ing. Every design choice has prob­lems. Every one.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    I’d love to see them, too. Should’ve asked ear­lier. It would be extremely help­ful for putting this issue into perspective.

  • Jabberwock6735

    you are a moron sir! thank you, now, may i have another please?

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Another ques­tion for you:
    Did you test in 3G mode, or was 3G deac­ti­vated? It’s of inter­est, because every­thing I’ve read so far, only men­tioned 3G or didn’t men­tion the mode at all.

  • Mieses
  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

    Huzzah, more unver­i­fied spec­u­la­tion from blog­tards with no par­tic­u­lar exper­tise in the sub­ject at hand.

  • Mieses

    The old exter­nal cell phone anten­nas were always clad in plas­tic or some other non con­duc­tive mate­r­ial. Not the same thing as an exposed con­duc­tive metal antenna. It’s a mis­lead­ing and irrel­e­vant com­par­i­son.

    You can­not com­pare TV which is a dif­fer­ent spec­trum with dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics. Cell phones are more sen­si­tive to sig­nal loss than tv or radio. it’s ok to lose tv or radio recep­tion for a few sec­onds. Not ok dur­ing a phone call. So again, it’s mis­lead­ing to com­pare radio and tv. It’s a bad idea to expose a cell phone antenna in that man­ner.

    I agree that it may work bet­ter in some sit­u­a­tions (if you’re wear­ing gloves, for exam­ple). On bal­ance it’s a bad engi­neer­ing deci­sion that they prob­a­bly will not repeat (given that they’re already start­ing to coat the iPhone 4 anten­nas in some kind f plas­tic).

    It’s almost dis­gust­ing how Jobs sought to deflect atten­tion by sug­gest­ing that other phones suf­fer from the same design flaw.

  • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk
    t’s really hard to actu­ally hold the iPhone 4 with­out bridg­ing the two antennas



    In a word: bull­shit. It may be hard for you to do so, but the mil­lions of iPhone 4 own­ers who aren’t com­plain­ing about this “issue” — you know, the real users not overly self-entitled mem­bers of the tech media — indi­cates that peo­ple adapt and move on.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    They’re look­ing into the issue, still noth­ing con­clu­sive. Why am I mis­in­formed again?
    You should check your read­ing com­pre­hen­sion skills.

  • Mieses

    You rewrite his­tory when you defend Apple’s bench­mark­ing. They were noto­ri­ous for pro­duc­ing mis­lead­ing bench­marks in their mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als. Do you not remem­ber that? How you can defend Apple so blindly is really bizarre. Many reports on the web that cur­rent ship­ping mod­els of the iPhone4 have dif­fer­ent plas­tics and coat­ings to fix the antenna issue and the prox­im­ity sen­sor issue. Common sense would tell me that they shipped a lemon too early and are try­ing to defuse the prob­lem with PR and mis­lead­ing sci­en­tific com­par­isons while they fix the prob­lem. Sorry for not reply­ing to right post. Not famil­iar with your site. I’ll shut up now. Sorry, but this site really seems like an exten­sion of Apple PR. I’m pretty sure I can drink the Angry Drunk under the table any day, unless we’re drink­ing Apple Kool Aid.

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