Why Steve Jobs Is (Legitimately) Pissed at the Media

July 16th, 2010

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.cultofmac.com/steve-jobs-hates-his-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

  • 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/b3Z8es (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 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.livingroom.org.au/cameraphone/sony-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


    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










    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.



















    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/show/3794/the-iphone-4…
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-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/show/3794/the-iphone-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

    you are gen­er­ally mis­in­formed.
    http://www.ifixit.com/blog/2010/07/is-apple-sil…

  • 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

  • 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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