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

    Look fuck­tard, you’re exactly one more troll com­ment away from being banned here.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    I don’t care how bad Apple’s bench­mark­ing was years ago, I know that it is pretty reli­able now, just check some reviews by Walt Mossberg and David Pogue.
    I believe Apple as blindly as I believe the ran­dom blog­ger or some shitty ana­lysts who don’t know jack about the tech they’re writ­ing about.
    Please pro­vide a link to the reports of the iPhone 4 hav­ing “dif­fer­ent plas­tics and coat­ings”, because oth­er­wise I’ll stick to my knowl­edge about pro­duc­tion pro­ce­dures and sup­ply chain man­age­ment and say that even for Apple that would be a feat.

  • RDF

    The point is to design it in such a way that you do not touch it where you are going to hold it.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Nigh-impossible to accom­plish, as every­body holds their phone differently.

  • http://twitter.com/meat_tornado Meaty

    Drunk ass MacMac.

    Whoever thinks that putting the antenna where most of the population’s hands are going to go is a dick­wad who should be reamed by the droves of peo­ple who buy his over­priced phone.

  • Angry Drunk’s Pappy

    All I’ve read here is The Angry Drunk, man­gochut­ney and Steve Jobs gay flirt­ing with each other. I think peo­ple are right when they say that thean​gry​drunk​.com is noth­ing but a bunch of butt-fucking homo­sex­u­als. Nothing can come in between ifags and a shiny new Apple. Nothing except Steve Jobs. He’ll come right between their eyes. And in their mouths. And they’ll love it.

    Because they’re queers.

    Open wii­i­i­i­ide!!!

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

    bye whore!

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

    You mean like all the other phones with their anten­nas on the bot­tom? Try again fuck stick.

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

    actu­ally, yes, i can eas­ily com­pare TV VHF/UHF sig­nals to cell sig­nals. VHF/UHF sig­nals were:

    longer wave­length
    higher power
    ana­log

    as com­pared to cell sig­nals which are

    shorter wave­length
    much lower power
    and dig­i­tal, with regard to how data is encoded.

    See? Simple. You can com­pare damned near any­thing to any­thing else, it’s real easy.

    And again, you keep stat­ing that they’re coat­ing the iPhone 4 antenna in some kind of plas­tic, yet you offer no proof of your state­ment.

    finally, Jobs didn’t say that other phones have the same kind of design. He said that all phones suf­fer sig­nal loss if you hold them right. There’s a dif­fer­ence there, and you might want to pay atten­tion to what he said vs. what you want him to have said. It makes you look like less of an idiot.

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

    you are gen­er­ally not read­ing the arti­cle, nor the com­ments. No one seems to have this mag­i­cal coated iPhone yet.

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



    Many reports on the web state that the US has a UFO in a hanger at groom lake.

    Many reports on the web state that elvis is still alive.

    Many reports on the web state that all women secretly like anal.

    okay, so the last one’s true. The plural of anect­dote is still not data. No mat­ter how much you pretend.

    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.



    I doubt you’ve been in the same room with com­mon sense in the last ten years.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    I just love it when you bitch-slap peo­ple with rea­son :)

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    This I’ve just found: http://​www​.the​do​g​house​di​aries​.com/​?​p​=​1​877
    The comic to end this discussion.

  • bkhar­mony

    Who cares what the douche at hack­tas­tic “Cult of Mac” thinks? If you need some­one else to sum up your thoughts, well 1) they’re not your thoughts and 2) you should prob­a­bly just keep your mouth shut.

  • Thirdeye

    I would extend that com­ment about humil­ity, pro­fes­sion­al­ism, and logic tak­ing leave from the tech press/blogosphere beyond mat­ters Apple. Witness the non­sense that cir­cu­lated about Vista a few years back, par­tic­u­larly sur­round­ing the Gutmann paper and Randall Kennedy’s inter­pre­ta­tion of RAM/CPU per­for­mance (both now dis­cred­ited). Teething prob­lems with Leopard and Snow Leopard were also blown out of pro­por­tion. The sad thing is, the tech press takes the lazy path and instead of inves­ti­gat­ing issues raised in the blo­gos­phere sim­ply echoes the blogosphere.

  • Thirdeye

    Badly researched, exag­ger­ated, and unver­i­fied link bait is not a good char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Consumer Reports. CR is usu­ally very pro-Apple.

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

    Of course I’m just a “pathetic Apple fan­boy” but I agree one-hundred per­cent. Unprofessionalism is unpro­fes­sion­al­ism. Whether it be giv­ing uncrit­i­cal blow-jobs to Google and Apple or fact­less vit­ri­olic screeds against Apple and Microsoft. The prob­lem is that the tech-press (with some notable excep­tions) has gone down the same road as U.S. polit­i­cal “jour­nal­ism.” They run what­ever story gets the page-views, and when called on it fall back on the “we’re just enter­tain­ers giv­ing our opin­ions” excuse. They’ve also (again with some huge excep­tions) fallen into the same men­tal trap as the Washington Beltway pun­dits. They’ve started to believe that they’re an impor­tant part of the nar­ra­tive instead of being objec­tive reporters of the facts.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    This com­ment wasn’t aimed at CR, rather the news out­lets that Steve Jobs called out dur­ing the press con­fer­ence and the fol­low­ing Q&A session.

  • Thirdeye

    Mossberg and Pogue are noto­ri­ously super­fi­cial, vac­u­ous, biased, and unpro­fes­sional. It’s a trav­esty that they are the tech voice of two of the most influ­en­tial media out­lets.

    Plastic coat­ing is a log­i­cal solu­tion to the iPhone antenna issue, but you are cor­rect that it is unlikely that it is in the pipeline. I guess we’ll find out about the solu­tion on or about September 30.

  • Sigivald

    Page 10 (pdf) of the HTC Touch Pro 2’s man­ual.

    Oddly, it has a zone on the phone out­lined with a “no touch” icon and says “Contact with the antenna area may impair call qual­ity and cause your device to oper­ate at a higher power level than needed.“

    So it sure looks like the Drunk was right, again. Everybody’s phone, unless it has an antenna that sticks out (ala some of the Blackberries) has a prob­lem with hold­ing it in The Wrong Place caus­ing sig­nal loss. This is sim­ply a nec­es­sary byprod­uct of physics.

    Maybe you’ve never held yours in a way that made you notice impaired sig­nal… but many iPhone 4 users haven’t had a prob­lem either, it seems…

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

    yeah, well, the NYT and the WSJ keep not pay­ing Darby or I to take Pogue or Walt’s place, so you’re stuck with them.

    Suffer bitches, suf­fer as we have.

  • peel­man

    Uh…welcome to cap­i­tal­ism? It’s called mar­ket­ing. Every pos­i­tive news arti­cle writ­ten is an iPhone ad that apple didn’t pay (much) for. We weren’t see­ing the mere oppo­site of that. They’re were not pub­lish­ing Palm-Pre-ish reviews of the iPhone. Jizzmodo and sev­eral other view whores cre­ated a press-induced mass psy­chosis around the premise that there was a cat­a­strophic engi­neer­ing fail­ure, when in real­ity it’s a fairly minor issue.

  • peel­man

    You seem to be under the impres­sion that human skin pos­sesses the same con­duc­tiv­ity as cop­per or alu­minum. Over short dis­tances (say, the minus­cule gap between two antenna on an iPhone 4) the con­duc­tiv­ity will be high enough to cause sig­nif­i­cant re-tuning, as John pointed out. But you’re imply­ing that sim­i­lar con­duc­tiv­ity is pos­si­ble across the entire human hand, which is where your argu­ment falls apart. YES, it is enough to retune things slightly and cause a small sig­nal drop. NO it’s not even close to the drop when bridg­ing the two anten­nas with just a few square mil­lime­ters of skin.

    If I press my Bold 9700 to my ear I can lose enough sig­nal to drop a call, depend­ing on where I am. My solu­tion? I don’t hold it to my fuck­ing ear. Problem solved.

  • bradisrj

    Bahahahahahahah! (I’m laugh­ing at the quick rebut­tal to JC). Second your last sen­tence and raise it to “.… MOST iPhone 4 users haven’t had (or at least haven’t noticed) any problems.….”

  • bradisrj

    Apple sold out? : — (

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

    Not in real­ity, but there are a sur­pris­ing num­ber of MacMacs who think so.

  • bradisrj

    Bahahahahahahah! (I’m laugh­ing at the quick rebut­tal to JC). Second your last sen­tence and raise it to “.… MOST iPhone 4 users haven’t had (or at least haven’t noticed) any problems.….”

  • bradisrj

    Apple sold out? : — (

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

    Not in real­ity, but there are a sur­pris­ing num­ber of MacMacs who think so.

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