Rotophonic

One free bumper and I'm gonna hurl

Apple: Don't even think about offering a free bumper for my faulty iPhone 4

iPhone 4 silent recall underway already?

http://m.gizmodo.com/5586256/is-apple-silently-recalling-the-iphone-4-now

Both simple and surprising

When I first read Apple's July 2nd response to the iPhone 4's antenna problems, something bothered me about it. As I've been writing about the iPhone 4 lately, I went back to read it again and I think I know why: Apple's reaction is flippant and condescending. The tone of the whole PR release is all wrong for something as significant as this. Let's break down some of the most egregious problems in the release. I've included a link to the complete release at the bottom of this post if you'd like to read the entire thing.

"It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned."

"Surprised" is clearly the wrong word to use here. As the builders of this product and with the complete design and all the phone's engineers at their disposal, a better word to use would have been "concerned" or "alarmed." It's not like the iPhone 4 had been out in the wild being used by millions of people or even thousands of people prior to its release. Apple releases products like a multimillion person beta test. It's release on the 24th was the first time that a significant enough sample of users began using the product. Notwithstanding the fact that I believe the iPhone team was fully aware of the issues prior to launch, the tone of this pair of sentences immediately calls into question the credibility of those people reporting the problems: "Everyone else loves the phone. Why don't you?"

If you take Apple at its word that these complaints are coming from outliers and that the majority of people are thrilled with the reception, Apple does not seem to be leaving any room for the possibility of a defect. What if there is a defect in some phones that occurred during manufacturing? Isn't that a possibility? Apparently not.

After explaining that holding *any* phone will attenuate the signal, the release continues:

"At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing."

Again with the implication that the antenna issue reports are coming in from freaks and idiots who clearly can't see how great the phone is.

Then this:

"We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising."

It seems like this line, the one line that sticks out in the release (as it's the only one sentence paragraph in the whole thing), sums up the tone of the entire message from Apple: Not only is the iPhone 4 delighting everyone, but even the iPhone's flaws delight!

"Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars."

When I read these words, I heard, "Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that we'd been reporting signal strength in a way that would make both our phone and our carriers (AT&T etc) look better." In the cell phone world, this is akin to Ferrari issuing a statement saying, "We were stunned to discover that our speedometers display our cars' speeds at 180MPH when in reality the car was only moving 90MPH."

"To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength."

Recently recommended? When was this recommended? Last week?

"We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped. For the vast majority of users who have not been troubled by this issue, this software update will only make your bars more accurate. For those who have had concerns, we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused."

So here's the crux of this PR release, "we apologize for any anxiety we may have caused." In other words, my dropped calls and completely non-existent data signal are simply the result of anxiousness. And demonstrable problems with the iPhone 4's antenna implementation are just "concerns."

So here's the deal, Apple: the iPhone 4 is a great device that is fantastic in many ways but in the end it's a fancy walkie-talkie and flaws in its design that result in dropped calls and no signal mean that there is a serious issue with the most basic function of the device. If you were in the car business, it's as if you've sold people a car and when people begin reporting to you that if they hold the steering wheel a certain way the car stalls, and you respond by questioning whether this actually happens in real life (like how Toyota questioned whether their cars had really accelerated on their own) and wax on about how much people love sitting in it and how beautiful the dashboard is. And have you seen how brilliantly the paint sparkles?

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/07/02appleletter.html

iPhone 4 Seems Destined for a Recall

After a few weeks of having the iPhone 4 to kick around, my feelings are decidedly positive about the usability of the device, but I have to say that the iPhone 4 Antenna Issue is so significant that I can't imagine Apple not having to issue a recall and fix this phone. Take a look at these screen grabs that I took in Speed Test on the iPhone 4:

This first one was taken with the iPhone 4 resting on the palm of my hand with my hand only touching the glass back of the phone. Nice near-T1 speeds. Sweet

Uh oh. This next grab is the speed test done while I was holding the phone the same way I have always held my iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 to do anything with it: holding it in my left hand with my fingers wrapped around the bottom of the phone. As you can see, the ping test took over 18 seconds(!) to complete and while the download test achieved a speed slower than a 14.4K modem, the upload test never even completed a single transmission. Not only that, I could literally feel heat from the antenna rapidly increase against my hand as the transmitter/receiver punched up the power levels to try and get a signal.

Then yesterday, I'm on the phone with my Mom and at first the call is nice an clear but unbeknownst to me, my hand had slipped down into the iPhone 4 Chokehold position (or, for Steve Jobs, where everyone in the universe holds their iPhones). She began saying, "You're breaking up. You're breaking up..." "Oops...," I said as I moved my hand to daintily hold the phone by its top side near the speaker. "That's better," she said. It happened once more as I continued the call.

I can't help but think that Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive have become so cocky about pushing around their software engineers to think outside the box and do things that the engineers initially thought were impossible that they actually believed that the antenna experts on the iPhone team (and lets hope there are antenna experts on the team) were just being cranky and their warnings about the dire effects of the iPhone 4's antenna design were just "an inability to be creative and focus on user-centered design." 

And beyond that, I believe that by the time Steve Jobs had demonstrated the iPhone 4 to the public he was fully aware of the issue: it's not something that you wouldn't notice. Yes, during their early tests of the device when they had it wrapped up in a disguise, they may not have noticed it as much, but certainly after Apple started to seed more devices around the Cupertino campus you'd have to notice. You notice it doing every day things with the phone. Simply hold the phone in your hand and the signal drops out. Sit on the couch and play Bejeweled: your signal disappears. Make a call: your signal drops out. This is a situation where you could not be any further from "user-centered design." Jobs says, "Don't hold the phone that way." Really? How defensive is that response? 

To me it seems clear that Jobs *knew* this was a major issue even as he presented the iPhone 4 at WWDC. Wouldn't Jobs have been more curious about the source of this signal dropout problem when it was raised on, literally, the first day the device made it into the hands of customers? He'd only be curious if he'd never heard of the issue. He'd only be curious if he hadn't already had hours of stressful internal meetings with engineers to try and fix the issue as millions of poorly designed phones were being manufactured in China. He'd only be curious if he hadn't already conceded to his antenna engineers that he was wrong about the design and should have listened to them better. "Just avoid holding it that way." Hmmm. That seems like something a cranky engineer would say.

Sounds to me like he's trying to downplay what he knows is a very serious problem: if I were him, I'd avoid the PR strategy makes you look like the BP CEO explaining how the blown-out oil well isn't as big an issue as it seems since there's so much water in the Gulf of Mexico. Competition in this space is heating up a lot and some honesty and positive action on the issue from Jobs would make a huge difference. Every iPhone 4 owner right now is asked by every potential new iPhone 4 owner, "Is holding the phone an issue?" And right now, the answer is, "Yes." Even Jobs agrees on this point. This is not the way to ensure Apple's dominance through the Android onslaught over the the coming year.

Apple's Macbook Firewire F U

In a quick break from the politics of the day, I have to take a moment to rant about Apple's decision to eliminate a Firewire port from its new Macbooks and reduce to one, the number of Firewire ports on the Macbook Pro. As you may have heard, Apple released newly designed Macbooks and Macbook Pros this week and they have eliminated all Firewire ports from the Macbook and left a single Firewire 800 port in the Macbook Pro. Every Mac since the advent of Firewire 1394a in 2000 has had at least one Firewire port. Hell, eMacs even came with two Firewire 400 ports. According to an email that may or may not have come from Steve Jobs, Apple's explanation for this nickle-and-dime elimination of the Firewire connection is because "all of the HD camcorders released in the last few years use USB 2.0." We get that you're a visionary product guy, Steve. We understand that you can see the future and Firewire is nowhere in it according to you. However, in the real world present day us long time Apple fans have a shitload of Firewire products that need a way to get connected to our computers. We generally don't toss out all of our existing electronic gizmos like hard drives, video cameras and iPods because Apple has decided it's no longer appropriate for us to use.

Read the rest of this post »