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Apple Offers Free Cases To Solve iPhone 4 Antenna Problems
Apple just finished their press conference about the iPhone 4 antenna issues that have been widely reported and discussed in the past few weeks. Steve Jobs started by showing that the problem wasn't limited to iPhones, using videos of the BlackBerry Bold 9700, the HTC Droid Eris, and the Samsung Omnia 2 as examples, all of which dropped bars while being gripped in certain ways. He said, "This is life in the smartphone world. Phones aren't perfect. It's a challenge for the whole industry. Every phone has weak spots." He went on to say that only 0.55% of all iPhone 4 users have called in to complain about reception problems, and that the return rate on the iPhone 4 so far is less than a third of the return rate for the 3GS. Jobs then said that according to their data, the iPhone 4 drops an average of less than one additional call per hundred than the 3GS. He continued by pointing out that because the 3GS was based on the 3G, there was already a large supply of Bumpers, which most customers left the store with. When the iPhone 4 came out, the old Bumpers didn't fit, so stock was lower and fewer customers used them (80% vs. 20%). Therefore, Apple's solution to the antenna problems is to give a free case to every iPhone 4 purchaser before September 30. Refunds will be offered for those who already purchased one. Since they can't make the Bumpers fast enough, they'll be supplying other cases from third parties. Jobs also acknowledged recently reported problems with the proximity sensor, promising a future software update to fix it. Engadget's liveblog of the conference has a ton of pictures and more direct quotes from Jobs. It's worth looking at if only for pictures of Apple's anechoic testing chambers.
3GS: 99.2% of calls dropped
4: 99.9% of calls dropped
So a very low increase percentage-wise... ;-)
It kind of bugs me when people admit they have done something wrong but because other people also have problems then it is not that bad. Wonder what Jobs would say if there was a coding error in OS X? Doesn't matter 'cos MS do it all the time? It's the normalisation of mediocrity.
No, it's about pointing out media sensationalism.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Hipster Douchebags become so dependant on Apple's marketing and lifestyle branding to prop-up their sad little lives that they defend the company and its products no matter how defective or lacking compared to other competing products.
What incentive does Apple and Steve Jobs have to do anything other than what they just did at this nauseatingly dishonest and sleazy damage control event.
Lie about the problem and smear other well designed cellphones? The Apple Hipster Douchebags will lap it up.
Apple's numbers are suspicious. Everyone I know with an iPhone 4 has the issue(s) but NONE of them have called AppleCare or gone to the Apple store to complain.
Unless you know hundreds of thousands of people, I'm going to trust AT&T and Apple's numbers, which cover _MILLIONS_ of users more than your anecdotal evidence covering, what, a half dozen?
"I'm an Apple customer, and I do not like being treated like an idiot."
thats how they sell so much overpriced/overhyped sh*t
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I'm calling shenanigans on this one...
Months of testing is done on every device before it goes out the door. Then it undergoes months of testing with the carrier. Then it gets released to the public.
This was a known flaw.
Of course, their anechoic chambers are beautiful! A beautiful way to make Consumer Reports look like amateurs.
There's so much spin going on, I can't express how flabbergasted I am!
And to point the finger at other people. C'mon!!
That's just childish and petty. Accountability should be SOP for any business. When Toyota had their accelration problems, they did the same run around. Pointing fingers at anything but the actual issue, and it's still happening.
Any company that treats it's customers like this doesn't deserve the customers it has.
That goes for ANY company.
Arrgghh!!
These CEOs are the rolemodels for tomorrows graduating MBAs.
We truly are doomed.
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Apple has handled this poorly every step of the way.
Really? Pray tell, how would YOU have handled it differently?
they still try to weasel out of trouble with the old line "it wasn't just me, they are doing it too".
No, they came right out and said the call-drop numbers were slightly higher on the 4 than the 3GS.
What you are calling "weasl(ing) out" was in fact Apple showing that they are, in fact, not alone (by any stretch of the imagination) in having signal-attenuation issues depending on how a phone is held.
It's called "Physics". Look into it.
They may not have tested signal strength, but they did the important tests, like measuring how thin it was and how little it weighed. And that's all that the iPhone homos really care about anyway, is how it looks.
Sorry about your Sony. However, I later found out that there is a little industry of people doing repairs on Apple hardware for more reasonable prices. And I mean the difference between $200 and $755 for the screen, although we did that ourselves.
Apple is supposed to provide such a great user experience but when they decide not to they can screw you. Want flash on that iPhone? Independent apps? You're "protected" from these things.
>What more, realistically, do you expect them to do?
I for one expect them to produce free software or no software and until they day they do - I will never buy any of their products. By the same taken I do not buy (or otherwise obtain or use) anything made by Microsoft or Adobe (indeed - my computers do NOT have flash installed).
Gimme the code, lemme hack it - you may win me over.
More importantly - iphone is a fad. There are two major schools of thought in UI design. School 1 is - make it impossible for hte user to do something wrong. In practise it means removing features, disabling options and preventing customization. Advantage: low initial learning curve. Disadvantage: it sucks - very very soon - specifically the very first time you ever want to do something the designer didn't think you would want to.
The other school of thought is: make everything as customizable as possible, maybe even up to and including the very source code but at least offer every option you can think off. Disadvantage: marginally higher initial learning curve (which basically goes away if you ship with sane defaults and smart initial autoconfigs though). Advantage: tool remains usable even as the user's needs get more specialised and advanced. The user can adapt the workflow to his personal style rather than the otehr way around leading to a more intuitive final result (because people are unique -there is NOTHING beyond a nipple that's intuitive to more than one person).
Things that try approach one: Apple OSX, Windows (mostly), Gnome (I will never forgive them for removing the option for ANYBODY to do double-sided printing because "too many people would never need that"), Iphone, MS-Paint
Things that try approach two: KDE, Android, Google (in general), Linux (below the desktop level), gimp and photoshop*
Software of the second variety tend to fall behind in the short term then gradually surpass and exceed the popularity of the first variety - because it's simply a much better model.
As Torvalds said - if you treat your users like idiots, very soon only idiots are your users.
*Note that for this second part of the post I was rating popularity and long-term success of these schools of thought and not considering issues of software freedom. Those issues are still highest priority for me, but I couldn't fairly compare the real-world success of the models if I left OUT the proprietary software.
Apple and the iPhone is firmly wedged in the former camp - it's a wonderful short-term strategy but the only POSSIBLE outcome in the medium to long term is that it WILL come back to bite them in the ass and iphone will, like mac, become relegated to a tiny minority of the market who are either too fanboiyish to consider something else - or fits the apple demographic so perfectly that none of the million things it cannot (ever) do is something they really need.
So - if apple ever wants my custom - they will need to change that model AND make their software FSF level free. Till then I'll use my customized android thanks - it's a free as I can get right now. Even if they don't care about me, the design model if not changed will still end up destroying the market share they have. This is just the first step - Jobs is learning that the iphone has moved way outside the fanboi world - real users don't just "do what king Jobs says they should".
It's going to be very interesting for Apple from here on in.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Considering he demonstrated the exact same effect with HTC and Nokia phones live this morning, I would say the problem was pretty clearly not isolated to the iPhone 4 and it's antenna design. Every phone on the market suffers from this to some extent, and the ones shown in the demo also dropped fro 5 bars to 1. It has been blown way out of proportion. The 4G demonstrated almost a one dropped call more out of 100 calls as compared to the 3GS. Most of the noise it turns out, was just that. Noise...
As to your other point, they are offering a full refund after 90 days, no questions asked, and no restocking fee. If you try a case, and you still aren't satisfied, you can return it for a full refund.
This is the reason people buy Apple and they consistently rank tops in customer satisfaction, and why the return rate for the 4G is only 1.4% compared to 6% for the 3GS. People know they will be taken care of. End the end, if it still doesn't suite your needs, return it and get a full refund.
Translation: Wait until September, we're redesigning the phone casing to put some clear shiny coating on the antenna, but we need to sell through the current stock first.
That should take about 48 hours, because Apple is BEHIND ON DEMAND on the iPhone 4. There IS no "current stock".
Next time actually check out the Press Conference before you show yourself to be an uninformed asswipe.
Um... do you mean like this one?
"10:43AM Ryan from gdgt: You showed people almost covering the entire phone in their hand, but on the iPhone 4 it can happen with just a touch. Can you explain that difference?
Bob: When you touch the phone, you put yourself between the signal and your phone, so when you touch that spot you can attenuate the signal, and if you grip it with your whole hand, you can attenuate it even more. We don't build phones with an antenna on top...
Hmm, that didn't really sound like an answer to us."
Apple continues to avoid the issue, and luckily the media present at the event didn't accept their lousy explanations.
Let's ask where the FUD comes from. Anonymous Cowards, disproportionately. Do you, by chance, work for Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, or some other competitor? What's your anonymous agenda, eh?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You should be able to Google the EVO user manual and near the end there are a couple pages dedicated to where NOT to touch the phone to keep from interfering with the antenna.
The iPhone problem is nothing new and has been in all iPhones to date and non-iPhones I owned prior. Apple is a big name so people make a big deal out of everything they do. They get a lot of free press/hype when things are good and when things are bad it can quickly turn around.
I have an i4 and it is by far the best reception I've had out of an iPhone(1st gen, 3GS prior). I can grip it with both hands really hard and sometimes manage to lose a bar. I don't think it's a signal strength issue because even in a low signal area I still only lose a bar. Maybe I'm just not electric enough? I also live in a dry climate so who knows.
You feel mighty comfortable here on apple.slashdot.org, don't you?
You're good at it, though. Tell your boss we said you deserve a raise.
There's a snobbiness to the way they do everything, and it rubs me the wrong way too so don't worry. I dunno, I would be mad too at that price for a repair, and I'd be mad too if I couldn't just leave the laptop with them and leave with a job number. Don't apologise about it, Apple are a bunch of snobby asshole liars who shoehorn industry standard components into nice cases and lie to their fans telling them that they have purchased something superior. I swear the snobbiness is the appeal sometimes.
If i was any of the before mentioned phone manufacturer, i would SUE Steve Jobs for slander and lets face it, for stupidity. How dare he to compare his stupid iJoke to all the other well known and with tradition and most of all, WORKING phones??? Is this guy out of mind? Does he realize that now he has to prove in the court that all the phones are as bad as his phones!!!
"I have to say that these guys stoop pretty low when claiming that this is a general problem. Sounds like spin to me." watch the videos if you don't believe this is a common problem... http://www.apple.com/antenna/
People complaining the loudest here never had any intention of buying an iPhone of any kind in the first place. There is no flaw. If there was one at least 1/3 of that 3 million would be demanding a refund. Where is the crisis? It was invented by bloggers like Gizmodo trying to attack Apple for being caught red handed and by Android fanboys trying to deflect attention from the problems with the android phones.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
* Samsung I9000 Galaxy S:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LROTHrTR92k
* HTC Evo Signal Attenuation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pj2YBYTbag
* Droid Incredible:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaDE941PzQk
* Droid Incredible (With Network Extender in Room):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEQH9_A5jw
* Nexus One:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEIA_lMwqJA
* Nexus One vs. iPhone (start at 1:29):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvMoV4_C4aA
* Nexus One (after Google's update to correct):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2g5J4qPp54
* Nexus One:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deCkjeHYT-g
* Android G1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CDaxhjUs9M
* "Major signal degradation when Nexus One is picked up" (N1 Thread on On this Problem):
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=34ae2c179184c33e&hl=en
There are plenty of counter examples for not only those phones but also the iPhone 4 by people with strong coverage who cannot make their phone fail. As SJ in Apple press conference noted, the formula they used before made it seem like there was a dramatic drop when it was already a weak signal to begin with.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.