An Unprecedented Look At Apple's "Black Labs"

An anonymous reader writes "Apple recently granted ABC Nightline unprecedented access to its secretive 'black labs' where it puts upcoming products through exhaustive testing."

Comments

Considering the stink about iPhone4

[Chas]

Maybe their testing isn't, exactly, "exhaustive".

teehee

[Pojut]

where it puts upcoming products through exhaustive testing

Does that involve letting Apple fanboys and Apple haters handle the devices, just to be sure they can make sufficiently outrageous claims about the product?

ABC.. Disney.. Jobs..

[Dynamoo]

ABC is owned by Disney. Steve Jobs owns 138 million Disney shares or about $4.7bn worth of stock. Anyone else think it odd that Disney is running a puff piece for one of its major shareholders?

Re:ABC.. Disney.. Jobs..

[vlm]

Anyone else think it odd that Disney is running a puff piece for one of its major shareholders?

Somewhere around 5 media companies control about 99% of what the general population sees, hears, reads, and frankly, thinks.

So, if a rich dude invests in a major media company, then pretty much by definition there is about a 1 in 5 chance that a report from a major media outlet will be covering one of their own shareholders.

Its not like we have a free market of numerous equal competitors trying to push commodities in the media world.

Sorry, it's US only.

[Moskit]

Video of the "unprecedented look" is hosted on Hulu, which allows only US viewers.

Racists! ;-)

Hey look, damage reduction!

[kyz]

I wonder how much it costs to get your damage-limiting press release videos on to national television?

Apple are the brand that never make any mistakes. EXCEPT WHEN THEY DO. But that's because everybody makes mistakes, not just Apple.

It's important to know: all phones are susceptible to the "death grip"... it's just a tiny minor detail, not really worth mentioning, that the iPhone 4 "death grip" is "holding it normally in your left hand".

Re:Hey look, damage reduction!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's more than that: All antennae in the frequency bands used by cellphones will suffer some attenuation if your meaty hands are wrapped around them. You are absorbing a chunk of the radiation. This applies to all brands, and is why many cellphones have an area, or areas, they encourage you not to touch during use. Typically, phones are designed so that you won't tend to hold this part during routine use.

On the iPhone 4, the antenna is external and does not have a dielectric coating. In addition to attenuating the signal with their meaty consumer-hands, the user can actually modify the performance characteristics of the antenna(for the worse); by being conductive enough to count as part of it, or by bridging the two sections.

Apple has, naturally, been doing their best to conflate these two distinct antenna issues. All phones suffer from finger-meat signal attenuation. The iPhone is pretty much the only phone in the industry that has an exposed, externally conductive, antenna. Even the old-school designs with external pull-up antennas generally had those coated with plastic, and the user was hardly encouraged to hold the phone by a flexible extending antenna, rather than by the body.

Re:Exhaustive testing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame the testers. They did their job. Blame the guy that decided to launch the product despite its known performance issues.

Anti-Internet Territorial blocking

[ChocNut]

Living in the past and breaking the international web with your territory blocking BS. Screw Hulu

And yet,

[Iburnaga]

And yet they still miss obvious bugs in design. Now, I'm an Apple hater, I admit it, I will never buy an Apple or encourage someone to do so. I don't imagine anyone would change their opinion about Apple after seeing their testing chamber that may or may not have been set up on the fly for the purposes of marketing.

Re:Considering ...

[hitmark]

i get the impression that apple want people to feel the coolness of brushed metal directly. Observe the metal back of the first iphone (before they found it to affect signal quality, and changed to plastic) and the ipad. Its almost as if its a company fetish.