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

Puh-lease!

[Trip6]

OMG, when will the Apple spin machine take a fricking rest? Secretive "black labs?" Sure they aren't killer canines?

Re:Hey look, damage reduction!

[dzfoo]

Although you may be right, this is only a problem if the calls get dropped. And it is not so certain that they will as a result of the new antenna design, except in areas where the signal is weak to begin with.

This is Jobs' point, not necessarily conflating two separate issues. In essence, he is saying "something causes our phones to attenuate signal, but something causes all phones to attenuate signal." The fact that these two somethings are different is not really relevant.

What's relevant is the degree to which it affects call performance. So far, Apple's assertion is that the iPhone 4 seems have generally better call quality than the previous version--because and not in spite of its antenna design.

        -dZ.

Re:Apple's Black Labs:

[Lars T.]

wasn't this site meant to be 'news for nerds', and not 'news for sad pathetic little consumerists'

And what, pray tell, qualifies you as a "nerd"? The fact that you can't accept that all phones have a "death grip"?

Re:Apple's Black Labs:

[Lars T.]

Out of interest, I tried the grip of death on my work Blackberry, and I couldn't get more than a 10db signal drop worst case, whereas the iPhone 4 averages a 20 db drop according to Anandtech.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

Also, the Blackberry includes a numeric display of the signal strength, rather than only displaying the data only via a possibly-fiddled-by-the-marketing-department bar chart.

So how much signal did your Blackberry have compared to the iPhone before any touching started?