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Chip Guru Papermaster Loses Signal At Apple
ColdWetDog writes "Computerworld reports that Mark Papermaster has left his job as Apple's Senior Vice President of Devices Hardware Engineering. He was the senior executive in charge of engineering for the iPhone 4 and thus responsible in some unknown fashion for 'antennagate.' His name may ring bells from previous coverage of his jump from IBM to Apple. From a brief blurb on Daring Fireball: 'From what I've heard, it's clear he was canned. Papermaster was a conspicuous absence at the Antennagate press conference. Inside Apple, he's "the guy responsible for the antenna" — that's a quote from a source back on July 23. (Another quote from the same source: "Apparently the antenna guys used to have a big chip on their shoulder. No more.")'" Update: 08/08 03:01 GMT by KD : Swapped out a registration-required NY Times link for a Computerworld one; corrected the direction of Papermaster's career move.
At one company, quality kind of matters when you drop something off at the consumer's front door.
From bugmenot:
Username: blahblahblah7
Password: blahblahblah
and that it was a software issue. Fucking pick one.
The fanbois haven't gotten the word yet because their antennas don't work.
They know it was an antenna problem, but the fanboys will believe whatever they claim.
Amusing side note, when I went to post the captcha was crucify
on the bright side, papermaster is a whiz at getting his resume looking good
Why does every "scandal" now have -gate appended onto the end of it? It wasn't called "Watergate" because it was a scandal about water...
Except they did say it was software.
In fact, they said that the number of bars that were being displayed was wrong, and that was the cause of the death grip signal loss.
They've fired off so many excuses that it's perfectly understandable if people mix and match them a bit. They did at one point claim that the big signal drop was only an illusion caused by the software displaying too many bars in the first place. I think they mixed that with the "well everyone else has a problem too" gambit, at least for a while.
I just have to wonder what was in the conversation between Jobs and Papermaster.
If Papermaster is the true mastermind of antennagate, may the heavens have mercy on his soul... Jobs would be pissed .
Anyone?
Anyone?
didn't Apple go on the offensive to illustrate that ALL smart phones had an attenuation problem if held the right (wrong?) way? Then they fire someone for it. Basically their saying "yeah, we knew there was someone to blame for the design all along but we couldn't admit that publicly and force a recall...that would cost too much money. Lets lie instead, that costs less. We'll quietly shove him out the door when all the hoopla dies down." It can't both be everyone's and one persons problem at the same time. I call bullshit through deductive reasoning.
Make no mistake about it. The antenna was put where it is, on the outside because Jony Ive was in love with the design. Sure, Papermaster had to sign off on the design, but I assure you it's very difficult to say no to Jobs or Ive within Apple.
If Papermaster was indeed held responsible for a problem that stemmed from Jony (backed by Steve Jobs), then it's probably to his benefit that he is gone.
I would however agree with the idea that the antenna people have big chips on their shoulders. I'm not saying they never did anything right, but they think every one of them is better than nearly any person outside Reuben's group.
So I don't know where Gruber gets his info, but going by what I've seen he's only right about half the time so I wouldn't get too wrapped up in what he says.
Finally, I'll say this about the situation. I wouldn't read too much into this antenna stuff. There have been signs of trouble for a while. When the iPhone 4 was announced (before antennagate), you saw Bob Mansfield in the announcement but not Mark Papermaster. And no matter how much people outside the company may talk about the P.A. Semi group (which reported to Papermaster), virtually all the internal chip work was really stemming from Mansfield's group. I think it's likely Papermaster found his responsibilities had already been stripped away before the iPhone 4 launch, perhaps even before he showed up for his first day.
Actually they never said it was a software issue. They said it was a attenuation problem that all modern smart phones have.
Then they lied about that as well. Does the iPhone 4 and every other phone have attenuated signal to it when the hand blocks the signal yes.
The ADDITIONAL problem with the iPhone 4 is it detunes the antenna when you hold in in a certain spot. No other phone has that problem.
That's the real problem. Apple has tried to distract folks by both claiming at one point that it was a software problem, and then later by saying it's the same problem all other phones have.
Both are lies.
The publicity stunt of trying to equate their antenna problem with another (common) unrelated problem is clearly not working. And they know it.
The RDF signal losing strength? Something about grip of death and stars pehaps?
Most right handed people I know hold the phone with their left hand. It's so you can do something useful with your dominant hand while the other hand gets the easy task...
I just don't understand all these left handled jokes about the iPhone 4, and this was my last straw.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I haven't been following all of the iPhone 4's signal loss issues, as I mostly live under a rock.
Still I've read on /. that Jobs et al messed with engineering to make it look pretty, is that true?
Also about those signal meters on most phones, are those standardized? Is it written in some standard somewhere that 5 bars must mean a certain dB value or is it completely ad hoc? If not, isn't that whole "OMG I lost 2 barzzz when holding ze iPhone this way, while this other phone only loses one. " kinda baseless?
*ducks*
for PCs.
- Life without walls.
That's kind of funny, and I realize you're joking.
But the truth is it wouldn't have made a difference. All of the field testing was done with the phones inside cases made to disguise the prototypes as 3G iPhones. Left or right handed wouldn't have mattered because the flaw wouldn't manifest inside the case. Apple's obsession with secrecy with the objective of generating hype is what bit them in the ass this time.
Main screen turn off.
Correction: he left IBM to work for Apple.
Actually they never said it was a software issue.
Apple has tried to distract folks by both claiming at one point that it was a software problem,
Make up your mind yo. PS they did say it was a software issue.
That was a quote from the grandparent. I accidentally hit the submit when I was going for preview and had forgotten the quotes.
There isn't an antenna problem, there's an echo-chamber problem: lots of people in the press and the blogosphere are trolling for page hits, and they're much more likely to get them with a negative story than a "it works like it should" story.
The iPhone 4's antenna design is superior to most other phones on the market. There was a bug in the signal strength indicator, which made the attenuation look pretty dramatic if you were in a low-signal location. Go watch SJ's press conference.
I hate to shuffle out that the Slashdot story writes in a sorta/kinda confirmation that it was indeed a firing based on a blogger's opinion on what happened. The opinion is extrapolated from observation (Papermaster wasn't at the press conference a few weeks back) and a dosage of common sense and logic about the firing.
Nothing states any observations that the termination might be linked to how Papermaster handled supervision of his engineers and the methods of field testing that lead to this loss of one of their prototypes to a third party (and eventually Gizmodo). I can't recall how Daring Fireball was linked to that debacle (or why Gruber didn't acknowledge that maybe Papermaster was held liable by Steve Jobs as well as his subordinate).
The first deduction of reasoning I saw when the story first broke was that his expertise is in chip design therefore he had nothing to do with the antenna... then it was reasoned that since he is the head of the mobile division, he has a responsibility to the design of the phone (makes more sense). I've never known Apple to really put forward their designs based solely on functionality. Johnny Ives wasn't at the Apple Antennagate news conference a few weeks ago... but no one blames him or expects a letter of resignation from him on Steve Job's desk the next morning. It was likely that he drew up the design for the product and told engineering that they were constrained to what was on his design papers down to the every angle and curve regardless of how functional it actually was.
was quickly replaced by eBookMaster
Pin the blame on the VP?
In the corporate world they call him a fallguy. Must have been lacking in his ass kissing skills.
When you get to the top and get that obscene salary, part of the job should be that you take a bullet when things screw up. In American, it is rare for any executive to suffer in the sightest fashion for big problems, even when it is their fault.Just look at Wall St. and the crash. No one got dinged.
You can bitch about Apple about a lot of things, but at least someone got the axe. There needs to be a lot more of that at the top level if American business is ever going to be honest or meaningful again.
Why is Snark Required?
There was a bug in the signal strength indicator, which made the attenuation look pretty dramatic if you were in a low-signal location.
If only there were some sort of optional operating mode, something that you could call a "field test" mode, or something like that. Such a mode could replace the worthless "bar" graph with a quantitative RSSI value in dBm, displayed at 1-dB precision, so iPhone owners could tell exactly how much loss Steve's magical new antenna was causing, and under what conditions.
Oh, wait. There is such a mode, capable of being enabled on virtually any GSM phone... and Apple disabled it for the very first time when the iPhone 4 shipped.
Move along, these aren't the excuses we're looking for...
While I've got a fair bit of disdain for Apple, the iPhone 4 antenna seems novel and effective, albeit critically flawed. IMHO, the designers should be praised for generating a new and potentially useful idea, while the testers should be fired for not finding this flaw before release. Given Apple's strange punitive actions, I predict the next iPhone will have a very conventional antenna design, which keeps it from pulling ahead of the competition, while the same poor quality control allows some other issue to creep in.
This all seems logical to me:
For me, this covers the whole issue and all of the information that has come out. Seems pretty straightforward and not all that sinister, but again, maybe I'm naive.
When taken as a whole it's not underhanded or inconsistent or anything like that. Then you look at the calendar of events in regards to their statements and you realize they're a bunch of elitist pricks trying to take everyone for a ride.
First they said there was nothing wrong with it and you were holding it wrong and if you had a problem stfu and go buy a bumper.
Then they said it was similar to other phones (it's not even close to the same but RDF Activate!)
Then they said it was a software error.
Then people started proving there was a problem and Apple had to have a press conference where Jobs lied his ass off or made completely misleading of fallacious comparisons and they said they would give people a free bumper.
Then they fired this guy.
(Note: I think the way Apple handled this issue is a much much bigger problem than the actual antenna design, which is honestly pretty minor in the grand scope of phone problems.)
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
"He was the senior executive in charge of engineering for the iPhone 4..."
And yet "and thus responsible in some unknown fashion for 'antennagate.'"
Umm, he was the senior executive in charge of engineering for the iPhone 4, that means it was his goddamned responsibility to ship something that worked and if it didn't*, its his ass.
That is the way it used to be in companies and at work, but for some reason when the "senior executive in charge of X" isn't responsible in the minds of many these days.
Look at Deepwater Horizon, no one at Halliburton, BP or Transocean was publicly canned for that mess. The CEO of BP was demoted and sent off the Russia, but that wasn't a firing or a forced resignation.
* - I'm not convinced antennagate is that big of an issue, I know six people with iPhone 4s and they are all happy with them, good PR nightmare and generates alot of pageviews though.
Papermaster left IBM for Apple. In fact, IBM sued to keep him, saying he had trade secrets that shouldn't be shared. Apple had to wait a few months to get him because of this suit. Ironic that after fighting to get him they're dumping him so soon. If he's the head honcho responsible for the antenna problem (assuming it exists) you have to applaud Apple for holding people responsible for their failures. Are you paying attention Microsoft?
Isn't that true? I don't have an iPhone4, but the Anandtech reviews certainly seemed to back up Apple's claims of what the bars meant and how they were affected by a dropping signal.
(Note: I think the way Apple handled this issue is a much much bigger problem than the actual antenna design, which is honestly pretty minor in the grand scope of phone problems.)
I have to disagree with the idea that the antenna of a telephone having issues is a minor problem.
It should be imperative that the antenna be absolutely as strong as possible, because it's a goddamned cell phone. The whole point of the thing is to make phone calls.
I'll grant you that the antenna issue was not as big as it appeared to be at first, but when you're spending $500+ for a phone, you expect to get the best reception possible. The antenna is not an area that should be skimped, and I do believe that it was Jobs' fault for pushing aesthetics over functionality, and leaving his engineering team stuck with having to make everything work given the aesthetics dreamt up by the art department.
The rest of your post I agree with. Not that any of this ever affected my decision to not buy an iPhone - Jobs turned me off of Apple a long, long time ago.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I notice that you didn't show any evidence that my statement was incorrect, you merely bitched that Apple decided not to include the field test mode in the customer OS. Can you refute Anandtech's findings?
>Move along, these aren't the excuses we're looking for...
How very clever. Try again.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Swapped out a registration-required NY Times link for a Computerworld one.
>the Anandtech reviews certainly seemed to back up Apple's claims
Yes, they did, and so did these guys in Australia.
Speaking from my own anecdotal experience, I have a spot in my house, right in front of my fridge, where all of my previous phones (iPhone 3GS, original iPhone, and two Sony-Ericsson phones before that) would always drop the call if I walked into it. The iPhone 4G has no problem with it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't know what to believe and I don't have an iPhone to test. I just know that they did blame software at some point. I've lost track of whether that's part of the current explanation/excuse or if it's been superseded.
It does seem that whatever it is, the problem is substantially worse than for other phones.
"There isn't an antenna problem, there's an echo-chamber problem: lots of people in the press and the blogosphere are trolling for page hits, and they're much more likely to get them with a negative story than a "it works like it should" story."
That would be a plausible explanation except that the tech press has been promoting Apple products for years. Even when the problem was discovered the press felt compelled to include positive comments on the iPhone as part of their coverage of the problem. Perhaps if the press had treated the launch of this phone with the same level of coverage they use for other smartphones, Jobs' antenna bragging would have gone unnoticed.
Besides you being an obvious Apple fanboy, I read your other comment above about reviews.
So-called "Reviews" are nothing but ads, and have been for many years now. The only trustworthy source of reviews, Consumer Reports, threw Apple under the bus just as Apple have thrown their fall-guy under the bus.
If that's true, wouldn't it be more of a case design problem than an antenna or signal strength display issue?
Doesn't matter to me, I'm happy with my Blackberry. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Sir, for finishing that sentence with an ellipses, you deserve everything you have coming to you.
You're extrapolating a lot of things they never said and completely making up some things. They never said "stfu."
What Apple has said all along was two things--that the bar display was making the signal loss appear more drastic than it was, and that the signal attenuation itself is suffered by every smartphone. There are countless YouTube videos illustrating this with non-Apple phones. Nobody "lied."
This guy leaving probably has more to do with how Apple mentioned that the design mistake they made was how the horizontal line on the side of the frame was like a bullseye telling users where to place their fingers. But I realize saying this is pointless because Apple-haters have taken over the site. It's been non-stop Apple bashing in the comments for months now, usually directed at Steve Jobs, as if he can hear them or cares. For crying out loud, the iPhone 4 gets signal in locations that the 3GS doesn't at all, but people are going to ignore that so they can take out their tired, predictable hatred toward a successful company that has given them Clang/LLVM, WebKit, and more.
They said that the bar display algorithm was making the signal loss appear more drastic than it was. When media outlets continued with the story and acted as if only the iPhone 4 had signal attenuation when gripped, Apple had to hold a press conference to point out, "Hey, this happens to every smartphone," which is true and something that journalists seemed to be completely ignoring so they could have a phony controversy over an anticipated device. It really was an exagerrated non-story that most people have already forgotten about.
The hatred is a little worse on Slashdot because of the ideologues around here who hate popular, shiny things and hate Steve Jobs because he doesn't back down on his positions when a few entitled morons whine at him via email.
If you recall, Steve Jobs brought this up at the press conference, mentioning that a design mistake they made with the phone was that the line on the frame was like a bullseye, drawing users' fingers to it. In that context, it's not surprising this guy is leaving Apple.
They're neither distractions nor lies. The bar display algorithm was making signal loss appear more dramatic than it was, and other smartphones do have this same attentuation problem, as countless YouTube videos can demonstrate for you if you do a simple search. Some phones even have stickers on the back indicating the areas you should not hold the phone so you don't experience signal loss.
That's probably the source of frustration at Apple and why they decide to hold the press conference. Journalists were acting as if this was a unique issue to the iPhone 4 and no other phone. Frankly, if this was such a huge issue, there would have been lines of people returning their iPhone 4s. That didn't happen. In fact, the iPhone saw a record usage increase in July, over twice that of Android and nullifying the recent story about the Android outselling the iPhone in the last six months, which didn't include iPhone 4 sales or take into account that customers were waiting for the new model.
Personally, I can't detune the iPhone 4 antenna with my hands. I suspect that, for most customers, this controversy only existed on tech blogs.
Jony puts the antenna on the outside. Then product design gets to try to make the best of it.
The problem with the antenna is you can easily touch it. And Jony's aesthetic was that the antenna would be on the outside.
You can say he should own even the antenna being on the outside, but if you do, you must never have tried to change the Jobs/Ive bloc's mind before. VP's don't get vetoes over Jobs' wishes. If he wants an antenna design that has inherent flaws in design (not just implementation) then he gets it. He is the boss.
Overheating laptops.
Less than usable mice (several times! the puck was just the beginning!)
Power supplies with cords so thin they break.
iPod shuffles that can't be used with 3rd party headphones because the design doesn't have any buttons on it.
iPhones with recessed headphone jacks that can't work with 3rd party headphones.
Mac Minis (and laptops, the first titaniums) with impaired wireless reception.
These problems are not the products of a company that lets those who have practical concerns alter an industrial design selected by Ive/Jobs in the ways necessary to correct their flaws. And you can't blame it all on Papermaster.
Note that I didn't make any claims to the validity (or not) of the blame, just noted that they DID blame a software problem.
It is noteworthy though that they are issuing a fix in the form of a retrofitted bumper.
How do you know he's taking the fall for anything? The article is 100% speculation with no facts backing it. Maybe he just wasn't a fit at Apple and decided to leave. But watch as the comments here automatically assume that correlation equals causation.
Why would he be fired over the antenna? Papermaster was supposedly brought in for chip design. IBM's lawsuit wasn't over Papermaster's knowledge of mobile phone antenna design. In fact, the iPhone 4 antenna design might have been in the pipeline before he even arrived at Apple. If he was responsible for the antenna, he wasn't in any of the iPhone 4 promotional videos to talk about it like the other engineers were.
I smell bullshit.
Apple has been trying to spin this every which way possible.
Their first phase was just flat out denial. The iPhone didn't have any problems, they had no idea what you were whining about. Users were just being dumb about shit. Shut up and buy it. The second phase was claiming that this problem was well known, and applied to all phones. This was the one that accompanied a bunch of media blitz and their videos of other products, and drew ire from their competitors. Their third, quite phase, was to not admit they had a problem, but acknowledge they would try to make people happy by giving out bumpers for free. Now their fourth, mostly internal, phase seems to be blaming it on an individual, rather than a culture of arrogance or the individual at the top who might be responsible.
Basically this has just been a massive problem for them because they very much have a culture of not admitting wrong doing. They are always brilliant, everything they do is brilliant, and so on. They probably even believe that internally to a degree (companies often drink their own marketing coolaid pretty heavy). So they wanted to pass this off as not a problem, but people wouldn't let them, they kept hammering on it and presenting proof, as well as threatening lawsuits. Then they tried to spin it as something that was just a general problem, their design had nothing to do with it. Well their competitors weren't letting them get away with that. RIM in particular was extremely angry and might have filed suit. So now they've had to choice of if not to admit at least acknowledge they fucked up.
As happens in many organizations not used to admitting fault, there has to be a fall guy. The guy at the top can never be wrong, and clearly the whole organization can't be wrong. So one (or sometimes a few) person who was high enough to be important has to be blamed for the problems and get punished for it.
You see this happen in other places. Militaries it is pretty common. There's a major fuckup and the person at the top doesn't get punished, a mid level general does. There's no overall change of the organization and the top commanders take no responsibility, a fall guy is chosen and they internally pat themselves on the back for fixing the problem.
You apparently didn't watch the keynote where blow himself gushed about the clever integrated antenna/case design. It's one of those instances where they just couldn't get over how clever their 'design' was.
I just resent I would be literally forced to use it if I would buy almost any PC except Apple's.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
All dictatorial individuals can shape things on their own based on their irrepressible charisma.
Why you think that is a complement is a mystery to me, I thought most people have studied a bit of history in primary school.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
He has made himself the face of Apple, and actually he is the CEO, so for good or evil, any discussion about Apple will at the end gravitate towards what Jobs may be thinking or doing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Nah, I wasn't that interested. :)
My ex has a iPhone 3. I've used it a few times, and was generally annoyed. My girlfriend just got a LG Rumor Touch. I was trying to help her figure out things, and got very annoyed with the touch screen also. It's dumb. To scroll through a menu, you make a motion opposite of what is intuitive. When you try it, sometimes it'll think you wanted to scroll, but usually it will think you tried to select an option. To back out of that selection, it would frequently take you all the way back to the beginning. At least the LG has a keyboard too, so I gave up touching the screen, and did everything with the keyboard.
Not that I'm totally against new and innovative. I love new and innovative, but if they can't make it work reliably, it's not much good as a tool. That's all a phone is. A tool to make calls on. I like the fact I can check my email also. How fancy do you need to make the interface to do simple functions? It seems like a race to make simple things overly complicated, and they completely forget about the basics like "the user will want to make a phone call." I love watching people with touch screen phones try to make a call. They do a whole little dance with their fingers trying to get to the right screen or number, and many times you can see their frustration as they can't actually make it dial. Despite that, they'll keep the annoying phone, because they spent so much money on it. "It was expensive, so it *HAS* to be good."
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Are you implying that assholes can't be geniuses? I'm pretty sure the two things are not mutually exclusive. Jobs may be an asshole, but he's definitely also a genius. Your personal feelings of the guy (a guy you presumably don't even personally know, btw) have no bearing on the matter.
Woz is a hell of a smart guy, and it seems he's also a hell of a nice guy. But without Jobs, there would be no Apple. Without him returning to Apple in the 90s, there would be no iPod, no iPhone, and probably no Apple anymore, either.
Fear the Libertarians! If they get their way, the government will leave you alone! Oh, the Horror!
Unfortunately a libertarian govt will also leave me alone when BP is planning on drilling near my home.
Not sure how you got any of that from the multitude of Apple stories that have been going on everywhere.
Apple first said their customers where holding it wrong. People posted montage videos of Apple ads/commercials of people holding it in exactly the way that makes the phone drop calls.
Then Apple said that *an additional problem with the phone* was the cause of a perceived problem with the phone. Somehow these two problems were to cancel out and owners of the phone were supposed to feel better about this. All iphones have been misreporting their ability to perform their (arguably) primary function and this is being spun as a *solution* to the problem of dropped calls. Nice job, this problem just got swept under the rug, but people were still unable to make calls. The attenuation problem that they claimed all phones had was linked with this supposedly because the user was looking at a call barely connected and when the grip changed the position of the phone, the reception changed and a call was dropped. This was called normal.
It wasn't really until Consumer Reports came out with a real easy to follow video where they have the phone on and touch it in the corner and signal strength drops dramatically. No movement of the phone, very simple. Apple finally says, "Here is a free bumper to cover up the design factor we had told you to obsess over, we'd now like you to obsess over our generosity. We're still not going to really admit a problem."
Some guy gets fired, apparently getting to be the first guy to take credit for something while Jobs is in charge.
t
I doubt we'll ever find out the truth here about Papermaster... But FWIW, I have absolutely no reception issues with my iPhone 4. If I hold it the "wrong" way, without a case which I never do naturally, I loose one bar a most. It gets much better reception than my iPhone 3g ever did! ...That, coupled with iPhone 4s still being sold out.. everywhere.. means Apple really came out of this whole mess just fine!
appleguru.org
There was a sudden opening at HP for the CEO job.
Mark Papermaster is one of the most respected computer industry executives around. He has a solid engineering background. He's not a finance or sales dweeb like Ballmer, or Hurd, or Carly.
If you were HP's board, and you wanted to get a scandal involving your CEO behind you, who better to bring in as his replacement? If you're Papermaster, going from running a division at Apple to running the whole show at HP is quite a promotion. I think his sudden departure is due to a better offer outside of Apple.
You forgot to tick the 'post anonymously' button.
No, I forgot to log in when I posted the first one.
You fucking retard.
Right back at you, kid.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Alright, Bob - please elucidate. What exactly is an attenuation problem, if it's not related to the antenna? Where to all the dB come from? How are they "attenuated"? I'm not a real genius when it comes to radio propagation - but I've messed with a few radios. Some powerful, some not so powerful. Everything ALWAYS comes back to the antenna. I can hook up a 1000 watt kicker to a radio, and do nothing more than get some wires hot if I have a shitty antenna. With an exceptionally good antenna, I can take a cheap, nearly worthless citizen's band radio, and talk halfway across the country.
Let's remember that your cell phone relies on radio waves, after all. I can put a variety of portable radio sets on a coffee table in an empty room, and have you walk around the radio. There will be points where the signal is "attenuated" as you walk past, and other points where the signal seems to be blocked as you walk by. It seems to me that Apple put THIS antenna exactly where the proximity of human flesh would damage reception the most.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
That might be because now he's just Mostly Steve -- not the original 100% guy. The liver replacement factor comes into play.
I should point out that most GSM phone manufacturers now make it very difficult to enable Field Test mode -- to the point of even removing the functionality from phones. Nokia is one example of a GSM phone manufacturer that has done so. So your claim that field test is "enabled on virtually any GSM phone" is false. I should know as I used to be a field testing geek until I could not longer purchase a suitable GSM/UMTS phone to do field testing with.
Except that's not true. Every smartphone loses signal if you cover the antenna portion significantly. However, the iPhone4 problem is of a totally different nature: it loses signal considerably if you simply touch a specific portion of the outer edge, creating a galvanic connection between the GSM antenna and what likely is the ground side of the WiFi antenna. No other smartphone on the planet loses reception considerably when you touch a specific spot of the case with a finger.
C'mon, seriously guys... They hired additional "antenna engineers" at Apple shortly after the incident. Having the lead engineer leave, is as the article states, not very likely related. But it's good PR for Apple, not so much for Papermaster if they play it out as the stroman.
In a large organisation like that it's not just "one's" responsability intermediate processes and prioritylitst. For such a slipup you wont likely "point at someone and fire them" unless if it's a PR-stunt to clear the brands name in public.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Hahaha, nobody buys an iPhone for the phone. Are you stuck in the mid 90s?
I know people like to hate (and love Apple) on here but I have yet to read a comment pointing out that the iPhone 4 has fewer dropped calls than previous iPhones. It holds onto low signals better than previous iPhones (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-apples-ios-41-signal-fix/2). There is the bridging effect that can kill the signal if it is low but if you look at the early reports, very few people are complaining about this. It only happens in certain situations and with a specific hold.
Ceteris paribus (all things being equal), the iPhone 4 antenna is better than any previous iPhone's (and better than more other smartphones if you look at the comparisons).
Hate to burst your bubble, but the Samsung Galaxy S has exactly the same problem: a single touch to the bottom right of the handset will reduce the reported signal from five bars to one. Shame really, as that's the only problem I've had with this excellent smartphone.
cat:
Er, pot, kettle? You didn't post any evidence to back up your claims either...
cat:
You still think the stock market crash was something the banks didn't want?
How naive.
And, to paraphrase George Carlin : if honesty was introduced into business it would throw the whole thing off, the whole system would collapse.
My captcha was "radiates". Anyone sure the captcha-thing DOESN'T give context-connected words?
hmmmm, you fire the engineer because you demand zero-defect? I wonder if the quality assurance people did their job? If SOOOOO many users have this problem, why didn't they identify it? Was there a shortage of testing? Was that driven by the engineering staff ... or the bean-counters? After all, the antenna doesn't break, and when not held in a specific way, performs great.
"They had a serious, and frankly stupid, design flaw caused by Apple wanting metal on the outside of the case for aesthetic purposes." and...I wonder how many times the engineers told them?
"the much more serious problem of bridging a contact on the iPhone's case, which de-tunes the antenna and thereby reduces the signal quality far beyond the usual signal loss caused by holding a phone in your hand." This isn't a new idea. Who insisted on metal on the outside of the case? Bet you a billion dollars (or the cost of this problem to Apple, whichever is greater), that it WAS NOT the engineers that thought this was a good idea.
Marketing and/or senior leadership.
Marketer: "We need a rifle capable of hitting a target at 1000m, that uses paper slugs, and total cost must be....$40. If you can't make the deadline of 4 weeks, you are a stupid engineer."
Engineer: "Paper isn't the best material for a slug."
Executive: "I dont' care, it's eco-friendly. Now just build it and we'll figure out the rest."
The proper response if you don't know is "We don't know if this is an issue, we are investigating if there are any truth to the claims."
As for the videos, well they were an attempt at disinformation. See there are two issues that affect the iPhone 4:
1) Signal attenuation due to hands being near it. This is the case with ALL phones. You interfere with the signal a bit by holding it. However, even in the very worst case, if you wrap two hands around it, you get maybe 10dB of attenuation. Over all it isn't a real problem.
2) Signal attenuation due to detuning the antenna. When you hold the iPhone such as to bridge the gap between the two parts of the antenna, that changes its characteristics and detunes it. This causes fairly large signal attenuation, as much as 20dB (and remember dB is logarithmic). This does not affect other phones as they don't have their antennas where you can make physical, and thus electrical, contact.
They deliberately attempted to conflate the issues and make it look like everyone had the same problem, which they didn't and hence the strong response from RIM.
Also trying to pretend like nobody would know this might happen is stupid. One of our professors at work had me grab a video of the problem to use at a presentation. Why? Because she's been researching the problem of detuning of antennas like this for 4 years and this is a good demonstration of it happening. However, as often happens with Apple, form took precedence over function and marketing won the day. It just came back to bite them. Same general thing as all the 18 month timecapsule failures. They demanded the PSU go inside which left too much heat in the unit, causing it to fail early. However marketing wanted it slick and that's what happened.
Apple made a mistake, and they've been scrabbling around with it ever since. You are correct that I don't know his firing is related, but it seems likely.
When a sacrificial person or people are fired, that doesn't accomplish shit. Rarely is a big screwup the result of one person doing something wrong. Usually it is because the whole system has a problem. So the correct answer is not to find a guy and go "Ahhh! It's all your fault or are so fired!" and them say "Ok see everything is good now, we are fixed!" That does nothing other than maybe for public image. The correct answer is to fix what is wrong with your corporate culture.
In the case of BP, it is a lax system to be sure. Good comparisons have been drawn to Exxon, who now has one of the very best safety records. Why is that? Because their corporate culture demands it. They have extensive requirements internally to keep everything safe and that don't give individuals the ability to sign off on being lax. Probably not surprisingly, this resulted from the Valdez disaster. They realized they were fucking up, looked at what needed to be fixed, and fixed the system.
In Apple's case firing some guy isn't what is needed, they need to change two things about their culture:
1) Letting marketing run the show. Form comes first at Apple. That is going to lead to problems, as it did here. Engineering has to have the final say if you are going to make sure your designs are solid. Form is always a consideration in consumer devices but it cannot trump functional requirements.
2) Believing everything they do is brilliant. This might be harder because they market themselves as such and as I stated in another post, companies often drink their own coolaid. However they need to change that culture so that they can look with a critical eye at their own designs and see what is and is not good. When you start to think everything you do is awesome, it gets easier and easier for mistakes to slip by.
Ultimately I don't think they'll change anything since for now, consumers are voting with their wallets to say they don't care. Apple's sales remain strong despite their high price premium, and their high premium means great margins which means great profits. At this time their strategy is working. However those are what they'd have ot change ot try and prevent more iPhone 4s from happening, not just firing some random guy and saying they are changed.
The quotes from the "source" were directly taken from John Gruber's daringfireball.net.
It looked good on paper.
undoing accidental mod
Hahaha, nobody buys an iPhone for the phone. Are you stuck in the mid 90s?
I disagree with those who seem to think that the phone is the iPhone's *sole* purpose. It's not- it's as much a PDA, or rather, what the PDA would probably have evolved into had that market not basically died a few years ago. The fact is that it evolved from the direction of being a phone because that's where the market- and technological development- was coming from.
Still, IMHO what you say is wrong. While the phone functionality isn't the *sole* point of the iPhone, it's certainly an important one, and I suspect the majority of owners would be very pissed off if they couldn't make any phone calls at all. I would assume that poor phone performance also correlates with poor data/Internet performance, but that's another issue.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I realize saying this is pointless because Apple-haters have taken over the site. It's been non-stop Apple bashing in the comments for months now
You're kidding. I just had a look at your comment history and- as I suspected- it's full of endless comments rushing to defend Apple, including five in this thread alone. Frankly, this suggests you're the type who brands anyone that is even remotely critical of Apple as a "hater".
Quite the opposite to what you'd like to claim, the slightest criticism of Apple brings out numerous fanboys rushing to flood the thread with defences of Apple.
usually directed at Steve Jobs, as if he can hear them or cares
Unfortunately, the shrill and rabid Apple fandom evidently *do* care about even the most minor slight.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think it is. The phone works, we won't find out how it holds up long term for a while yet but if previous versions are any indicator it should do just find in the long term operations.
The design flaw if very minor in that it is easily correctable by external intervention and is probably negligible for Apple to correct in the production stream.
Many Many phones out there both smart and dumb suffer from much larger faults from bad software to buttons or screens that fail in weeks and are essentially unusable even new out of the box.
You can still use the iPhone and negate the issue very easily. I still won't ever own an apple product until the company has a major corporate overhaul though.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Chip Guru Papermaster Loses Signal At Apple
"You can't stop the signal, Mel."
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
What if the ideal antenna was 2 feet long - would you use it then?
It's a ridiculous assertion that any attribute be as perfect as possible at the expense of everything else.
I was playing with a friend's iPhone 4 with a signal meter app (available for jailbroken phones). And you can make the signal drop a ton just by hovering your finger over the line on the lower left (about 2mm away). You don't even have to touch it. So a diamond coating that prevents you from touching it wouldn't fix the problem.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Yeah obviously Jobs is a real luzer, unlike those who deign to simply call him an asshole.
Darn right it's not true, and while your statement is true, it's still misleading. Looking at the actual dB numbers from completely covering the antenna area with your hand:
It's more correct to say that every smartphone that uses the GSM/3G chip in question suffers substantial signal loss if you get close to the antenna with your hand. This is probably an indication that there is either a hardware or firmware flaw in the Infineon GSM/3G chipset, and a big one at that.
There were several and yet fixable "antennagate" happenings on Nokia, the 40% share (for now) not-taken-seriously smart phone giant.
N97 for example, a device which made everyone drool and yet shipped with 256MB of RAM (remember, Symbian and users heavily multitask) and no hardware accelerated UI. Now, N97 owners say "OK you tell us Symbian 3 is great, upgrade us for free and we stop bitching". While technically possible (know anything Qt doesn't work?) Nokia is very silent. Stupid guys could even have "free beta testers" for their next flagship N8 which is extremely important these days. Remember, MS essentially gave Windows 7 free to testers.
N900, based on Linux has no word from Nokia whether its firmware will be fixed or better switched to MeeGo (Intel/Nok thing).
These are "iPhone class" devices I talk about. They dream that, owners of these devices, cursing every moment will flock to Nokia stores to buy N8 for a iPhone sec. hand price.
These are just 2 "flagships", several more software scandals which are fixable are happening but they are a bit deeper technical issues.
Imagine Apple doing these mistakes and chief of hardware still stays. Man, they would even fire SJobs if they felt like it. Apple's success comes from "no mercy" policy, even on OS X.
Yeah! I knew there had to be a simple solution to the antenna problem: No more signal dropping for me since Papermaster was fired!
Just don't hold your iPhone the way Apple held to Papermaster and you'll be fine.
I was in a dilemma: Should I download more signal or an iBumper? No need now, Steve Jobs fixed it again!
In a related story, Papermaster has been replaced by Fred RockScissors. His first act was to ban technical decision making in favor of Rock/Scissors/Paper. The upshot is that management decisions are now 66% more likely to be 'correct', as any selection of 'paper' is clearly incorrect.
If a phone doesn't have an external, extendable antennas like my Motorola v325 does, it doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to antenna performance.
Every smart phone I'm aware of has an internal antenna, which compromises performance. Manufacturers do this because consumers care about aesthetics when they pick out a phone, and if they have problems with coverage or calls, they always blame the network operator, not the phone.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Not exactly. They said the software made the antenna problem look worse than it is. They didn't claim the only problem was the software, they said the software was responsible for telling you that you have a good signal when you really don't.
But then, admitting to lying about signal bars in software sounds just as bad or worse than having a badly designed antenna.
I guess they went that route because you can push out a software fix a lot more easily than you can redesign and re-release your hardware.
Quite the opposite to what you'd like to claim, the slightest criticism of Apple brings out numerous fanboys rushing to flood the thread with defences of Apple.
It should be pretty obvious by now that BOTH are true. As evident by your own shrill and rabid anti-Apple ranting.
The worst part is, the haters flooding every Apple article are probably the biggest reason we see way too many stories about every time Steve Jobs farts. Those are page hits for the news sites, and that's all they care about.
How about you start skipping the Apple articles instead of stopping by to effectively beg sites to post more of them?
You don't think it's possible they fired him because he was antenna-man, and they were out there giving his answers about the antennas?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Consumer Reports is hardly trustworthy. They treated this iPhone thing as a hit generating media blitz. First their review crowned it the king of cell phones, then they came out a couple weeks later with the not recommended rating (unless Apple provides cases for free), then Apple provided cases and CR still said they didn't recommend it even though Apple did what they asked. It was a media campaign that week designed to get tons of free advertising off Apple's back. Every day that week CR released some new (conflicting) statement that got them in the news.
Sorry, but if you think CR is the only trustworthy source of reviews then you're living under a rock.
Hey, congrats on the only cogent analysis on this thread.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It should be imperative that the antenna be absolutely as strong as possible, because it's a goddamned cell phone. The whole point of the thing is to make phone calls.
Oh, for Pete's sake, we've got people buying iPhones around here when the AT&T signal is terrible. A few carry a second phone on Verizon.
"A mobile phone that never made any calls - fascinating." (apologies to Grig)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Actually he did, he referenced the press conference.
Please point me to the bit where I missed jcr referencing a press couference, because I cannot see it. Evidence and pointing to "Anandtech's findings" are not one and the same.
cat:
He references the press conference in his earlier post. You said he provided no references and he did. Look back and find it yourself.
And is it really worth this exercise. Your last sentence clearly shows you are already predisposed to discounting any evidence or reference that conflicts with what you believe.
Care to provide a link to this post? I've just looked through the entire comment stream, and all I can find is this review: New iPhone 4..., which I have already seen and read.
cat:
IBM: 26 years, highly esteemed executive.
Apple: 2 years and he leaves in disgrace.
I wonder if Mark P is the real problem... He probably shouldn't have burned his bridges at IBM due to promises made by someone who's obviously insane.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Companies in the valley know how Apple is, and they will be more than willing to hire an ex-Apple executive even if he was made into the company scapegoat.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Just goes to show you, no matter how fancy and nice your job title is, most people still don't know what the hell they're doing.
Only could be better if his first name was Thor or Deathbringer.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
No, I forgot to log in when I posted the first one.
You forgot to log in? You have to answer a captcha. You don't just 'forget' and 'accidentally' post anonymously.
By all things holy. You're a fucking weasel.
Right back at you, kid.
*chuckles* - ruffles JCRs hair. You're a cute when you're trying to lie your way out of being stupid.