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Chip Guru Papermaster Loses Signal At Apple

Posted by kdawson on from the heads-gotta-roll dept.

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.

5 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I thought Apple said there was no antenna probl by bhtooefr · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:I thought Apple said there was no antenna probl by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  3. Re:Ive is the one responsible for the antenna by tyrione · · Score: 5, Informative

    Papermaster was in-charge of the iPhone 4 design and it's interaction with all the hardware specs. Jony is an industrial designer, not an RF Engineer/Scientist. That's Papermaster's domain. He could have very easily vetoed his own antenna design that he developed within Ivy's design team's aesthetics. He has to own it.

  4. Re:This is the difference between Apple and MS by Man+On+Pink+Corner · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you're referring to Wozniak, I'm going to take exception to your remark.

    I just assumed he meant Ballmer.

  5. Re:I thought Apple said there was no antenna probl by KiwiSurfer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.