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.

Comments

This is the difference between Apple and MS

[Anonymous Coward]

At one company, quality kind of matters when you drop something off at the consumer's front door.

Re:This is the difference between Apple and MS

[Joce640k]

a) They released Vista first (should never have been released)

b) LOADs of minor niggles and things that are now *worse* than XP, especially in Windows Explorer - the front end to the files, the most important thing in the machine and the only thing an OS should do really well.

I'd make a list but I can't be bothered and there's probably hundreds of web pages dedicated to it.

c) What exactly makes it better then XP? Where exactly is the "wow!"? The only things I can think of are a slightly better taskbar with previews and the ability to type in the 'start' menu. Everything else seems like a pointless renaming and reshuffling. Is that it? Billions of dollars and eight years spent for that...? I'm looking around at all my collection of now-useless hardware and wondering if it was really worth it.

The only reason I upgraded was I needed 64-bits to work with some big files. Apart from that I'm not the slightest bit more productive with Windows 7 then I was with XP.

I thought Apple said there was no antenna problem

[Anonymous Coward]

and that it was a software issue. Fucking pick one.

Re:*gate

[myowntrueself]

Watergate wasn't even a real scandal; it was dressed up to look like a scandal by politicians who felt they needed to give the appearance of upholding moral standards (when in fact, as politicians, they had none to begin with).

Jean Baudrillard in his book "Simulations" explains it very nicely. Watergate was a simulation of a scandal.

Re:I thought Apple said there was no antenna probl

[valeo.de]

Er, pot, kettle? You didn't post any evidence to back up your claims either...

Re:Tell a fanboy

[MogNuts]

Amen. The design is absolutely retarded.

Honest question here though. Has anyone used Skype or another VoIP solution over 3G? I have a IPhone 3GS (another mistake I regret buying) and on the few short tests I've used it for, I get better reception/quality than traditional cell voice service. My guess is Skype keeps the connection open longer before dropping a call.

Anybody have experiences to share?

Re:iPhone 4 Antenna is not as bad as people say

[aussersterne]

Lots of us comment that, but it gets modded down ruthlessly.

People just plain hate Apple.

No doubt that their products are highly usable and suffer from far fewer QC and design flaws than most other companies (very few electronics devices I've ever used, and I've been in tech and online since the early '80s, have ever actually worked well, while all of the Apple products I've used have worked well), but many geeks just hate, hate, hate, hate, hate them because Apple is the antithesis of the hacker ethic. Geeks love tweaking. They love wire-wrapped, hand-optimized, kludged together in six languages with illegal API tricks, souped up with spare parts and a soldering iron, stuff. Apple doesn't do this stuff. Apple does hermetically sealed, minimal design highly structured maximal predictability devices.

Geeks hate Apple because Apple makes it hard for Geeks to bust open their products and do pointless things with them (you know, like water-cool a 486 chip on a mobo with a piggybacked crystal just to get to 37 MHz instead of 33 MHz, or install Linux on a vending machine to get a console shell on a 12x1 character 10" tall LED display in which to write "Hello, world," or built a robot out of Legos designed specifically to flip the power switch on the wall when the sun goes down) and this hermetic enclosure makes Geeks feel as though their god-given rights have been senselessly violated.

Fact is, the iPhone 4 is a damned good phone. Better in every way than the 3GS, which was several orders of magnitude better in every way (possibly even n^10^10 better) than the Palm Centro it replaced -- and at the time, I was a die-hard "Zen of Palm" user shocked rudely into the knowledge that the "smartphone" I had been using was crap and the "iPhone fanbois" that I had avoided emulating for two years were probably actually better at choosing phones than I was.

It's called massive bias, and it's reverberating inside the geek echo chamber that is Slashdot.