I CAN HAS FREE BUMPR!!!

[strredwolf]

Lets see if I can summarize the iPhone 4 "antennagate" press conference:

"Here's some sales stats, some videos of what we've achieved, where we tested it, it's not completely our fault, please don't kill us for it...

"Free cases next week, your pick from approved sources since we can't churn out bumpers fast enough; refunds for those who bought Apple bumpers.  Offer ends Sept 30th when we get more data and can digest it all.  Please upgrade to iOS 4.0.1 so you can get a more accurate view of signal coverage.  If it doesn't work, bring it back before the 30 days after purchase are up for a no-fee refund.

"And we're sorry.  We got a good tower here. We're fixing the proximity sensor in a later iOS release, and the white iphone later this month."

Want my take?

• At the very least, Apple needed to push out the display fix.  Just the algorithm update would of worked, but they also needed a corporate bugfix for Exchange servers.  I swear they made the bars bigger for fun just to say it's digital Viagra.
• The next step Apple needs to do is tap AT&T's data from the "Mark the Spot" app.  If the signal's weak, Apple should go over where it is weak and test it.  Get out of the *!$)@#*( office!!! And leave the case behind.
  
  There's some areas that are well known to be weak:  Leo Laporte's house, the Amtrak Northeast Corridor between BWI station and MARC Halethorpe station, and MTA Maryland Light Rail's Cherry Hill station.  Get with the needed parties, and start testing in real-world conditions.
• Explore having the GSM antenna, when the Bluetooth antenna is bridged to it, act like a much longer GSM antenna.  If it turns out there's a better signal under the "Whole phone band is one antenna" model over the "2/3rds of the phone band" model, switch over and keep monitoring.
• You're going to have an iPhone 4.1, a minor mod for the iPhone 4.  You'll also going to work on the iPhone 5, which will support LTE.  LTE is the future, and is where you'll be able to make more money by playing Verizon off of AT&T.

Comments

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

"Anechoic" means "No sound echos." Not "No radio/cell/etc signals." Ask your RF engineers about a Faraday cage like the Mythbusters used to test two myths: getting radio through your fillings and if cell phones disrupt airplane instruments.

[(Anonymous)]

Uhh, what? You're clueless. And you seem to be convinced that Apple's RF engineers are truly ignorant - you think they spent $100m on a lab with sound absorbing material?

Anechoic means without echoes. There are acoustic anechoic chambers, and there are RF ones. The foam in the Apple ones is filled with carbon and/or metal particles so that it absorbs RF.

A faraday cage stops signals from escaping. It does not stop them from bouncing around. Bouncing around will create standing waves, and other forms of complex wave superposition that will destroy your test.

The RF anechoic chambers that Apple has are inside faraday cages. The doors have copper fingered contacts to ensure good electrical contact.

My company has a much smaller budget. We built an anechoic chamber in our warehouse using panels of RF absorbing foam we hung from the ceiling. That stuff only cost us a few thousand dollars.

I'm happy to ask the RF / microwave engineers I work with any questions, but, please do some rudimentary research yourself. Try typing anechoic into Google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

First, I'm only able to un-screen and reply at night, so apologies for the lag time.

Okay, assuming that you are correct, and they spent the money to do it "right" (aka paranoidly, Faraday cage and RF+sound absorbing foam). That means their initial testing methodology is flawed, because there is a signal drop out in real-world conditions as well as test conditions in both Apple's and Consumer Reports' labs.

But proven? Not really. Apple never truly gives full details of their testing lab. (http://www.apple.com/antenna/testing-lab.html) Only an overview, with hints of the build; something that Engadget's report of a guided tour (http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/inside-apples-black-lab-wireless-testing-facilities/) follows. Compare with Consumer Reports' own article on fully testing the iPhone 4 (http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/2010/07/apple-iphone-4-antenna-issue-iphone4-problems-dropped-calls-lab-test-confirmed-problem-issues-signal-strength-att-network-gsm.html) which they blatantly say "the controlled environment of CU's radio frequency (RF) isolation chamber."

Even then, the signal bars that Apple relies on in the video are suspect at best. Anandtech did a reanalysis (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-apples-ios-41-signal-fix) using their "hacked" version of the iPhone 4 (and how he did it is listed there). They found that the bars are more linearly mapped in iOS 4.0.1, compared with iOS 4.0 and Android 2.2. So far, only those have been mapped to actual signal values; none others on other phones have been mapped.

Long story short, Apple's testing methodology is flawed; Anandtech and Consumer Reports are doing it right for providing technical detail.

Now will Apple learn the right methodology? Yes. Will Apple provide more technical detail, down to the signal levels? No. That's not Apple; they're hyper-secretive.

I'm just going to take my free case and take this Scotch Tape I have on my iPhone 4 off, and then patiently wait until Sept 30th when they quite possibly ether announce iPhone 4.1 w/trade-in, or release a patch that retunes the antennas as one of there was some detuning.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm. Are you assuming that Apple did not know that touching the antenna that way did that? They knew that it did that but they believe that the overall performance is improved and the tradeoff is worth it.

You can't approve comments during the day? Your iPhone should let you do that. You have no excuses :P

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

If they did, they should of said it. The way they're saying (and acting) now, it's like the press caught Steve with his pants down.
(Steve did say they're working their butts off, and look at him! No butt left! :D )

And no, LiveJournal only lets one browser stay logged in at a time, and I want it kept here at home. Don't like it? Complain to the Russians!

[(Anonymous)]

The way I understand what they've said, they didn't think that it would bother people that much, or would be a serious issue in customers' normal, day to day use. ie: most people wouldn't hold it in a way that would cause a problem. What they've been working their butts off doing is making sure that it really is what they think it is, rather than some other production issue or other bug. If Apple were to say one thing now, and then it turned out there was a different problem, it would be *highly* embarrassing.

The only real question I have in all of this is, is there a reason they couldn't have put the seam on the bottom of the phone?

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

Good question. I would imagine it would need to be on the port to keep the current port arrangement, plus have software tweaks as the size of both antennas would of changed; but I'm not sure it would hold up to normal (ab)use.

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't at all be surprised if it would require some RF tuning tweaks. Antennas can reflect signal back to the transmitter. If they are the wrong geometry they can reflect back enough to damage the power amp. Essentially, the amp is pushing the signal one way and getting reflected back something it did earlier, out of phase, so it's fighting itself. Tuned circuits before an antenna are sometimes used to adjust for this in ham radio systems. Not sure what they do in cellular.

Also, regarding your previous belief that Apple missed this during their two years of design work on this antenna, here's what Jobs said:
"And so the iPhone antenna went through all of this. We tested it. We knew that if you gripped it in a certain way, the bars are going to go down a little bit, just like every smartphone. We didn’t think it’d be a big problem, because every smartphone has this issue."

Please do some basic research before you state things as if they are objective facts. Had you chosen to do a bit of basic research into what an anechoic chamber was, you would've been able to ask reasonable questions in your postings instead of adding misinformation.

Personally, I have one un-answered question about this: Did Apple realize how easily this grip could be reproduced, how many places it would be noticeable, and how significant it would look on the display?