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

[(Anonymous)]

The engineer raised questions "in the early design stages". That is different than the press portraying it as "the engineer said the shipping phone wasn't going to work."

Rumors are not good ways to make decisions. Did the guy start out saying, "I don't think we can do this" and then, after working on the problem, tell Jobs "we figured out a way!"?

Everything I've read about Apple's history with Jobs indicates that he frequently gets people to achieve things they said were impossible. This dates back to the start of the Mac. The Xerox PARC demo included interesting overlapping window stuff. Bill Atkinson, I believe, saw it and developed the regions code used in Quickdraw. Later he told a visiting PARC researcher that they inspired him - he knew it could be done. In fact, the PARC guys thought it couldn't be done - their demo was a canned display of that feature.

That's a long winded explanation of why "a guy said at the beginning that we couldn't do this" is meaningless.

Jobs didn't claim that they didn't know that bridging could do this. Rather, they claimed it was a flaw comparable to all antenna designs and that this was better because the area to avoid touching was very small.