Live iPhone 4 press event coverage

http://live.gdgt.com/2010/07/16/live-iphone-4-press-event-coverage/

by andrewcaito • 16 years ago

37 63 16 years ago

live.gdgt.com

twapi• 16 years ago

We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. - Steve Jobs

thehigherlife• 16 years ago

Interesting, they're going to give away a free case. There seemed to be some sentiment that wouldn't happen.

sigzero3• 16 years ago

Yes but I think a lot of opinions were formed before the actual facts were known.

carbocation• 16 years ago

Free bumpers.

If you already bought one, you'll get a refund.

If you didn't, they'll mail you one.

If you want to return your undamaged phone for a full refund, you can do that, too.

gjm11• 16 years ago

Brief summary of what they've said so far:

1. Similar things happen to all smartphones. (They had videos showing them happening to many other smartphones.)

2. This isn't making lots of people return their iPhones. (Return rate ~ 1/3 that of 3GS at the same point in its life.)

3. The iPhone 4 does drop more calls than the 3GS, but by less than 1%. (Not clear whether that's 1% of all calls or 1% of calls dropped on the 3GS.)

4. They're going to give everyone a free case and refund everyone who's bought one from them.

5. They've got improvements coming up for the proximity-sensor problems some people have had.

6. That's about it.

zhyder• 16 years ago

It's 1% of all calls: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone... . Am I the only one that thinks that's actually a lot?

ccorda• 16 years ago

If the norm is a 5% drop rate, that's a 20% increase.

If the norm is even higher, then the increase is less as a percentage, but no wonder ATT won't release the numbers.

klochner• 16 years ago

I wonder if it could be skewed by everyone testing it out and trying to get calls to drop.

drivebyacct2• 16 years ago

Considering that people constantly complained about call reception and dropping on the 3GS and the iPhone 4 was heralded as the solution?

Yes, I was shocked. I thought Apple handled this all well, but I was really expecting them to say that the "iPhone 4 still provides better reception than the 3GS". I guess they can't actually make that claim and I still find that a bit funny.

ajg19772• 16 years ago

Those pictures of other phones losing signal were hilarious.

Yes, if you hold other smartphones in a clam-like grip then they do lose signal. But not when you place a single finger on one small spot on the outside of the phone.

It's good that Apple will be providing free cases, but it's still going to suck when they start releasing phones with tweaked antenna insulation in a few months that eliminates this issue.

mbreese• 16 years ago

single finger on one small spot

I'd like to see you hold a phone with a single finger...

ajg19772• 16 years ago

I hold my phone lightly, not in a death grip. If part of my skin touches the wrong area on the iPhone 4, signal vanishes.

Capeche?

wmeredith• 16 years ago

I can't believe people still aren't getting this. Their return rate has been ~1%, they've received apple care calls on 0.55% of the phones they've sold.

This is a non-story blown out of proportion by the press who obsessively over-cover Apple products.

(Disclaimer, Apple iPhone owner, 3G and now 4; no problems with either.)

tptacek• 16 years ago

I agree, but, live by the sword, die by the sword.

cschep• 16 years ago

Yeah, this is what I keep saying. The experience is excellent. A free case? Sweet!

fmora• 16 years ago

Honestly, how is it going to suck. You can return your current iPhone 4 now and wait for one of those phones with the insulation already present. Seriously, it seems that in your eyes no matter what Apple does it will still suck.

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

"Maybe we should have a wall of PR people to insulate us, but we don’t."

I bet Katie Cotton and Steve came up with that line together.

tszming• 16 years ago

Try to search "are not perfect" in Google you will see somethings.

AlexMuir• 16 years ago

A lot of people ask how Apple didn't pick this up in field testing.

I think the answer is that they wrapped the iPhone 4 in plastic to camouflage it as an iPhone 3GS (as we know from the Gizmodo phone). Hence all their field testing was effectively done with bumpers on.

bond• 16 years ago

They knew... Steve Jobs: "The iPhone 4 went through all of these tests. We KNEW that if you held it in a certain way, the bars would go down."

tvon2• 16 years ago

That means they knew something, but not necessarily about the "bridging the gap" problem.

gamble• 16 years ago

Absolutely. This is a human psychology problem, not an engineering problem. They designed the phone knowing that it suffered more attenuation than other phones, but it also dealt with highly-attenuated signals better than previous iPhones. Overall reception is the same or better, all things considered.

What killed them was the way the reception bars dramatically plunged toward zero within seconds of bridging the antennas. If the iPhone 4 had shipped with the bar distribution formula in 4.0.1 and used the same level of hysteresis as other phones, no one would have noticed the drop and everyone would have happily gone on using their iPhone 4's oblivious to the attenuation.

elblanco• 16 years ago

Good free case, problem solved in my mind. Recall avoided, patch applied, everybody stays happy.

Iphone 4gs, design it and sell it with the case.

tvon2• 16 years ago

In Q&A they seem to be glossing over or ignoring the whole "if you bridge the gap the signal drops" issue (demonstrated here with a paperclip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgouzUMlQpY but as I understand it your finger will do the same thing).

At least when asked somewhat directly, one engineer gave a complete non-answer.

ugh2• 16 years ago

What you see there is a drop of between 6 and 22dB (from four bars to one [+]). Gripping the iPhone will reduce the signal by at most 24dB.

I don’t know whether they don’t acknowledge that. They showed a “X marks the spot” slide. That, to me, seems to be a pretty clear acknowledgement that merely touching that spot weakens the signal.

[+] http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-...

ergo982• 16 years ago

In reference to the "x marks the spot" they claimed that it "showed you where to cover the antenna", trying to draw a parallel with covering the internal antenna on any other phone.

That is ridiculous. You aren't "covering the antenna" when you cover that spot. The antenna is the big strip of metal above that spot. Instead you're upsetting the profile of the antenna, which is entirely different.

The presentation was incredibly deceptive and flawed.

Shabaz2• 16 years ago

One of the things that most bothered me in the initial responses from Apple (the Jobs emails and the open letter) is that none of them acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between antennas from other smartphones losing signal and the iPhone 4, where the antenna is exposed and can be shorted, even with one finger. I'm kind of disappointed they apparently still don't acknowledge that (maybe the live transcript is incomplete).

Citing dropped call numbers or return rates or showing other smartphones with signal reduction caused by something completely different just seems like willful misinformation. I suppose their usual MO is to not acknowledge complaints head-on, but that's usually with new features people would like to see. If I can short an antenna and change its RF characteristics so as to lead to an instant dropped call, that seems like a fundamental engineering flaw, and I would've liked them to acknowledge that.

sigzero3• 16 years ago

> caused by something completely different

Um, from what I saw it was caused by the same thing. You hold a phone a certain way you lose signal strength.

> that seems like a fundamental engineering flaw, and I would've liked them to acknowledge that.

I watched the whole thing and several times it was acknowledged as such. Maybe you wanted them to say it was only an iPhone4 issue and not a general smartphone problem?

ergo982• 16 years ago

>Um, from what I saw it was caused by the same thing. You hold a phone a certain way you lose signal strength.

Apple is playing some extraordinary deception with that. They're comparing a death grip on phones (which is entirely unnatural and I certainly don't hold a phone like that), and saying "See, it's all the same".

That isn't the issue. The issue is ruining the profile of the exposed 3G antenna by electrically distorting it (whether with your body or against the GPS antenna).

It was pretty clear when he talked about the 3GS and cases -- a death grip with or without a case will yield exactly the same outcome. But they're trying to conflate the downsides of an external, unavoidable antenna with holding the phone in a ridiculous fashion.

Shabaz2• 16 years ago

I have only read the gdgt transcript, so if you watched it somehow I'm going to defer to you about anything not in the transcript.

But as far as the 'completely different' thing goes, as far as I know the lower signal can be caused by signal being absorbed by your hand. But what seems to happen with the iPhone 4 is that there is also this shorting issue because of an exposed antenna. But when directly asked about the shorting issue they say it's about your body being a "pretty effective signal absorber".

AndrewHampton2• 16 years ago

Based on the little I know about signal strength for digital phones, the number of bars really doesn't matter, The bars could just be replaced with an indicator letting you know whether or not you have strong enough signal to make a call. And from that perspective, the stats discussed today that there is less than one additional dropped call per 100 calls make this whole thing seem like a non-issue.

However, what I haven't heard discussed and would like to hear about from someone who knows what their talking about is whether or not signal strength affects data transfer rates. I use data a lot more than voice on my phone and if it's significantly easier to reduce the signal quality on the iPhone 4, I don't think I would get one.

vitobcn• 16 years ago

Without getting into details about digital modulations, yes, parameters such as signal strength, network congestion, user speeds, etc. do affect transfer rates.

The speeds quoted by phone providers are always the maximum transfer rates allowed by the communication standard used by the network.

To give an example with WiFi networks. Even though a router might support 802.11n and have a maximum speed of 144Mbit/s, if you're far from it, your transfer speed could only be 11Mbit/sec.

AndrewHampton2• 16 years ago

Thanks for the explanation.

philwelch• 16 years ago

I've run some 3G speed tests on my iPhone 4, and even when I death-grip it and the bars drop, the most dramatic result I've gotten is increased ping (10x as much ping). Throughput doesn't seem to suffer.

rauljara• 16 years ago

Q: Are you willing to make an apology to investors? Steve: You know we hear from customers who love this phone and have a great experience with it, and we're doing a lot to help them with any issues they're seeing. To investors, you know, you invest in the company we are, so if the stock goes down $5... I don't think I owe them an apology.

Whether or not Jobs is bs-ing about loving his customers so much, I wish more CEOs took this attitude. I think that doing your best to make your customers happy reaps far more benefits in the long haul than doing your best to make investors happy. In Apple's case at least, the fact that they ignored what their investors demanded of them during their dark days actually made the investors a lot more money.

zppx2• 16 years ago

I think this is the correct attitude when you're an entertainment company, or a company that does have a direct relationship with costumers, but might not work for other types, such as services for enterprises.

macrael2• 16 years ago

Is it? When you are selling services for enterprises, shouldn't your focus still be on making those businesses happy? I've never been in such a market, so maybe I don't know, but it seems to me like your focus should be similar.

tonystubblebine• 16 years ago

I run a B2B company and I think customer focus is effective there as well. I'm in a small niche but with enough competitors to see other approaches. I've seen competitors with what looked like great marketing, great sales efforts, and important looking partnerships.

We don't do any of that. We just try to do our best with each customer and grow from word of mouth. For awhile I thought we were going to get creamed by all these other companies that seemed to have the sales/marketing activities nailed. But in the end we seem to be growing much faster and most of the efforts from other companies to ram their product down people's throats weren't just less effective, they completely failed.

I think in B2B, customer focus leads to repeat business, expanded scope of business with existing customers, and word of mouth. Normally once you have a sale your margins are really good. Keeping customers happy is where your profits are.

mattmillr• 16 years ago

I'm glad Gdgt ran this full quote. Engadget unfortunately dropped the first part of it from their liveblog (not really a problem, they're typing and submitting pretty quickly) but then ran an article that started "Apple's not really ready to say it's sorry about the iPhone 4 antenna design..."

brown9-22• 16 years ago

The key difference here is a CEO that is interested in building long-term value and great products that customers love, rather than a CEO who is only incentivized to create short-term shareholder value.

est• 16 years ago

Apple is really bad when it comes to bars.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone...

aschobel• 16 years ago

Body language from Q&A is telling:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone...

macrael2• 16 years ago

I think they are just listening to a question, there.

mishmash• 16 years ago

Somebody probably dropped a quarter on the floor - Cook just hasn't seen it yet.

wvenable2• 16 years ago

In the Wall Street Journals live blog of the event, Jobs indicates they have a Verizon testing site:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/16/live-blogging-apples-...

"We have both an AT&T and Verizon cell site set up on our campus" for testing, says Jobs.

Did Jobs go out of his way to say Verizon there?

SandB0x• 16 years ago

This is a good quote, from the Q&A session:

You could make a really big smartphone that doesn’t have this problem — some of these guys are making Hummers now — so big you can’t get your hand around it. But no one’s going to buy that.

cwilson• 16 years ago

Something no one is mentioning or commenting on: When the 3GS launched the majority of buyers walked out of the store with a case in hand. When the iPhone 4 launched 80% of buyers were not able to take a case with them as well (due to their being no third party cases at launch and a shortage of bumpers). If it would have been the opposite, and 80% of customers walked out of the store WITH a case, I'm guessing that "less the 1%" stat about the iPhone 4 vs 3GS would actually flip to the iPhone 4 as having the better ratio of dropped calls.

I'm willing to bet you'll see @Gruber focus on this point heavily, which is a good thing, because it's a great point by Jobs.

extension2• 16 years ago

Does 3GS reception improve with a case? I thought the iPhone 4 only improved because of the exposed antenna.

powrtoch• 16 years ago

According to Steve (and others) you get a similar phenomenon with earlier iPhones, it's just that the "do not touch" zone is in a different place. So a case would help any of these phones.

pistoriusp2• 16 years ago

Just to get some clarity on how people who have the device actually feel about all of this (And that it's not just the media), how many of you are going to return the iPhone 4?

Live iPhone 4 press event coverage

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