Inside Apple's Actual Distortion Field

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/17/insider-apples-antenna-testing-facility/

by bmcmanus • 16 years ago

56 24 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

Alex3917• 16 years ago

"And yes, there were several things hidden under black cloaks on tables in these rooms."

Wouldn't surprise me if there were just empty boxes under the cloaks, a la Smartest Guys in the Room.

niekmaas• 16 years ago

That's something like the stories we are told about North-Korean factories acting as if they have huge production. However since Apple does manage to launch new products every now and than I tend to believe they actually do have new products to test.

byw• 16 years ago

Didn't an Apple employee a while ago say the company's design process consists of making 10 prototypes while only 1 goes into production?

panacea• 16 years ago

Classic 'Mystery box' storytelling à la http://blog.ted.com/2008/01/jj_abrams.php

gry3• 16 years ago

If Apple could kick out a product in a couple months, I'd believe it.

Subscribing to Occam's Razor: they hid real products.

They have a year or two pipeline. Google/HTC/Motorola would eat them alive. I have a hard time believing they are manufacturing a coverup to this degree within 22 days. I write software for projects a couple orders of magnitude less than Apple's taking on. There's no way they can fake this.

It's presented well. This is true.

devinj• 16 years ago

Huh? To what degree? Hiding empty boxes isn't much of a coverup. It's just a small thing that adds an air of awesome, and at the same time means that if any reporter has the balls to quickly run over and unsheathe the boxes, nothing sensitive will be shown.

Putting real products under there would not be a very smart move. It only takes a minute or two to quickly hide something else instead before the reporters arrive.

jarek2• 16 years ago

Putting real products (which I don't doubt are being worked on as I type) there is a very unnecessary risk. You gain nothing and you lose a lot if only one visitor feels brave enough to uncover them. This is especially the case as Apple has had some interesting experiences with the press recently.

ilamont• 16 years ago

I would have been more impressed knowing how often the engineers got out of the foam rooms and into houses, normal office buildings, trains, cars, and airport lounges using AT&Ts stock 3G nodes.

gry3• 16 years ago

How do you measure interference? How do you improve reception if you have a half-dozen, dozen, or hundred arbitrary radiation sources? Maybe they missed the PR move with everyone else. Color me impressed.

jarek2• 16 years ago

Often enough that one of them lost a prototype. Knowing how tight Apple is with unreleased products, that means very often.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

Interestingly this prototype was wrapped in a case to make it look like the previous version of the iPhone, and the major problem with iPhone 4 is that when you touch the phone directly, as most end-users would touch it, you lose signal. The phony casing probably mitigated this problem, so maybe that's what happened there.

Timothee• 16 years ago

The funny thing is that they make a joke about Apple's distortion field while this whole post is the result of said- and moked- distortion field.

Example: "most people who work at Apple have never seen them, we were told"

Well, yeah. Doesn't Apple have about 20,000 employees? Of course, most people haven't seen it. And of course Apple is testing their products thoroughly. And so do their competitors.

So, "inside Apple's distortion field" indeed.

barredo• 16 years ago

34.300 employees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.)

djacobs• 16 years ago

I completely agree. I've stopped reading Siegler's pieces for that reason.

googler• 16 years ago

And arguing about what was beneath the black sheets (iPhone 6 or boxes?), or how many employees they have does nothing but further the Willy Wonka Factory image of Apple. Brilliant, isn't it?

hga• 16 years ago

But isn't it widely known that the current Apple severely compartmentalizes information? (In the general sense of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Informa...). So maybe he meant that?

(Granted, almost every time I read a crunch article I regret it, and I only read the bit pertaining to your comment of this one.)

huhtenberg• 16 years ago

I wonder how much this TC post cost Apple.

To downvoters: it's a genuine question. Apple is in trouble, their stock is down almost 10% and that's after the launch of their best product to date. They are in a full damage control mode. If they show their most secret testing facility to the selected few, I am going to guess they will not settle for just any coverage. They are the control freaks, and it's only logical to assume that there must've been an arrangement between them and those let into the sacred lab. And the most obvious question is what the arrangement was.

rimantas• 16 years ago

The backlog for iPhone 4 is what, turės weeks as Į write? A trouble indeed.

Rhapso• 16 years ago

Insinuating that Apple did not test the iPhone 4 enough was an attempt to allow Apple to save face, it gave them a chance to go "Whoops! we made a mistake" then politely fix it. But all this evidence that Apple went to huge extents to test the phone but it still had problems says worse things about Apple then just not testing enough.

parkan• 16 years ago

Am I wrong in thinking that this is a completely industry-standard setup for RF testing? Many of the passages make it seem that Apple is going above and beyond the call of duty in their testing (like the heads filled with solution approximating tissue), but it seems to me like these are essentially minimal due-diligence procedure mandated by the FTC. Hell, I'm pretty sure some of the (severely underfunded) labs back at my university had similar equipment.

Can anyone more familiar with the industry comment on what sort of facilities other vendors use?

sasvari• 16 years ago

some follow-up from FastCompany: http://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/apple-anechoic-chamber-sc...

Inside Apple's Actual Distortion Field

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