A surprisingly defiant Apple CEO resets reality for its most popular product, the iPhone 4.
Friday's Apple press conference was vintage Steve Jobs. He was sharp, analytical, tough, and, seemingly, unafraid to tell the collected media: The emperor has no clothes.
In the days and hours leading up to the event, pundits—and even betting sites—were placing odds on all sorts of possibilities. The most outrageous theory was that Apple would recall all 3 million iPhone 4s that it had just sold. (A close second in the ridiculous department was the idea that Apple would offer a rebate.) Even before polling readers, I knew this was an impossibility. You don't recall a product that poses no potential harm to customers. No, annoyance doesn't really count as harm.
Many people expected the Apple CEO to fall on his sword and apologize for everything—from, allegedly, ignoring the warnings of his engineers to being far too confident about the "magical" nature of his products.
Initially, as Jobs spoke and talked through the iPhone 4 antenna issues, I worried he was being too flip. He called it "AntennaGate" and seemed to be telling us things we all already knew. Then I realized that he was simply acknowledging the facts of mobile antennas and making something of an admission. Yes, Apple knew people could attenuate the external antenna if the phone was held a certain way, but it did not see this as a significant problem, nor did the company find this significantly different from what you'd find with other mobile phones.
The true highlight of Apple's press conference, however, was Steve Jobs' dismantling of current iPhone 4 perceptions, which revealed the reality of the situation. And this is an area where the Apple CEO and I are in total agreement. Let's step back a moment first.
As the iPhone 4 situation unfolded (I, too, was able to recreate the bar-killing "death grip"), I wondered if this was a bigger issue than I originally thought. I went back and reread Mobile Managing Editor Sascha Segan's Apple iPhone 4 review. Segan said "It's not the best phone-calling phone" and "the iPhone 3GS actually connected slightly more calls successfully than the iPhone 4 did—about one in ten additional calls went through. The iPhone 4 gave a truer picture of signal strength than the 3GS did, though; its "bar" meter is quicker to respond to changes in RF than the 3GS is."
Despite this, PCMag awarded the iPhone 4 an Editors' Choice award as the best smartphone on the AT&T network. In my experience, it makes and hold calls fine and is certainly no worse or better than my BlackBerry Bold, which is also on the 3G network. If all you want to do is make phone calls, then, yes, the iPhone 4 could frustrate you. However, if that's all you want to do, why are you buying an iPhone and paying all that extra money for a data plan? It's time we acknowledge that we buy phones like the Apple iPhone 4 for so much more than just calls (e-mail, text, photos, video, social networking, gaming).
In the days and hours leading up to the event, pundits—and even betting sites—were placing odds on all sorts of possibilities. The most outrageous theory was that Apple would recall all 3 million iPhone 4s that it had just sold. (A close second in the ridiculous department was the idea that Apple would offer a rebate.) Even before polling readers, I knew this was an impossibility. You don't recall a product that poses no potential harm to customers. No, annoyance doesn't really count as harm.
Many people expected the Apple CEO to fall on his sword and apologize for everything—from, allegedly, ignoring the warnings of his engineers to being far too confident about the "magical" nature of his products.
Initially, as Jobs spoke and talked through the iPhone 4 antenna issues, I worried he was being too flip. He called it "AntennaGate" and seemed to be telling us things we all already knew. Then I realized that he was simply acknowledging the facts of mobile antennas and making something of an admission. Yes, Apple knew people could attenuate the external antenna if the phone was held a certain way, but it did not see this as a significant problem, nor did the company find this significantly different from what you'd find with other mobile phones.
The true highlight of Apple's press conference, however, was Steve Jobs' dismantling of current iPhone 4 perceptions, which revealed the reality of the situation. And this is an area where the Apple CEO and I are in total agreement. Let's step back a moment first.
As the iPhone 4 situation unfolded (I, too, was able to recreate the bar-killing "death grip"), I wondered if this was a bigger issue than I originally thought. I went back and reread Mobile Managing Editor Sascha Segan's Apple iPhone 4 review. Segan said "It's not the best phone-calling phone" and "the iPhone 3GS actually connected slightly more calls successfully than the iPhone 4 did—about one in ten additional calls went through. The iPhone 4 gave a truer picture of signal strength than the 3GS did, though; its "bar" meter is quicker to respond to changes in RF than the 3GS is."
Despite this, PCMag awarded the iPhone 4 an Editors' Choice award as the best smartphone on the AT&T network. In my experience, it makes and hold calls fine and is certainly no worse or better than my BlackBerry Bold, which is also on the 3G network. If all you want to do is make phone calls, then, yes, the iPhone 4 could frustrate you. However, if that's all you want to do, why are you buying an iPhone and paying all that extra money for a data plan? It's time we acknowledge that we buy phones like the Apple iPhone 4 for so much more than just calls (e-mail, text, photos, video, social networking, gaming).
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