Denial Is Not A River In Egypt

But it appears to be a core value for Apple:

On Friday Apple released a letter admitting the iPhone 4 has problems, but insisted they are due to a signal-strength formula that is “totally wrong” and not caused by the antenna design. Since then the news has saturated tech blogs, Apple support sites and message boards — and it seems like most people aren’t buying Apple’s explanation.

Apple says the erroneous formula displays more bars than it should and that the sudden drop some users see when gripping the phone in a certain way is the because the “high bars were never real in the first place.”

Stevesst wrote in response to the letter on Apple’s iPhone 4 support forum, “Sooooo, Im having a hard time finding the connection with how it calculates bars and the way people hold their phone and dropping bars.”

Quite a few commentors shared the writer’s confusion, especially since Apple says the formula has been in play since the first-generation iPhone.

Steviejobz (I’m guessing no relation) even went as far to say, “I love how Apple thinks its customers are idiots. So we are to believe that Apple has not figured this out after 4 years of making a handset?”

Do go read the comments on this post at PCWorld. There is a lot of anger there. Longtime readers know I am not a fan of Apple products, software or of their very philosophy toward their customers. But I really think they have damaged themselves over this antenna issue. Someone made a world-class bad call on their response to this problem.

As an engineer, I can be fairly certain that a bar calculation software issue will not cause the demonstrated dropped calls – but a bad design would. If a rubber case stops the problem from happening – as it appears to do – then it is likely an uninsulated antenna issue. Something is shorting out when in contact with human skin (A fairly good conductor).

Apple would have done better to acknowledge a problem and fix it for their most loyal customers rather than treating them like “idiots”.

(On a side note, if the antenna is, indeed, shorting when in contact with human skin, the relative longevity of the phone might be questionable. Human skin also tends to corrode many metals. The acids and salt present in skin are not particularly friendly toward metal. As a guitar player, I can attest to that. I can make a set of strings show visible corrosion in short order. )