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.<p>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.
Brief summary of what they've said so far:<p>1. Similar things happen to all smartphones. (They had videos showing them happening to many other smartphones.)<p>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.)<p>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.)<p>4. They're going to give everyone a free case and refund everyone who's bought one from them.<p>5. They've got improvements coming up for the proximity-sensor problems some people have had.<p>6. That's about it.
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).<p>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.
In the Wall Street Journals live blog of the event, Jobs indicates they have a Verizon testing site:<p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/16/live-blogging-apples-press-conference/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/07/16/live-blogging-apples-...</a><p>"We have both an AT&T and Verizon cell site set up on our campus" for testing, says Jobs.<p>Did Jobs go out of his way to say <i>Verizon</i> there?
Free bumpers.<p>If you already bought one, you'll get a refund.<p>If you didn't, they'll mail you one.<p>If you want to return your undamaged phone for a full refund, you can do that, too.
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.<p>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.
A lot of people ask how Apple didn't pick this up in field testing.<p>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.
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?
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 <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgouzUMlQpY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgouzUMlQpY</a> but as I understand it your finger will do the same thing).<p>At least when asked somewhat directly, one engineer gave a complete non-answer.
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.<p>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.
This is a good quote, from the Q&A session:<p><i>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.</i>
Those pictures of other phones losing signal were hilarious.<p>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.<p>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.
Apple is really bad when it comes to bars.<p><a href="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone-reception-pc-0858-rm-eng.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone...</a>
Body language from Q&A is telling:<p><a href="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone-reception-pc-1034-rm-eng.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2010/07/iphone...</a>