Inside Apple's Actual Distortion Field

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.<p>Example: "most people who work at Apple have never seen them, we were told"<p>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.<p>So, "inside Apple's distortion field" indeed.

"And yes, there were several things hidden under black cloaks on tables in these rooms."<p>Wouldn't surprise me if there were just empty boxes under the cloaks, a la Smartest Guys in the Room.

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

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.

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&#38;Ts stock 3G nodes.

some follow-up from FastCompany: <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/apple-anechoic-chamber-science-rf-testing" rel="nofollow">http://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/apple-anechoic-chamber-sc...</a>

I wonder how much this TC post cost Apple.<p>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 <i>the</i> 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.