Apple Launches Smartphone Antenna Page

At today’s Apple Press Conference, Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone 4 is not perfect and that their “fix” will be to offer free Bumper (or third party cases due to Bumper shortages) to customers. Meanwhile, in the following Q&A session after the press conference, Steve Jobs admitted they didn’t educate customers enough and they are partially at fault for allowing this whole SNAFU to blow out of proportion.

Here’s a transcript as written by Jason Snell from Macworld. This was the longest answer by Steve Jobs to any question:

Q: What have you learned?

Jobs: We always knew how much we care about our customers. We were stunned and upset and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff that came out this week, but we didn’t need that to tell us to take care of our customers. The fact we didn’t say anything after a week, it’s because we didn’t know enough. And it’s taken us a while to get the data. If we’d have done this a week and a half ago, we wouldn’t have had half the data that we shared with you today.

I’m sure in a few weeks we’ll have more data. We’re an engineering company. We think like engineers. We create stuff like scientists and engineers. And we love it. And we think it’s the right way to solve real, and hard, problems.

I don’t think that’s going to change at all. That stuff is just operating like it normally does, and some people have wanted us to run a little faster. I don’t think we can run any faster. I’ve seen cars in the parking lot late at night, cots in some of the engineering offices. I don’t think we could’ve worked any harder.

But I guess it’s just human nature when some organization gets successful, there’s someone who wants to tear it down. I see it happening with Google. Why are they doing that? Google’s a great company. Google invented all of this great stuff that we love to use. And I see them jumping on us now. Would you rather we are Korean companies rather than American companies? Do you not like that we’re innovating here in America?

In search of eyeballs for websites, people don’t care what they leave in their wake. So I look at this whole thing and say, wow. Apple’s been around for 34 years. Haven’t we earned the credibility and trust from some of the press to give us a little bit of the benefit of the doubt, of our motivations, the fact that we’re confident and will solve these problems. I think we have that trust from our users, but I didn’t see that in the press. This thing was blown so far out of proportion. But I’m not going to say we’re not at fault. We didn’t educate enough.

And we painted a big target on ourselves. And that someone who had it in for us was going to put videos on their web site and say, do this. So we were not innocents in this. But.

Based on the data we have, this has been so overblown… so to digest this is going to take a few weeks, maybe. And we could use your help. We’d like to know, maybe you can tell us, can we do better at this?

To counter this, Apple has now launched a page on their website called “Smartphone Antenna Performance” that details antenna discussion involving the iPhone 4 and other smartphones, such as the ones they tested and reported about today. Looks like Apple is trying pretty hard here to “educate” the masses on cellular antennas. It shows that other smartphones also have this issue. However, it’s too late for that and the only solution is to fix the antenna “spot” on the iPhone 4.

Check out the site here: http://www.apple.com/antenna/

In case you missed it, this iPhone 4 Antenna song was played to kick off the press conference!


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