No, I DO believe that the software problem was real. Just not a real problem.
The software problem doesn't affect signal strength, just the readout. Apple released its existaqnce as an attempt to distract from the hardware issue, which actually does something to performance, not just aesthetics.
It sounds to me more like they deliberately altered the software in order to hide the hardware issues, and hoped that no one would notice.
apparently the software issue existed for multiple generations
I honestly believe that Apple was unaware of how they fucked up their antenna. That explains why all of their marketing showed people holding the phones the "wrong" way, and why they really seem to have no plan to fix things other than "hope people forget about it over time."
Near as I can tell the software problem IS real, it's just separate from the hardware problem.
I'm of two minds about this whole thing. On the one hand, the problem isn't really that bad. It doesn't affect everyone (never affected mine), but for folks who are affected it's easy to fix with a case or duct tape. Granted, it's silly to have to ask people to do that, but at least solutions are there.
On the other, given that the problem has been proven to exist and the solution is so damn simple, it's odd that Apple doesn't just spend a few million to send out free bumpers. It's not as if they won't make the money back via more iPhone sales, and a thin coat of something placed over the metal during the manufacturing process will fix things for good.
Apple hasn't ever had any experience with product recalls/fixes, have they?
Actually, there's been a number over the years. Heck, there is one with Time Capsules right now.
Cameron_Talley on
Switch Friend Code: SW-4598-4278-8875
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
Apple fuck up all the time like anyone else. The main difference this time is that they've fucked up on their flagship product in a way everyone can notice.
It sounds to me more like they deliberately altered the software in order to hide the hardware issues, and hoped that no one would notice.
apparently the software issue existed for multiple generations
I honestly believe that Apple was unaware of how they fucked up their antenna. That explains why all of their marketing showed people holding the phones the "wrong" way, and why they really seem to have no plan to fix things other than "hope people forget about it over time."
Supposedly from the very first generation wasn't it? Their press release made it sound like "omg we just found this crazy error", but in reality I think they had originally sandbagged the antenna readout from the get go.
So how does the software side of the antenna thing work? It shows (less?) bars quite quickly for a small drop in signal?
Because there's a simple explanation for that one: most phone reviews don't actually try to measure reception quality, but if it holds calls well on "1 bar of signal" which people assume is linear and standard across all phones, then the review says "great reception!"
So how does the software side of the antenna thing work? It shows (less?) bars quite quickly for a small drop in signal?
Because there's a simple explanation for that one: most phone reviews don't actually try to measure reception quality, but if it holds calls well on "1 bar of signal" which people assume is linear and standard across all phones, then the review says "great reception!"
you'd assume that each of the five bars represents 20% of the signal
but in reality, they were variable ammounts. The fifth bar was actually everything from 36% through 100%. The first bar was only a couple percentage points.
But yeah, it doesn't really matter. talking about exactly how many bars you have is rather rare in real life, outside fo comercial shoots.
Apple released the information in an attempt to distract from the hardware issue that they can't fix so easily.
Personally, my guess of what they will do is (after a bit more time, when they see that people still care) to send a giftcard to everyone who owns an ipod 4 that is worth the cost of one of those bumpers. They will then either redesign the phone to mitigate the issue, or else start including the bumpers in with the phones.
So how does the software side of the antenna thing work? It shows (less?) bars quite quickly for a small drop in signal?
Because there's a simple explanation for that one: most phone reviews don't actually try to measure reception quality, but if it holds calls well on "1 bar of signal" which people assume is linear and standard across all phones, then the review says "great reception!"
Anandtech did a pretty good breakdown on what's going on with it, not sure if it's been posted before, but here it is.
The 4-5 bar readout represents a large swath of the bandwidth, whereas 3 and down are each very small bandwidth changes, so if you're just barely at 4 bars on your iphone and cup the antenna, you can quite easily kill all the bars.
So do they typically fix their design fuckups or try very, very hard to pretend they don't exist?
They usually try very hard to pretend they don't exist for a long time and then cave and fix them.
Or they sue and deny them.
The another hilarious one was when nvidia admitted that all those 8600 chips they'd been selling to world+dog were flawed, right after apple claimed they weren't.
So how does the software side of the antenna thing work? It shows (less?) bars quite quickly for a small drop in signal?
Because there's a simple explanation for that one: most phone reviews don't actually try to measure reception quality, but if it holds calls well on "1 bar of signal" which people assume is linear and standard across all phones, then the review says "great reception!"
They allocate most of the range of signal strength into the 5th bar.
5 bars --> -51 to -91 dB
4 bars --> -91 to -103 dB
3 bars --> -101 t0 -103 dB
2 bars --> -103 to -107 dB
1 bar --> -107 to -113 dB
none --> <-113 dB
Gripping the iPhone pathologically results in a ~24dB signal attenuation, which is enough to go from 5 bars (-89dB) to none (-113dB) using their mapping of bars to signal strength. Adding a case reduces the attenuation to ~7dB, in line with other smart phones.
Interestingly, it looks like the signal processing used by the iPhone4 is better than previous iPhones, so it tends to function better at a given signal level than previous models. This is probably where the whole "best antenna EVAR" stuff came from - even though they are really talking about the whole system, not just the antenna.
Mine arrived at the store today so I'll see if I can find out more with a hands on demo =P
Well, that would make my analysis wrong, although I suppose it also works the other way: the more bars you show all the time would also work great for marketing. I guess you could play it both ways.
So do they typically fix their design fuckups or try very, very hard to pretend they don't exist?
They usually try very hard to pretend they don't exist for a long time and then cave and fix them.
See not using Intel processors, for example.
They've stopped? I just assumed that they trusted the base to only get its news from their screen saver (yes, apple uses official press releases as a screen saver).
So do they typically fix their design fuckups or try very, very hard to pretend they don't exist?
They usually try very hard to pretend they don't exist for a long time and then cave and fix them.
See not using Intel processors, for example.
They've stopped? I just assumed that they trusted the base to only get its news from their screen saver (yes, apple uses official press releases as a screen saver).
umm... they have an RSS reader as a screensaver, that has apple as the default RSS feed but can be loaded however you want... and it's a sexy looking RSS reader to boot.
I use engadget and AP for mine.
syndalis on
SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
"It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that," said Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, in a keynote speech at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), which runs through Thursday in Washington, D.C."
This is like in Tekken where you can make Yoshimitsu stab himself in the stomach, but if your opponent is close you deal more damage to them when the sword juts out of his back.
You should not be forced to conduct business with anyone if you don't want to, for any reason. The reason could be because of something complex such as "We don't want to sell to you because you take our product and resell it in an unauthorized store." or even as simple and asinine as "We don't want to sell to you because you're black."
My understanding is that this part in particular hasn't been true (from a legal perspective) in the states for some time? Since the whole Woolworth's thing?
Yeah, not at all really, that's quite a stretch to connect the two. It does tend to reinforce Apple's (some might even say notorious) history of valuing form over function though.
There was nothing wrong with Vista on a non-tech user level. Technical issues arden't what matter in the comparison, it's the public perception
I would have to disagree, non technical users were just as unimpressed, yes for differing reasons, but they weren't buying it any more than the sophisticated pc users.
There was nothing wrong with Vista on a non-tech user level. Technical issues arden't what matter in the comparison, it's the public perception
I would have to disagree, non technical users were just as unimpressed, yes for differing reasons, but they weren't buying it any more than the sophisticated pc users.
What were the non technical issues with it, then?
Vista failed because of very small issues and a marketing disaster.
There was nothing wrong with Vista on a non-tech user level. Technical issues arden't what matter in the comparison, it's the public perception
I would have to disagree, non technical users were just as unimpressed, yes for differing reasons, but they weren't buying it any more than the sophisticated pc users.
What were the non technical issues with it, then?
Vista failed because of very small issues and a marketing disaster.
Well, mostly that it didn't offer anything really new or innovative over XP other than the aero interface, which was a ridiculous resource hog that most consumer grade computers wouldn't run. Then they split it into 25 (not 25 I know) different iterations further confusing buyers, and putting salesman into the unenviable position of having to tell people NOT to buy Vista Basic because it was worthless. And then they didn't make sure they had proper driver support so that people had awful trouble getting 3rd party hardware to work, combined with manufacturers slapping Vista ready stickers on machines that couldn't fathom-ably run the OS well. Vista did not have "very small" issues out of the gate; so much so that MS scrambled like hell to get 7 out the door, people could smell the rush job a mile away and were not buying Vista.
Most of that is technical gibberish to the average consumer. They have no idea what drivers are.
Vista not installing on their machine is a valid consideration. Too many versions is POSSIBLY a valid consideration. The rest of that is really tech stuff that the average PC user would have no idea about.
Vista's failure was based on marketing, pure and simple. Windows made the assumption that because they are the platform kings people would just upgrade. They weren't prepared to deal with Apple's smear campaign.
Similarly, Apple was completely unprepared to deal with having a serious design issue in their flagship iPhone. Whether or not they can get their act together and respond better than MSoft did with Vista remains to be seen.
Vista offered a lot of new stuff over XP, and to say otherwise is a load of poop. It was just stuff that wasn't easily marketed or sold to the general public. The network stack was completely rewritten, the audio stack was completely rewritten, it got MMCSS (audo/video apps could tell the kernel that they were important and their data would be given a higher priority), the printing architecture got a major makeover, it required (kernel-level) driver signing, it had SuperFetch and ReadyBoost. It had a lot of new stuff that were significant improvements over XP, but that stuff is difficult to explain or difficult to sell.
Also, Vista really wasn't the resource hog that people called it. Vista used (uses) SuperFetch to load programs into memory that it *thought* you might want to run based on what you run, when you run it, and in what way you used the program. So it looked like it was eating up more memory than it really was, but if that memory was requested by another app the OS immediately gave up said memory.
Vista's biggest issue is that MS let it out the door with STUPID fucking minimum system requirements, so that it said it could be run on Hardware X, when really you needed to have Hardware X++ to run the software in a usable fashion. That whole "Vista Capable" thing was a freakin' nightmare that MS really screwed up on. In fact, there is or was a class-action lawsuit over it.
Also, they had no idea how to market the changes they had made. Or so it seemed. It was really mind-boggling to those of us that ran Vista on capable hardware day in and day out. The OS was good. They just let it die a slow death by bungling every decision about how to sell it to people.
Similarly, Apple appears to have no idea how to deal with the iPhone 4's design flaw, as evidenced by the initial response of "hold it different" followed by "spend more money on a case" followed by "stop paying attention to our hardware flaw and check out this software flaw instead."
Vista offered a lot of new stuff over XP, and to say otherwise is a load of poop. It was just stuff that wasn't easily marketed or sold to the general public. The network stack was completely rewritten, the audio stack was completely rewritten, it got MMCSS (audo/video apps could tell the kernel that they were important and their data would be given a higher priority), the printing architecture got a major makeover, it required (kernel-level) driver signing, it had SuperFetch and ReadyBoost. It had a lot of new stuff that were significant improvements over XP, but that stuff is difficult to explain or difficult to sell.
Also, Vista really wasn't the resource hog that people called it. Vista used (uses) SuperFetch to load programs into memory that it *thought* you might want to run based on what you run, when you run it, and in what way you used the program. So it looked like it was eating up more memory than it really was, but if that memory was requested by another app the OS immediately gave up said memory.
Vista's biggest issue is that MS let it out the door with STUPID fucking minimum system requirements, so that it said it could be run on Hardware X, when really you needed to have Hardware X++ to run the software in a usable fashion. That whole "Vista Capable" thing was a freakin' nightmare that MS really screwed up on. In fact, there is or was a class-action lawsuit over it.
Also, they had no idea how to market the changes they had made. Or so it seemed. It was really mind-boggling to those of us that ran Vista on capable hardware day in and day out. The OS was good. They just let it die a slow death by bungling every decision about how to sell it to people.
/offtopic
A LOT of this blame falls on the head of intel. There was a lot of crap going back and forth where everybody knew it wasn't going to fucking run on dual core centrino platforms and the old crap intel had been selling for the past while. It ran just fucking fine on AMD's platforms. So yeah, it was falsely marketed and flopped.
Well, this pretty much guarantees they'll have to address the issue and offer people some workaround. We'll see if it's a recall, bumpers or "just put duct tape on it, you jerks."
Similarly, Apple appears to have no idea how to deal with the iPhone 4's design flaw, as evidenced by the initial response of "hold it different" followed by "spend more money on a case" followed by "stop paying attention to our hardware flaw and check out this software flaw instead."
more like wait till we patch our software so our hardware flaw isn't as noticeable.
People are pissed and Apple tries to hand them a placebo
Similarly, Apple appears to have no idea how to deal with the iPhone 4's design flaw, as evidenced by the initial response of "hold it different" followed by "spend more money on a case" followed by "stop paying attention to our hardware flaw and check out this software flaw instead."
more like wait till we patch our software so our hardware flaw isn't as noticeable.
People are pissed and Apple tries to hand them a placebo
Vista's failure was that to the end user it appeared to offer basically nothing over XP, but it was enough of a resource hog that on the budget PCs it was sold on it would spend most of its time hanging or crashing.
Am I the only prospective iPhone customer that's glad they switched to an external/structural antenna? I'll gladly take better reception in exchange for attenuation when bridging that gap. It'll end up in a case anyway.
And another thumbs up to hot corners + passworded screensaver. Whenever I leave my office at work, it's nice being able to just swipe the mouse in a corner as I get up, locking my station. Win + L is what I do on Windows machines. It's nice, but just a little bit less slick.
Vista's failure was that to the end user it appeared to offer basically nothing over XP, but it was enough of a resource hog that on the budget PCs it was sold on it would spend most of its time hanging or crashing.
iPhone 4's problem is that it has a design flaw.
Vista was a resource hog on any machine really. You shouldn't have to have 4 gigs of ram just to run the fucking OS on its own. (Yes I'm being a little hyperbolic, but I am continually astounded how much ram Vista hogs up on my laptop with 2gigs of memory.)
I am very keen on seeing what they do at the press conference. This is like the first time in years Apple has lost control of the media surrounding their products.
Posts
The software problem doesn't affect signal strength, just the readout. Apple released its existaqnce as an attempt to distract from the hardware issue, which actually does something to performance, not just aesthetics.
apparently the software issue existed for multiple generations
I honestly believe that Apple was unaware of how they fucked up their antenna. That explains why all of their marketing showed people holding the phones the "wrong" way, and why they really seem to have no plan to fix things other than "hope people forget about it over time."
Actually, there's been a number over the years. Heck, there is one with Time Capsules right now.
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
They usually try very hard to pretend they don't exist for a long time and then cave and fix them.
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
Supposedly from the very first generation wasn't it? Their press release made it sound like "omg we just found this crazy error", but in reality I think they had originally sandbagged the antenna readout from the get go.
Because there's a simple explanation for that one: most phone reviews don't actually try to measure reception quality, but if it holds calls well on "1 bar of signal" which people assume is linear and standard across all phones, then the review says "great reception!"
you'd assume that each of the five bars represents 20% of the signal
but in reality, they were variable ammounts. The fifth bar was actually everything from 36% through 100%. The first bar was only a couple percentage points.
But yeah, it doesn't really matter. talking about exactly how many bars you have is rather rare in real life, outside fo comercial shoots.
Apple released the information in an attempt to distract from the hardware issue that they can't fix so easily.
Personally, my guess of what they will do is (after a bit more time, when they see that people still care) to send a giftcard to everyone who owns an ipod 4 that is worth the cost of one of those bumpers. They will then either redesign the phone to mitigate the issue, or else start including the bumpers in with the phones.
Anandtech did a pretty good breakdown on what's going on with it, not sure if it's been posted before, but here it is.
The 4-5 bar readout represents a large swath of the bandwidth, whereas 3 and down are each very small bandwidth changes, so if you're just barely at 4 bars on your iphone and cup the antenna, you can quite easily kill all the bars.
Or they sue and deny them.
The another hilarious one was when nvidia admitted that all those 8600 chips they'd been selling to world+dog were flawed, right after apple claimed they weren't.
From Anandtech's review linked earlier:
5 bars --> -51 to -91 dB
4 bars --> -91 to -103 dB
3 bars --> -101 t0 -103 dB
2 bars --> -103 to -107 dB
1 bar --> -107 to -113 dB
none --> <-113 dB
Gripping the iPhone pathologically results in a ~24dB signal attenuation, which is enough to go from 5 bars (-89dB) to none (-113dB) using their mapping of bars to signal strength. Adding a case reduces the attenuation to ~7dB, in line with other smart phones.
Interestingly, it looks like the signal processing used by the iPhone4 is better than previous iPhones, so it tends to function better at a given signal level than previous models. This is probably where the whole "best antenna EVAR" stuff came from - even though they are really talking about the whole system, not just the antenna.
Mine arrived at the store today so I'll see if I can find out more with a hands on demo =P
See not using Intel processors, for example.
They've stopped? I just assumed that they trusted the base to only get its news from their screen saver (yes, apple uses official press releases as a screen saver).
umm... they have an RSS reader as a screensaver, that has apple as the default RSS feed but can be loaded however you want... and it's a sexy looking RSS reader to boot.
I use engadget and AP for mine.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
I sure as shit do.
I set a hot corner on my laptop to trigger my screensaver, which requires a password to unlock, every time I step away from my machine.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
"It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I'm okay with that," said Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, in a keynote speech at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), which runs through Thursday in Washington, D.C."
This is like in Tekken where you can make Yoshimitsu stab himself in the stomach, but if your opponent is close you deal more damage to them when the sword juts out of his back.
My understanding is that this part in particular hasn't been true (from a legal perspective) in the states for some time? Since the whole Woolworth's thing?
Yeah, not at all really, that's quite a stretch to connect the two. It does tend to reinforce Apple's (some might even say notorious) history of valuing form over function though.
There was nothing wrong with Vista on a non-tech user level. Technical issues arden't what matter in the comparison, it's the public perception
I would have to disagree, non technical users were just as unimpressed, yes for differing reasons, but they weren't buying it any more than the sophisticated pc users.
What were the non technical issues with it, then?
Vista failed because of very small issues and a marketing disaster.
Well, mostly that it didn't offer anything really new or innovative over XP other than the aero interface, which was a ridiculous resource hog that most consumer grade computers wouldn't run. Then they split it into 25 (not 25 I know) different iterations further confusing buyers, and putting salesman into the unenviable position of having to tell people NOT to buy Vista Basic because it was worthless. And then they didn't make sure they had proper driver support so that people had awful trouble getting 3rd party hardware to work, combined with manufacturers slapping Vista ready stickers on machines that couldn't fathom-ably run the OS well. Vista did not have "very small" issues out of the gate; so much so that MS scrambled like hell to get 7 out the door, people could smell the rush job a mile away and were not buying Vista.
Vista not installing on their machine is a valid consideration. Too many versions is POSSIBLY a valid consideration. The rest of that is really tech stuff that the average PC user would have no idea about.
Vista's failure was based on marketing, pure and simple. Windows made the assumption that because they are the platform kings people would just upgrade. They weren't prepared to deal with Apple's smear campaign.
Similarly, Apple was completely unprepared to deal with having a serious design issue in their flagship iPhone. Whether or not they can get their act together and respond better than MSoft did with Vista remains to be seen.
Also, Vista really wasn't the resource hog that people called it. Vista used (uses) SuperFetch to load programs into memory that it *thought* you might want to run based on what you run, when you run it, and in what way you used the program. So it looked like it was eating up more memory than it really was, but if that memory was requested by another app the OS immediately gave up said memory.
Vista's biggest issue is that MS let it out the door with STUPID fucking minimum system requirements, so that it said it could be run on Hardware X, when really you needed to have Hardware X++ to run the software in a usable fashion. That whole "Vista Capable" thing was a freakin' nightmare that MS really screwed up on. In fact, there is or was a class-action lawsuit over it.
Also, they had no idea how to market the changes they had made. Or so it seemed. It was really mind-boggling to those of us that ran Vista on capable hardware day in and day out. The OS was good. They just let it die a slow death by bungling every decision about how to sell it to people.
/offtopic
Similarly, Apple appears to have no idea how to deal with the iPhone 4's design flaw, as evidenced by the initial response of "hold it different" followed by "spend more money on a case" followed by "stop paying attention to our hardware flaw and check out this software flaw instead."
http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/14/apple-to-hold-press-conference-on-iphone-4-this-friday/
3DS Friend Code: 0404-6826-4588 PM if you add.
A LOT of this blame falls on the head of intel. There was a lot of crap going back and forth where everybody knew it wasn't going to fucking run on dual core centrino platforms and the old crap intel had been selling for the past while. It ran just fucking fine on AMD's platforms. So yeah, it was falsely marketed and flopped.
Well, this pretty much guarantees they'll have to address the issue and offer people some workaround. We'll see if it's a recall, bumpers or "just put duct tape on it, you jerks."
more like wait till we patch our software so our hardware flaw isn't as noticeable.
People are pissed and Apple tries to hand them a placebo
So let's say that's the analogue to Mojave.
iPhone 4's problem is that it has a design flaw.
Isn't that the solution to the problem?
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
And another thumbs up to hot corners + passworded screensaver. Whenever I leave my office at work, it's nice being able to just swipe the mouse in a corner as I get up, locking my station. Win + L is what I do on Windows machines. It's nice, but just a little bit less slick.
Vista was a resource hog on any machine really. You shouldn't have to have 4 gigs of ram just to run the fucking OS on its own. (Yes I'm being a little hyperbolic, but I am continually astounded how much ram Vista hogs up on my laptop with 2gigs of memory.)
I am very keen on seeing what they do at the press conference. This is like the first time in years Apple has lost control of the media surrounding their products.