“Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced the news at a rare media conference on Friday, when he admitted that Apple and the phone were ‘not perfect,'” Madway and Gupta report. “But he defiantly asserted that smartphone reception issues were a problem shared by the entire wireless industry, including devices by Apple competitors such as Research in Motion and HTC Corp.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Defiantly?” Bias much, Reuters? Why not “truthfully?” It’d be more accurate and far less biased.
Madway and Gupta report, “‘This has been blown so out of proportion, it’s incredible,'” Jobs told an auditorium at Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. Jobs said that if iPhone 4 users were still not satisfied, Apple will offer a full refund within a month.”
Full article here.
My take is that Steve Jobs and Apple held a very good presser. They were open in discussing issues with the iPhone 4. Further, they offered free bumpers to anyone who wants one and a full refund for those who want to cut and run.
I’m keeping my iPhone 4 and skipping the bumper but that’s just me.
@RIP
Didn’t they say they couldn’t make the bumpers fast enough?
NO. Jobs said they couldn’t make iPhone 4s fast enough. He wasn’t talking about bumpers.
You’re so full of shit, it’s drooling out of your ears. By the time you finished what you wrote you were puking it.
@Everyone
I’m not good at English either!
I wrote, “…but isn’t the formula 3,000,000 / .005 = 15,000?”
When I meant to say, 3,000,000 * .005 = 15,000?
oops!
I read the transcript of today’s press conference with interest. What consumers, fanboys and haters don’t understand is that a company like Apple approaches a problem like this very carefully. Steve and his team certainly huddled with their engineers, but they also likely had some significant meetings with public relations advisors.
The trick is not genuflecting and apologizing too much, and making more of the PR crisis than it should be (and in the process, inviting more government intrusion and scrutiny, more negative press and class-action lawsuits initiated by bottom-feeding greenmail attorneys), but waiting to get the answers correct, and then responding only as needed.
That might sound cold. But it isn’t. There are a number of cases to support this in the annals of public relations. For example, when the makers of Extra Strength Tylenol discovered that a bad batch of their product caused deaths, the company responded immediately and with an aggressive PR campaign to address the problem. It is regarded as a gold-standard response.
In another case, a malicious individual tampered with a batch of Pepsi cans, inserting razors into a small number of cans. Pepsi quickly realized that the number of cans in question were infinitesimally small, and the media-fed hysteria was well beyond the true threat. Pepsi waited several days to assess the extent of the problem, and then responded only as needed. To have adopted a Tylenol approach would have been excessive, and would infer the problem was much greater. By limiting culpability for a problem not caused by Pepsi, the company quickly snuffed out the crisis.
The worst-case standard is how Exxon miss-handled the Exxon Valdiz oil spill. By denying there was a problem, the credibility issues have permanently hurt the company’s image.
Using these examples, I think Apple will ride out this issue based on the company’s response today. I am not surprised that Steve Jobs was somewhat defiant. It’s his style not to be submissive to the media. Some will conclude this is arrogance. But it also points out that Apple has the facts on hand (as indicated by the actual low return rate of iPhone 4s and complaint calls), where bloggers, pundits and journalists do not. That Apple apologized to consumers and has offered a remedy that Consumer Reports (which published a flawed study recently) admitted that the bumper will address the attenuation issue will likely render the story moot in the next few weeks.
This of course won’t stop bloggers, pundits and journalists who seek to damage Apple’s reputation. Sadly, in today’s media world, truth is the first victim, often aided by competitors and hedge funds with a vested interest in attempting to damage Apple.
But judging by my visits in the past few days to some local Apple Stores, the traffic from the body of mainstream consumers (who don’t visit sites like MDN, Engadget, CNET or Gizmodo, as we do), this is not an issue at all.
When you step back from the fray and hysteria and look, I think Apple accomplished what it needed to today.
Just checked my local Apple store and they know nothing of getting a free/refund for the bumper
@ G4Dualie
Engadget:10:30AM “We’re going to send you a free case. We can’t make enough bumpers.
Who’s full of shit you Mac Monkey! Ha! Your head is so far up Apple’s Ass you must be in China. Get your facts straight.
He was talking about both things:
First Bumpers: “But. We can’t make enough bumpers. So what we’re going to do, is source some other cases and give users a choice of cases. And they’ll be able to pick one. “
Then the phones: “We can’t make ’em fast enough. We are way behind demand. And probably the only thing we’ve gotten more emails on other than this lately, is customers who are upset that they have to wait for their iPhone 4.”
@ Arnold Ziffel, CR has been reviewing technology devices for years and does a great job at it. They have labs that would blow you away, many talented people that work for them, and they have had an impact on the sham product protection plan industry by recommending specific devices and purchases that justify a PPP. They do lots of great work.
They somehow got sucked into this non-story, lots of people did, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that they do great work with no advertising. No small feat in todays world.
And, for the record, they agreed with you that’s it an incredibly great device.
Great job Apple!
@Arnold Ziffel,
Consumer Reports is and will remain a very influential force. If you, MDN and the rest of the Apple apologist brigade think you can knock them off their perch, you got another thing coming. Just ask somebody who works in the car industry about the power of Consumer Reports. Fighting them is futile.
Notice how Jobs himself didn’t have anything bad to say about CR. In fact Apple cited them when listing the reviewers who call iPhone 4 the best smartphone on the market, and Steve admitted he was “…embarrassed by the Consumer Reports thing.”
Chase
Steve did not say walk into store and get one. He said go online. Damn there are so many stupid people here.
@Notorious
Lol, yeah right, so like Steve, wouldn’t incorporating tape, case or something similar (like non-conductive coat) during production fix this issue for the industry??
Which is exactly what they’ve done to mitigate the attenuation issue over the last 22-days. The fifteen-thousand or so phones returned under Applecare will be treated with the coating and put back on the markets as refurbs.
Apple being Apple, who balances the needs of form over function better than any company I know of, opted for the coating process, rather than cover up the stylish metal antenna with a bumper or case.
15,000 phones out of three-million sold so far, is hardly a trend and I dare say, most of those returns were probably for some other reason other than the attenuation problem.
Telling Steve Jobs to lose his ego would be about as promising as thinking you’d go away and not return, if asked.
Go away, k?
@Rip
Here, I’ll try to speak your language;
“Cuckoo!”
MDN I can’t believe you deleted my post requesting that you make people register to be legit feedback posters.
Do not start dissing your core contributors.
@G4Dualie
SJ says “Other smartphone makers decide for themselves about how to do this. But this happens to all phones. We haven’t found a way around the laws of physics… yet. “
Ok, so they knew about it long time ago.
Q1: Knowing this fact, why didn’t Apple apply coating from the beginning??
or they did know, but failed to realize exactly how it would affect the iPhone 4, in which case the question becomes:
Why did Apple say this during the conference: “We’ve been trying to understand this so when we solve it, we really solve it, not slap a band-aid on it.”
..and.. “If we did this all over again, we’d try to come up with some mitigation, but so far nobody in the industry has been able to do it.”
So you say they have started with the coating process, they say nobody has come up with the fix yet.
Which one is it? I think you must really be smoking something…
I think MDN wanted to give you a hint that you have to clean your tongue every now and then, you can’t have it inside Steve’s ass 24h/day every day you know
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@Deus Ex Technica
Ars said they are giving away bumpers, and if they run out of bumpers, you may choose between a list of 3rd party’s.
@@breeze:
Nobody asked for the moral police and who the fuck are you to put your tongue up for bleaching idiot. You might nit know the extent of contribution or involvement one has behind the scenes just like the ongoing smear campaign against Apple has it’s shadows … Little boy
@Land of the less
They would be locked with AT&T! I’ll wait til end of month for a noncomitted iPhone 4.
RIP Jul 16, 10 – 03:39 pm
Nice to have Al Gore on your board isn’t it? Nice to have Obama have private tech tours in your plant for the Russian President, right?
This is a tech blog and most of us could care less about the politicians you admire, but if you must sing their praises you be better served if you did so on Daily Kos or Huff ‘n Stuff. I’m sure you fit right in.
I think it’s time for you to stop whining like a cry-baby, tell your mommy to change the diaper and you are good to go again licking Apples cornholio day-in day-out
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They did what no other company would do. So I’m satisfied.
On another note, anyone notice a difference with the 4.0.1 update? I did for sure. I could hold it till I got the no service message before, now it holds at 2 bars, and no drops. So what the hell, I’ll take it.
Bumper for me at least, doesn’t seem necessary after the update.
@@ breeze:
Well now that you tried out that rhetoric you know first hand as a recipient get out of your patents house and into the world where action backs up empty words. You wouldn’t know substance if it hit you in the head.
@NHL
Go Puck yourself!
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@ G4Dualie
Is Gore on Apple’s Board? Yes. If you didn’t know that then go back to school. There’s politics in techland everyday. Grow up or in your case, go smoke up (again).