Apple, Toyota, and the great media piling-on

John Biggs writes for CrunchGear, “Remember back when people thought their Toyotas were trying to kill them? And then the company issued huge recalls after a bunch of people peeled into traffic, blaming stuck accelerators, floor-mats, and computers? And then, quietly, the National Highway Traffic Safety Association basically said the crashes were caused by ‘pedal misapplication’ i.e. some doofus holding down the accelerator when he meant to hold down the brake? Good times.”

“Although I don’t want to belittle the lives lost in the single tragic Lexus accelerator issue, it’s abundantly clear that Toyota was unfairly blamed for a number of issues that weren’t its fault,” Biggs writes. “Fast forward to the oil-streaked summer of 2010. Apple’s new iPhone had a fairly egregious error in signal strength representation and attenuation, a problem, that, in all fairness, from which all phones suffer.”

Biggs writes, “I wrote last week that Antennagate was, in short, schadenfreude… So when such a visible and reproducible (under the right circumstances) problem appeared, the world piled on. Mainstream news, including local stations, picked up the story. Apple eventually had to pass out some bread and circus tickets for the downtrodden masses, ensuring that people would forget about attenuation and focus instead on all the free cases they’d be getting. As we move into the post-BP spill news cycle, rest assured that Antennagate will be forgotten and all the ink spilled will be for naught.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: All the ink spilled will be for naught, just like the last time they tried antenna FUD to slow down iPhone.