“A lawsuit filed in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday claims that Apple misled iPhone customers by displaying a stronger carrier signal than was actually available,” Thomas Claburn reports for InformationWeek. “The allegations arise from ‘antenna gate,’ the public relations crisis last summer precipitated by then-CEO Steve Job’s dismissal of complaints about call reception issues following the iPhone 4’s 2010 launch. Though Apple largely undid the damage and helped make the iPhone 4 a phenomenal success, its mea culpa is being used against it.”
“The company’s public letter, which acknowledged that ‘the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,’ forms the basis of plaintiff Daniel Donohue’s lawsuit… [which] seeks recompense for the effect the faulty signal calculation method ostensibly has on the iPhone’s resale value,” Claburn reports. “‘The value of an iPhone with a fatally flawed Signal Strength Meter is less than the value of the same iPhone without the flaw,’ the complaint states.”
Claburn remarks, “Evidently, it would be too much trouble to download the iOS update that fixed the erroneous signal strength formula.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We echo the causticity of Calburn’s final quoted sentence.