Bloomberg is reporting that Jobs’ statement yesterday that he and his team are “working our butts off” means “cots in the engineering department and cars in the parking lot at all hours of the night.”
Yikes.
More yikes? Jobs was on vacation this week prior to Friday’s event. Here’s Jobs in the Q&A session after his presentation:
I’m doing fine, I was doing better earlier in the week when I was on vacation in Hawaii.
Apple’s press conference this morning is pretty much what a lot of people expected — lots of praise for the iPhone 4, followed up with a solution that doesn’t involve a recall or hardware revision.
I think Apple did a good job at highlighting that lots of other phones show the same issue that the iPhone 4 does. I know that my Motorola Droid exhibits the issue when I’m in an area with poor reception. That said, the whole thing came off as a little passive-aggressive.
This page on Apple’s site just leaked passive-aggressive juice all over my MacBook Pro.
To sum up: no recall and no free bumper cases (putting the iPhone 4 in any sort of case completely solves the antenna problem). There will be no admission of any kind that Apple did anything wrong in the design of the iPhone 4. The only nod in that direction will be that it’s the nature of new technology that no matter how carefully and thoroughly you test it, you will always find ways of improving it later on and that any future firmware or hardware revisions to the iPhone 4 will be just par for the course.
Steve Jobs will come out on stage and will sit in front of a large olde tyme cash register. He will immediately begin taking questions from the assembled journalists and bloggers. As the first-question scrum begins, Jobs will start madly ringing up purchases on the very loud register while pointing to his ears, shaking his head, and shouting “gosh, I’m sorry I can’t hear you guys over the sound of the register”. This will continue for several minutes and then the press conference will be over.
iOS developer and filmmaker Garrett Murray:
I’ve never been so completely disappointed in Apple. I genuinely believe Apple knew from the beginning their antenna design was flawed and would cause issues. I believe that’s why they used bullshit math to show an incorrectly positive number of bars, and I believe that’s why they designed the Bumper. They figured enough people would buy the Bumpers on launch day and with the falsely-reported 5-bar signals displayed to users, people wouldn’t notice the iPhone has a terrible time holding onto a signal when in your hand.
Bloomberg is reporting that at least one Apple engineer warned the company that the iPhone 4’s bezel-as-antenna design was flawed:
Last year, Ruben Caballero, a senior engineer and antenna expert, informed Apple’s management the device’s design may cause reception problems, said the person, who is not authorized to speak on Apple’s behalf and asked not to be identified. A carrier partner also raised concerns about the antenna before the device’s June 24 release, according to another person familiar with the situation.
Apple has invited journalists to a press conference this Friday, presumably to address the growing chatter about the iPhone 4 antenna issue.
Obviously, what Apple says Friday is very important. If the company comes out and announces a full-blown recall, I will be shocked.
I think the best outcome is a three-pronged fix:
1. A slightly-revamped iPhone 4 with a clear coating on the steel band.
2. A free Bumper — or unit replacement — for any phones that display the issue. Since every phone doesn’t exhibit the problem, this wouldn’t be a full-blown recall.
To say that the clamor surrounding the iPhone 4’s reception issues is growing is an understatement.
Yesterday, Consumer Reports came out with this statement, explaining why the group couldn’t recommend Apple’s new handset:
The signal problem is the reason that we did not cite the iPhone 4 as a “recommended” model, even though its score in our other tests placed it atop the latest Ratings of smart phones that were released today.
Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes reported on Tuesday that its sources within overseas component makers indicated that Apple plans to launch a second-generation iPad as soon as the fourth quarter of 2010. The new hardware would reportedly use 5.6-inch and 7-inch OLED displays, with Compal Electronics in the running to supply Apple.
The new models would be in addition to Apple’s successful 9.7-inch iPad, which would receive “some minor changes,” the report said. The smaller 5.6-inch and 7-inch iPad models would “mainly target the e-book reader market, separating them from the 9.7-inch model, which mainly targets multimedia entertainment,” the report said.
Damn it, that one with the grandfather just about made me cry.
Update: The “Big News” one is also crazy touching.