512 Pixels

We cannot believe we’re getting shit for this.

Genius.

The Apple PR Machine, on the iPhone 4 signal dropping thing:

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

This could explain why iPhone customers will drop calls (or not receive them) in places where their phones appear to have a strong signal. Whether or not this fixes all of the issues or not is yet to be seen, but at the very least, it should be interesting to see this reevaluated signal readings.

This is yet another step in Apple shifting all the blame for iPhone connectivity issues to AT&T, and off of their own shoulders.

We may all soon realize that AT&T’s coverage is in fact as bad we all all think that it is.

Android developer Derek James:

As far as development, I know the Android team doesn’t like the “F” word, but fragmentation is a very real issue. There’s the increasing number of hardware configurations. There’s vertical firmware fragmentation in the sense that there’s a spectrum of versions in the ecosystem ranging from 1.5 to 2.2. And then there’s horizontal firmware fragmentation in the customized variants by the manufacturers, like Sense UI and MOTOBLUR. This rapidly expanding diversity is great in terms of expanding the user base, but it increasingly makes development and testing a pain. The Android team has done a great job of trying to mitigate these issues. The development tools associated with Android are very nice. But it will become more and more difficult to develop apps and games that run on more and more configurations if the gap between the oldest and newest firmware version continues to grow and manufacturers continue to release their own versions.

Chris Matyszczyk at CNET:

Maria Avila had an old iPhone. It was time to give it some of that new 4.0 flavor. So she went to her local Apple store in Modesto, Calif., to have the iOS 4 software installed and came back with an installation she hadn’t quite expected. Yes, a slide show of strange photos, 110 of them.

Thumbing through her new pictures, Avila told CBS13 in Stockton, Calif.: “I don’t know these people.”

Her upgraded iPhone seemed to have taken on a new personality. She couldn’t send texts. The phone locked up. And then, having discovered the strange pictures, she found new information in her address book. As well as text messages.

Apple put a policy in place in 2008 that kept Genius staff form backing up iPhones. Look like someone ignored it, and then was dumb enough to restore Avila’s phone from the wrong backup.

Update: I’ve heard from two current Geniuses that they can backup customer phones — it seems the policy has changed since I left. If many more incidents like this pop up, I bet the policy changes back.

HP:

HP today announced it has completed its acquisition of Palm Inc. at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash.

The combination gives HP significant headway into one of technology’s fastest-growth segments with Palm’s innovative webOS platform and family of smartphones, plus a rich portfolio of intellectual property from the smartphone pioneer.

I really hope they can release some killer WebOS devices. It’s a great mobile OS, but Palm’s hardware sucks.

Woot announced the deal in what may be the best CEO-written letter ever.

Gruber hit on something in his iPhone 4 review that made me stop and think before I could get past it:

Apple seems very confident about the precise size and dimensions of the iPhone display: 3.5 inches, with a 3:2 aspect ratio. Not 3 inches. Not 4 inches. In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone. There are no new buttons, or even moved buttons. The Retina Display is emblematic of the iPhone 4 as a whole, both hardware and software: the same fundamental idea as the original iPhone, but clarified. It hasn’t really changed so much as improved — like the same picture in increasingly sharper focus.

[…]

The iPhone 4 feels like a major step toward an idealized iPhone form factor.

He’s right — the iPhone 4 is an obvious, healthy evolutionary descendant from the original iPhone.

Apple finesses and evolves its designs over time.

The first example that came to mind was the iMac.

When the iMac G3 was announced, its simple, all-in-one design* was highlighted heavily in Apple’s advertising. In the three years it was on the market the core design remained intact. Every iMac G3 looked basically the same, even though the external treatment ( Flower Power, anyone?) and internal components evolved quite a bit.

In 2004 the original iMac G5 came out and the design was praised for its simplicity. Apple highlighted the design in a product video, promoting the design — tying it to the iconic look of the iPad.

Apple has moved to aluminum and glass, but the iMac of today is much like the iMac of six years ago, just refined.

Another example that comes to mind is the pre-unibody MacBook Pro. While the case looked very, very similar to it’s PPC-powered ancestor — the PowerBook G4 — the MacBook Pro packed all new internals, which, at first, were not laid out very well. But over time, Apple’s engineers made the machines more easy to work on, and by the time the machines were phased out, even the most complicated repairs were simple to carry out.

Likewise, the insides of the pre-unibody MacBooks also evolved over the years, losing weight and gaining rigidity and simplicity.

This philosophy pretty genius, actually. Apple likes to announce one new product at a time. (At most they highlight a single line, like the yearly iPod update in the fall.) By revamping the same design over and over, it makes any major redesign a big deal. Throw in some Stevenote time and — boom — instant news story.

Another upside of this mentality is that it lets users upgrade their gear with ease of mind that they will be able to use it. Anyone who can use Snow Leopard can use OS X 10.2 pretty easily. Anyone who has an iPod can use the original iPod without skipping a beat. iOS 4 operates basically the same was as the original iPhone OS did.

It’s tempting to think of this philosophy as being a lazy one to have. In fact, it’s the opposite. A refinement is basically a critique of past products, and finding ways to improve existing work takes a great deal of honesty and attention to detail.

Of course, Apple creates artificial refinement opportunity. Why doesn’t the iPod touch or iPad have a camera? Why didn’t the 13-inch aluminum MacBook have a Firewire port?

Upgrades, baby. Upgrades.

—– \* Of course, the iMac harkens back to the original Macintosh in many ways, including this.

Michael Lollar:

Graceland archivist Angie Marchese was cataloging receipts and other paperwork from Vernon Presley’s Graceland office about two weeks ago when she found a manila envelope with three photo negatives.

“Just when you think you’ve seen everything, all of a sudden there’s something new,” said Marchese.

Even though I’m a native Memphian, I’m not an Elvis fan, nor have I ever been to Graceland. Regardless, this is still pretty cool.

From yet another thoughtful, near-obsessive piece by our Chairman:

The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams.

Apple’s internal support documents regarding the iPhone 4 antenna issue have been leaked, and it looks like the company regards it as a non-issue.

Jeremy Horwitz:

Even while acknowledging the physical beauty of Apple’s latest design—yet another pocketable piece of art from Jony Ive and his legendary team, worthy of awards as much for its execution as the boldness of the chosen materials—it must be said that the glass and metal iPhone 4 has a certain impracticality that will turn off some users as much as it excites others. The challenges caused by its antenna system and scratchable, glossy body are ones that many users will want to mitigate with cases, which may have been beneficial for past iPhones but seem downright necessary now. For no good reason other than to look cool, iPhone 4 feels like it has taken yet another step down the “designed to be damaged and ultimately replaced” path, a point that Apple would surely spin as environmentally friendly due to the recyclability of its glass and metal. But if iPhone 4 was truly a nod to famed German designer Dieter Rams, as noted in the introduction to this review, it should respect his principles that good design is “long-lasting,” “environmentally friendly,” and “makes a product useful.” Products should be built to last rather than disposable, and items made to be moved in and out of pockets shouldn’t break after a few drops, or suffer networking problems when held normally in one’s hand. True environmental friendliness avoids the need for product replacement and recycling rather than exacerbating it; good design also makes a product useful, rather than making the user work around its limitations. As attractive as it is, iPhone 4’s case-dependent body design is the only reason it falls short of our high recommendation, and should Apple provide a reasonable remedy to the obvious problems here, we’ll take the rare step of revisiting our rating in light of that change.

That having been said, iPhone 4 is otherwise the best iPhone Apple has released: it surpasses every past model in horsepower, screen quality, data speeds and versatility while either rivaling or improving upon their feature-for-feature battery life, and the price points are reasonable given the quantity and quality of capabilities Apple is offering. This isn’t another G4 Cube, a product that looked incredible but didn’t outperform other Apple and competing products; it’s an incredibly powerful smartphone, so long as its body is protected. Were it not for the chassis concerns, and the variability of AT&T’s service, which continues to hold U.S. customers back from enjoying the data speeds and call stability they deserve—differentially on a city-by-city basis—this new model would be a close to no-brainer recommendation for all sorts of potential customers, including everyone from iPhone EDGE and 3G upgraders to first-time users. Instead, our advice is as follows: buy into the iPhone 4 solely if you’re in a city established to have reliable 3G coverage and are making the switch from an older phone. Get a case quickly and avoid dropping the phone. If you have an iPhone 3GS, you can probably afford to hold off on this one until next year’s update comes, but the camera and screen improvements may tempt you to jump in anyway. We’d wait, but we’d also understand if you couldn’t. Issues aside, the iPhone 4 once again inspires the kind of lust that will only seem foolish when it’s replaced.

That last line sums up Apple pretty nicely.

Ashlee Vance, NY Times:

According to company memorandums and other documents recently unsealed in a civil case against Dell in Federal District Court in North Carolina, Dell appears to have suffered from the bad capacitors, made by a company called Nichicon, far more than its rivals. Internal documents show that Dell shipped at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of failing because of the faulty components. These were Dell’s OptiPlex desktop computers — the company’s mainstream products sold to business and government customers.

A study by Dell found that OptiPlex computers affected by the bad capacitors were expected to cause problems up to 97 percent of the time over a three-year period, according to the lawsuit.

Apple’s iMac G5 line was affected by the same bad capacitors. For months, all I did as a Mac Genius was replace logic boards with blown caps.

Apple eventually opened a Repair Extension Program for these machines, offering repairs for free up to three years from date of purchase. This effectively acted as AppleCare for customers who didn’t purchase it for this particular issue.

Dell wasn’t as forthcoming with the issues. Again, the NY Times:

As complaints mounted, Dell hired a contractor to investigate the situation. According to a Dell filing in the lawsuit, which has not yet gone to trial, the contractor found that 10 times more computers were at risk of failing than Dell had estimated. Making problems worse, Dell replaced faulty motherboards with other faulty motherboards, according to the contractor’s findings.

But Dell employees went out of their way to conceal these problems. In one e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees concerning computers at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm, a Dell worker states, “We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning.”

While Dell eventually repaired or replaced failed machines, they never were open with the public about the issues.

Not a great move.