Why All the Apple Apologists?

This whole iPhone 4 radio thing (death grip, antennagate, whatever) has been annoying me more and more over the past week, and now that the press conference is done, and every tech pundit has had his say over it, I am more annoyed.

This is how radios work

First, the tech issues. Since I haven't seen a wholly comprehensive review of them, and the few really technical discussions are mostly hidden away on nerdy, electrical-engineering focused forums. Radio is an electromagnetic phenomenon. Radio antennas are electrical devices. If you short one to ground, or to another antenna, they will fail. Disregarding air interference, and just mechanical/electrical shorts, restivity differences in the the shorting medium mean you can get anything from a minimal signal drop to the whole output grounded, and no transmission.

I have actually experienced this. Bang around a handheld radio enough and the rubber cover wears off the antenna. Touch the little copper coils, and transmit range drops by an order of magnitude. Just using it in pouring rain, and you lose 10% power from the running water shorting to ground. So, exposed antennas are a no-no.

And external antennas have been around forever. For phones, much, much, much longer than antennas hidden away in the case. Remember, phones used to all have an extendable stick hanging off the side. Then a fixed stick (still the iconic "phone" image), and only relatively recently, all-internal antennas. At Little Springs we keep a phone museum, and have talks about the history and development of handsets so the new generation doesn't forget there's a reason all this exists.

I've personally had devices of various sorts with part of the case being the antenna for years. Some of these can be made to fail if you touch it, but they are all made to sit on a table or bolted to a cabinet, so it's okay.

And the devices with flush, external antennas you are supposed to carry around have been smart enough to insulate them. If it has to be shiny and pretty, a simple layer of varnish will do fine. I actually expect Apple did this. And either it wears off, or it was not specified right, or there were multiple subcontractors and one didn't do it, or a combination of the several. These are mostly milliwatt-level transmitters, so duct tape or a thick piece of silicone rubber is not needed. A half mil of clear plastic is overkill if it is painted on right so stays put.

And no, it's not just attenuation. Sure, that happens also, but it is clearly not all that's going on here.

This is how people work

So, maybe manufacturing or sourcing or QA variability causes the hit and miss results of many testers. Or it's something else random. Testing one or a half dozen of anything is statistically meaningless. And then there's people. Great story I heard years ago: this guy is teaching a class of older folks how to use computers. They all are on laptops with trackpads, and immediately there's trouble. 80% of them are broken. Switching around indicates its not the computers, it's the people. This guy is clever, so logics out that the trackpads are electrical devices (they are capacitive touch, just like the iPhone screen). Old people have dry skin. He has them breathe (not lick, or dip in water, just breathe) on their fingers, then they are good for an hour or two of mousing around. Clever, and informative.

So, people are variable. They also get varying results with capacitive touch screens, which is another thing to look out for, and why you should believe it when some people can't type on one worth a damn. But here, different people are going to short the antenna to different degrees even in the exact same device, and environmental conditions. You have to test more before saying something is untrue, and know why things can and do happen.

This is how Apple works?

Okay, on to the press conference. The above is demonstrable, truth, physics and likely scenarios. The rest is much more my opinion, and I am not sure everyone at Little Springs will agree with me (and we'd still love to make an iPhone 4 app for you!)

After the pretty much insulting opening video, this rest was merely disengenuous. Sure, lead with your strengths. But there was no real apology. Just numbers that show they are great, users are whiny or stupid (e.g. "X marks the spot") and the competition is lying ("a little liberal with their algorithms too, but that's their choice").

How about that slide about their complaint rate. Well, complaints are not 1:1, and as a rule of thumb I take direct mail response rates as a guide for customer complaints. 1% is a great return on direct mail, and 0.55% complaint rate is a LOT of complaints. And that's just direct to Apple, not counting operator complaints. Complaint rates are always about the fact that most people don't bother to complain. I presume, from some knowledge of issues vs. complaints, that it's 10-20 times higher. That's a lot of people.

But mostly, I am annoyed they didn't admit a design mistake. Hell, if I was running that PR response, I'd have told them to say it was a flaw so we can all get over it, even if they don't believe it, or it's actually not. Return-or-a-case is still the best short term solution, so that would mean no change, except in the attitide exuded by the company.

Which is kind of smarmy. I am currently displeased with myself for being a dyed in the wool mac user forever now.

Why do I even read blogs anymore?

But what bugs me most is the tech guru on the street. Everyone is apologizing for Apple and quoting their press releases. Comparing to Toyota, and talking about how this Apple thing is nothing like that bad. Though it's a product design issue, and Toyota is back to selling cars just fine. $1.2 billion in 1Q /profit/ sounds like the aftermath of a PR disaster I can live with (yes, people died also... would it take a failed 911 call to make the Apple issue that serious?). Maybe some of these tech writers should spend half the time I did researching this weekend blog entry before they actually write anything.

Sure, Apple makes some great products, and sells well and so on. But they have a great marketing and PR machine most of all. Why do they need puffing up and defense from everyone with a blog or a microphone? Why can't it be logically analyzed, and compared to everyone else's good and bad points? Why does practically /every/ tech article, blog entry or broadcast commentary seem to have some overbearing, singular, personal point of view no other reporting would accept? I want tech reporting that makes it hard to tell what phone the reporter carries around, so I can actually trust what I hear or read for a change.

I’m afraid there a lot of people envious of Apple’s reputation (and stock performance) and a lot of others looking to make a name for themselves by being controversial (and hugely negative) in their online conversations. Even the NY Times tech team – including the typically-respected John Markoff were making very snide (jaded, cynical) comments during Apple’s conference. The point here is that some people just can’t take it when someone else wins (and keeps on winning by building great products that people love to buy). Some people just have to “take down” the king pin, no matter the veracity of their argument.

Of course, Apple one-upped all these people in the offing. They got a huge amount of attention, explained that it was mostly bloggers who hyped this problem, and then made the problem go away by making EVERY owner “whole” with a fine selection of alternative solutions. Apple comes off smelling like a rose, which is sure to piss-off the Apple haters even more.

One thing I wonder about these people: Where were they when Bill Gates and his band of copy-cat pseudo engineers were stealing idea after idea from other companies and becoming an illegal monopoly? Microsoft is the company that originated the idea of EULA – which says in effect “we will charge you TONS of money for this product and then make NO PROMISES it will do ANYTHING you might want”. Talk about the definition of customer unfriendliness! Well, Microsoft is still churning out crap – including in the mobile space. Personally I find Apple such a RELIEF from 2 decades of junk, junk, and more junk from Microsoft. People have frigging shot memories.

I always learn something from your posts, Steven. Thanks for adding supporting factual details.

There’s a lot of speculation out there on what may have happened to cause the problem. One, reported elsewhere, is that perhaps the device was kept in an iPhone 3 case through most of its testing. Whatever the root cause was, I’m sure internally it’s being addressed.

In some ways Apple is busy paralleling Palm’s transition from PDAs to phones. They are doing the handheld computer part really well, but certain aspects of the mobile phone part are kind of lagging. Example from Palm: their radio communications pieces were buggier than those of other phone manufacturers, to the point that even with my third Treo 600 I couldn’t make calls from my house.

Similarly from Apple, we have this case/antenna problem. It’s a problem; they’ve more or less addressed it. They haven’t addressed issues like “make my alarm clock work, no matter what, even if there are headphones plugged in or if I have turned the phone off.” (Nokia has done this, BTW, for years.)

So each company has strengths and weaknesses. No surprise there.

And I agree about press/blog reactions to Apple.

But what about Apple itself? Did they, or at least Jobs, show contempt for their customers? No more than a company like 37signals does. “This is the way we intend it to be used, if you have another approach use a different product.” Okay, in this particular case they went a bit too far, but they did make their customers whole. Sort of. (Can all cases fix the problem? Did Apple just kill the case industry?)

But really this is completely consistent behavior.

I don’t think the “call failed to 911” scenario is particularly viable. If that were the case, then the operators would have been sued multiple times. Motorola would have been sued multiple times given the number of times my Droid freezes or cheek-dials. I left AT&T because despite full coverage my Nokia E71 kept dropping calls at the office, to the tune of 4 times per talk-hour.

So it’s a PR problem. I know how I would handle it: mea culpa, here is how we will fix it, and here is how we will make you whole. I don’t know why Apple didn’t do that, but at least they did the last item. Nokia and AT&T both insisted that my problem was my imagination (AT&T for example asserted that I was sitting too far inside the building or should force the phone to 2G.)

At risk of making myself sound like an Apple fanboy (I’m not, I swear — sometimes I even go days using exclusively Windows bootcamp’ed on my iMac — a computer is still a computer, but that’s another story), I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I, for one, applaud Apple on their efforts to bring closure to this issue. Apple did something that I think is commendable for any company — and definitely atypical for Apple — they /apologized/, or at they very least, very publicly acknowledged the issue. Sure they backed it up with pretty facts, (and in the process disclosed some information that was made them seem non typically transparent), but at least they did something. And something big. They brought out frickin’ (escuse my French) Steve Jobs, CEO, to admit they made a mistake and explain what they would do to fix it. I didn’t imagine them doing anything like that. Being the closed, secretive company they are, they could’ve just issued a press release (and perhaps announced new products to try to cover it up), but instead they held a big conference to very publicly disclose the issue. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that they didn’t try to hide it.

I’ll admit that I’m not an expert on the news. I don’t follow it as well as I should. But I’m going to compare this to another (indeed, much bigger in the grand scheme of things) current event — the BP Oil Disaster.

I don’t remember (it was, like, 3-4 months ago, right?) exactly how it all played out. But I bet that if Tony Hayward went out on DAY ONE (remember, this is a MUCH bigger nightmare) and said something to the effect of “Look, we made a mistake. We admit it. We’re investigating what happened, and we’ll have more details later. But here’s what we think happened [we were negligent, and greedy].... and here’s what were going to do to fix it [three ways they’ll try to stop the leak]. It could take months, years even to completely fix this disaster. But in the meantime, here’s what we’ll do [give out money to those affected].”

In other words, if they, too, had been completely honest and transparent ASAP, I imagine the situation would have played out much differently. People like honesty. Even if said honesty is sugar-coated in positive facts.

Perhaps I’m speaking out of turn here (I’ll admit, I didn’t do any research, this is just a comment, after all). Perhaps BP did all that. But my point is the same — people like transparency, openness, and honesty. It makes them feel as if they can trust a brand.

I’lll admit they probably shouldn’t have compared the phones, and they probably should have been even more open and admitted a design mistake. But at least they tried.They went a little out of their comfort zone, and were as honest as they thought they could be. I applaud that.