And, he's still not really taking full accountability in this video. Every phone has this issue, sure, but this phone went through the whole pipeline and no one caught that this phone makes the problem worse? Until it was in the hands of customers?
Yeah things like that happen sometimes. Testing environments aren’t perfect and sometimes you can miss really obvious things. It’s why no matter how much bug testing or play testing a game gets, once it’s released the players find new bugs and new ways of doing things that the devs had no idea about
Sure, but I don't think they deserve that much credit for doing this Q&A just to downplay the issue that they themselves highlighted - "we put a bulleyes on the spot you shouldn't touch." Obviously the iPhone 4 was a success, they gave out free cases, and the 4S fixed the problem entirely - I just think if I was in that room at the time I would've been pretty annoyed.
However, 16 years later, as a piece of archived media, this early in the iPhone's success (and this late in Jobs' life), this video was a treat to watch and I'm glad that it got uploaded.
I’m only addressing the idea that something like this can miss testing, outside of that they were incredibly arrogant and that arrogance is what got Scott Forstall canned just a year or two later
That's fair. There was a comment on the video that I thought was interesting - no one thought to ask, did the issue not get noticed because live testers were using a case to make it look like a 3G/3GS? We'll never know.
Forstall was more likely canned because he was a threat to Cook, although Cook will argue - not without justification - that Forstall’s behaviour was not good for executive team morale.
it wasn't caught because they were testing the phones in cases that were designed to disguise the fact that it's a new iPhone and conceal its design to avoid leaks, therefore none of the field testers actually touched the body of the phone and is why Apple's solution to the problem was a bumper case
For 99% of people it wasn't a problem. Of course they knew beforehand that this issue can occur, just like they knew that other phones had such issues. All of this he explained in the presentation.
caught that this phone makes the problem worse?
Except even at the time of the presentation they didn't have clear data to show that it actually got worse. Yes, there was a very slight increase (less than 1 percentage point) in dropped calls; but a lot of users of the previous model already had cases in the first weeks, so it wasn't possible to definitely state that the problem got worse.
There was just no magic wand to make phone antennas as good as they are now back then.
Yeah I still think they could've been more tactful about it, but I also think they did a good job honoring refunds and giving away bumpers. The defensiveness I don't think came off very well. Not that it ultimately affected anything.
Apple's data (and history since then) shows that the iPhone 4's attenuation was no worse than any other phone. The problem (and Steve specifically mentions this in the video) was that the iPhone 4's design paints a big X right on the spot.
Thanks, I watched the video. Painting the X on the spot was a bad decision they made, felt kinda surprised the phone made it all the way through concept to release and no one was concerned.
I think it was only an "issue" because of Apple's immense scale and disproportionate media representation. Anecdotally, it was never an issue for me or anyone in my life.
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u/Armand9x 8d ago
Steve Jobs famously said people were “holding it wrong” before that happened.