Should we start collecting quotes from all the people in the forums of people saying "There won't be a recall people, keep dreaming."?
This will be a very interesting press conference tomorrow.
If they do a recall, I'm really interested to see what Apple's response will be for why they lied about the issue and told people to hold it differently when they knew this was an issue.
Let me guess: They were stunned to discover it.
They will find some way to spin it and then everybody will just accept it because all that matters is that Apple fixes the darn thing. It's just annoying that they did not come clean from the start and say "yes, some users will experience this issue, we are working on a fix and will provide replacements"
As far as this being Apple's "Vista" -- I don't buy it. Microsoft ignored the problems with Vista for two years and kept trying to market it before providing Windows-7.
If Apple handles this correctly it will be a 2-month turn-around from release date (geez -- the phone has not even been available for a month, and I am assuming 1 month to start rolling out replacements). My guess is that they will retain most of their customer base (even most of the newcomers to the iPhone).
Problem is they lost quite a bit of respect from those customers by treating them as if they did not know what they were talking about or telling them that they were holding their phone in the wrong way.
I still remember the Jony Ive quote from the
iPad video from the 1:05 to 1:16 mark. He stressed the importance of two things "no right or wrong way to hold it" and "don't have to change myself to fit the product". Apple clearly understands these are important to customers because they use it in their marketing.
So #1 -- Apple needs to fix this because clearly enough users are having the problem (albeit not everybody).
And #2, Apple needs to promise to handle these kind of things better in the future.
There are times for the "downplay the issue" card and this clearly was not one of them.
