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Apple's response to this has been horrible at best. Their PR blurb about being "stunned" to find out about their visual representation of signal strength was truly embarrassing.

It's taken 9 months for Apple to finally admit to the Time Capsule problem.

Keep quiet and with a bit of luck it will go away seems to be their first course of action when dealing with design faults.
 
Auch! BURN!! :D

Apple denied this way to long already. Don't get me wrong, I love Apple, but their arrogance is getting way over the top. First Apple direct us not to have blu ray. Now they direct us how to hold our phone, and simple deny a serious design flaw. They almost screwed me with my macbook air, where the hinge have a serious design flaw and break. My Iphone 3 is almost unusable after the update, and works as bad as a PC, crashes, sluggish, no battery life anymore. Enough is enough!

In general, It seems ease to become successful, but way harder to keep success. Especially with serious competition on the corner.

As long Apple keep thinking the customers are a stupid sheep who eat this kind of crap, they will be wrong at the end of the story. People won't accept this.

The gap between Apple and the rest (Microsoft) become smaller too.

I forced my Girlfriend a lifetime windows user to go for Mac. But after a few months she still isn't impressed with MAC OS-X and find it hardly an improvement over WIN7. Wake up Apple. You are not longer the most unique in the universe anymore. There are alternatives. And if you keep treating your customers as stupid sheeps, they will go for that "alternative" eventually.

With kind regards,
Bas

You're just bitter about that World Cup match. :p

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I actually completely agree with you. I've been recommending Macs to everyone for almost a decade, but because of their recent actions, I'd have a hard time making that recommendation at this point.
 
...but it didn't. It's just not as pronounced a drop in signal strength.

Same for me, the bumper just makes the issue slightly less. Also, with the bumper on you have to use the cable that came with the phone, the thinner profile one. I think it's interesting that in the Apple Store they don't let you rate the bumper.
 
Thank you early adopters!

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Waiting a few weeks paid off BIG TIME. All the early adopters who bought this defective product and got LOCKED in with AT&T for another 2 years... I am sorry.

The next version will be on Verizon and will WORK as advertised. And the most loyal fans will still be stuck on AT&T with the failure that is the iPhone 4.

Just like Rev.1 iPad... no multitasking, 256mb RAM, no camera, no retina display.

Apple is officially a market leader. They can no longer be trusted, unfortunately. We need a new underdog with the drive to please their customers.
 
there' your fix...no recall...no software fix...no redesign.....and no free bumper($30 for a bumper? really?)

Apple buys a crate of duct tape and sends everybody a strip..problem solved.

Apple - [Ignorance or pride] pick one
 
I never saw any dropping bars yet. I live in germany and it´s like abolutely no issue to me.
I am sorry for anyone having problems with this.

I say Apple recalls all US based iPhone4 models sold in the last two weeks.
Send us all new devices, and we will send all of the defective ones back for a re-design
 
.
Waiting a few weeks paid off BIG TIME. All the early adopters who bought this defective product and got LOCKED in with AT&T for another 2 years... I am sorry.

The next version will be on Verizon and will WORK as advertised. And the most loyal fans will still be stuck on AT&T with the failure that is the iPhone 4.

Just like Rev.1 iPad... no multitasking, 256mb RAM, no camera, no retina display.

Apple is officially a market leader. They can no longer be trusted, unfortunately. We need a new underdog with the drive to please their customers.


Hmmm, I'm actually loving my iPhone 4 and iPad.
 
Consumer Reports is funny sometimes. I always take their recommendations with a grain of salt, ie with all the recalls and dangers of the Toyota / Lexus brand, they (CR) still recommends the cars as a recommended buy.

However, unlike Apple, Toyota issued a recall and fixed it by supplying new brake pedal 'hardware'. My car never exhibited the reported problem, yet they replaced the parts anyway (as they should). The rest of the car is great...hence recommended by CR.

I'm sure if Apple fixed the hardware, it would again be recommended by CR as the rest of the phone is pretty good. But first, Apple must admit to it.
 
Then again, as Kernkraft pointed out, you're one of those people who would side with Apple at any cost. If Apple made a poisonous soft drink you'd go "ooooh, so now you want soft drinks that don't kill you. Boo hoo. Kids today are so spoiled they won't adapt to anything, it's all feed me feed me feed me..."

Strawman arguments are lame.

And Kernkraft is one of those unlucky few who seems to get a major defect in almost every single Apple product he purchases. Yet me, I get almost none (believe it or don't - your call). I suppose the pendulum swings both ways. A creaky hinge on an iBook (fixed by Apple). A DOA hard drive on a Mac Mini (replaced by Apple). That's about it for me in years of buying Apple stuff. Of course I've had my experience with bad Apple design (hockey puck mouse, wind tunnel Dual G4), but no one bats a thousand.

Unfortunately for your bogus "brainwashed lemming" argument, Consumer Reports and other major customer service/product reliability surveys seem to lean heavily to the side of my own experience and not Kernkraft's. I guess everyone is just drinking the koolaid, right? :rolleyes:

If I were having problems with my iPhone 4 (which I'm not), I'd either learn to hold it differently, use a bumper or a case, or I'd take it back. Problem solved. That doesn't make the design "good" (and it may in fact be very "poor") but it certainly would alliviate my need to scream about evil Apple and their evil designs on an online forum.

People are acting like Apple shot their dog. If their product is flawed and doesn't suit your needs, return their product for a refund. It's the capitalist way. It doesn't matter how good or horrible Apple's PR is - you ultimately speak with your wallet.

Seems far more effective than yelling about Steve Jobs being a "douchebag" (to quote our friend nopple several posts previous) on an online forum. :rolleyes:
 
You are demonstrating a lack of knowledge of basic physics and RF engineering. Yes, software can help to a point. The fact that UMTS uses a CDMA air interface also helps a great deal. But if the cell phone's antenna is detuned, the receiver's ability pick up, filter out from background noise, and amplify the base station's signal is drastically reduced. If the receiver isn't capable of supplying the digital signal processor an input signal from which accurate 1/0 decisions can be made, it's a moot point how good the software is. GIGO.

Then there are all the issues with closed-loop power control and output power of the cell phone's transmitter through a detuned antenna… Yeck.

But you are displaying a lack of knowledge of what is actually going on.

As are all of us. Myself included.

Is the actual signal being degraded? No one can know for sure. Even the "tests" can't know for sure because the signal that the phone reports (even the decibel readings) are produced by software, software in the phone...

And: no one knows exactly what Apple is doing with the new radio basebands. We have reports that they are dynamically switching frequencies from the 800Mhz ranges to the 1900Mhz ranges as the phone tries to lock the most reliable signal. Some of the earliest comments from Apple engineers (and those comments which have disappeared by the way) is that the problem lies in when the antenna are bridged the resulting attenuation confuses the processor which causes a lag in the frequency switch - which should not be there - and then it loses track of it's signal.

My whole point, which you are ignoring, is that WE DON'T KNOW.

So no one can say whether it can be solved or can't be solved with software. No one knows if it is a 100% hardware issue. In fact, I guarantee that this phone is not the first place that software has had to deal with signal degradation or interference or other "physical" aspects and hardware limitations.

Every year someone says that you can't do something because of the laws of physics then the next year someone does it. I remember reading a decade ago about how the RF spectrum was full and we were going to run out of signal space. Yet here we are with 2G, 2.5G, 3G and 4G and we now have 802.11a,b,n wifi and we have Satellite internet and GPS and Digital TV and WiMax and all sorts of other things going over the air. I remember when Cable lines had reached their maximum data speeds and now I have a connection to my house over cable that was deemed impossible a decade ago. It happens over and over.

None of us have access to the raw data of what is happening in the iPhone 4. We can "test" all we want with off-the-shelf models, but we don't have source code, and we don't have detailed diagnostics. We are all just armchair quarterbacks.

I have plenty of knowledge of basic physics and RF engineering. What I don't have is detailed data on what is actually happening to the signal after we touch the magic corner.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7)

The only way a software fix can make this problem truly go away is if the 3 antennas can be remapped via the OS to the A4 processor when attenuation occurs; i.e. having one of the other unaffected antennas take over.
 
A friend of mine pretty much only buys stuff that CR says is good. He was going to get the Iphone 4, but has decided not too after this report. CR sways alot of people and has alot of pull. I have an iphone 4 now, but if I had to do it all over again, I would have kept my 3GS, to me it preformed much much better than the Iphone 4 has....and the CS report was spot on with the problems that Iphone 4 has...
 
Thanks Jony!

.
Jony I've is bringing Apple down all by himself.

-iPhone external antenna = fail
-iMac yellow screen = fail
-iMac flickering = fail
-iPad huge bezel = fail
-Mirror for a screen on macbooks = fail
-Cracked iPod screens = fail


How much longer do we have to deal with this magical moron???
 
It's breaking news all over the media now. AAPL is dropping.

Guess we should be buying then because it has done nothing to sales figures apple is still selling them faster than they can make them.

Number two I would never trust consumer reports their conclusions are bogus.
 
Lol at the fanboys still stating this isn't an issue. Granted, it may not be universal, I'm not stating EVERY SINGLE IPHONE IS DEFECTIVE, but quite a bit of people are having this problem. And to say just use a bumper or hold it differently is nuts

Here's an analogy that maybe you will understand. It's like owning a luxury sports car, where everything is so nice and high end and you get like 50 mpg, but for some reason if you move your hands from 10 & 2 the car shuts off and you have pull over and restart it. Or you can buy a tacky steering wheel cover that just clashes with the interior leather. And when you go back to the dealer, their response is to keep you hands at 10 & 2 or buy one of their lovely overpriced steering wheel covers which they just began manufacturing with the release of this new car.
 
.
Jony I've is bringing Apple down all by himself.

-iPhone external antenna = fail
-iMac yellow screen = fail
-iMac flickering = fail
-iPad huge bezel = fail
-Mirror for a screen on macbooks = fail
-Cracked iPod screens = fail


How much longer do we have to deal with this magical moron???

Are you serious? The quality of the parts is Johnny Ive's fault? This guy pretty much saved the company.
 
Software absolutely CAN solve hardware problems, in many cases. /snip/

Software will improve the situation.

I find it funny that people think Apple is doing nothing about this. They probably have had people working 20 hour days on this problem since June 22nd when it was first exposed - probably earlier in fact. Do you people think the Apple iPhone engineers just sit around and count money all day? They are real engineers who take pride in their work and work very hard to make good products.

You make a phone that does what the iPhone does and sell it to 2 million people in a weekend and see if it is completely bug free on the first shot!

This whole thing is *exactly* why companies make software up-datable!

I'm no engineer but how can software change the conductive properties of the metal antenna on that phone? Make it non-conductive? And there's no problem at all, Steve said so. It's grossly exaggerated and that non-existing problem only displays the signal strength bars incorrectly :rolleyes:

I'm glad I'm in a backwater country that hasn't received the 4 yet AND that my contract isn't eligible for renewal in 6 months or so. By that time all problems will be solved :D
 
The whole point of consumer reports not recommending the IP4 is the terrible PR Apple will receive from it. Most of the financial sites (marketwatch, etc) already have articles about it and a link to the wall street journal Digits report video. After watching it you get a sense that Apple's upcoming fix will not actually fix the problem. Without a case, or piece of tape, going Naked (with/without a skin) reception issues will always exist.

SO GLAD I waited to get the IP4. Apple will have to redesign the next version of find a way to eliminate human touch affecting the antenna.
 
there' your fix...no recall...no software fix...no redesign.....and no free bumper($30 for a bumper? really?)

Apple buys a crate of duct tape and sends everybody a strip..problem solved.

Terrible idea - because 1 crate would never be enough. You would need at least 10 times that.
 
Apple - [Ignorance or pride] pick one

That's a good point - I wonder how the Apple PR department operates - does every single release on behalf of the company go through Steve Jobs?

I would say pride. Apple must closely monitor all discussions regarding their products as they would be naive not to.
 
.
Jony I've is bringing Apple down all by himself.

-iPhone external antenna = fail
-iMac yellow screen = fail
-iMac flickering = fail
-iPad huge bezel = fail
-Mirror for a screen on macbooks = fail
-Cracked iPod screens = fail


How much longer do we have to deal with this magical moron???

Steve Jobs is still the one signing off on Ive's designs. If Ive's ideas are causing so many problems, then the onus is on Jobs to put a stop to it, but obviously, he's not doing that.
 
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