Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

iPhone Hardware Engineering Chief Mark Papermaster Leaves Apple

AidenShaw said:
Any design change (especially if it occurs on the white Iphone 4) will be taken as admission of a defect - and the lawsuits will be launched.

If there is "no problem", then why does it need a redesign?
Click to expand...

Lawsuits??? For what?????

It's obvious that someday there will be an iPhone 5... probably at least a year off given that's Apple's development schedule on the iPhone.

People... I agree 1000% with one of the other posters... can we get over the antenna issue? You can't sue over it, Apple is not trying to screw you and there is no huge Steve Jobs anti customer conspiracy going on.

If you actually owned an iPhone4, you'd know the Proximity Sensor is the biggest issue on the phone and they're going to fix it.
 
It would be safe to assume that when iPhone 5 comes out there will be a redesign. Besides, iPhones have not remained the same for long.
 
Mattie Num Nums said:
Scapegoat
Click to expand...

Yup, he was probably wearing a Golden Fleece as he exited out of Infinite Loop One with his golden parachute money. My take he is going to take a year off and resurface. I'm sure when Steve say the what is now iPhone 4 design concept he fell in love with it and the antenna guys went crazy trying to make it work. When I heard Steve say the iPhone 4 had workmanship like the old Leica cameras, I knew things were up.
 
superstrikertwo said:
So because you don't have the problem it must mean everyone else is lying. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

They are being sarcastic and trolling here. It's fun for trolls to come in here and either defend or attack an Apple item to the extreme if they know it's going to cause a huge storm on this forum.

The truth usually lies between the two extremes that trolls have taken on this iPhone issue.

Most posters here on the iPhone 4 here have a moderate view and what we are talking about is a known issue which has a known fix as I see it. The whole thing is pretty much a dead issue anyway.

There's a reason Apple offered the bumpers for free and it wasn't to please a few naysayers. In the end it's not as if the entire product was messed up from the hardware to the OS. The iPhone 4 is mostly a good product that now is known to be fine if you have the bumper. Really, so what? Imagine if it was Apple coming out with an large, expensive OS like Vista or something.:D
 
Rocketman said:
The telling news will be what job is announced he is hired for, to see if he gets some favorable leg-up from either IBM or Apple...
Rocketman
Click to expand...

nah, the career path of ex CEOs and senior excs is usually pretty easy to predict. They rise and make their marks with big-name companies and get lured away by another brand company. Usually though the time frame is about five years at each. They get canned and then move to a smaller company and then smaller still. The small dogs always hire them because they are thrilled to get a chance at the former star big-name blue bloods. This will continue for their entire careers.

The most disgusting thing is that they will never go down in salary as they descend. They only stay at one place long enough for them to begin to be exposed.

It's a blueprint. Go to a new company and promise the world in a "five year plan". By the time everyone realizes you haven't delivered they are wealthy and moving on to the next five year plan. Good work if you can get it.
 
ouimetnick said:
Because Bob Mansfield is taking over Papermaster's job, will Bod have 2 jobs? Who will be in charge on Mac hardware engineering?
Click to expand...
Someone below Bob will presumably take over the Mac hardware engineering lead position. I don't know who it will be, but it is likely that the person will be a longtime Apple engineering manager, not someone from the outside.
 
He left to join HP?

hell, there is no problem with antenna, except few executive are fired OR taken heart and resigned themselves but nothing wrong the antenna even with a case program
 
3GEE said:
No, it's called accountability. It's harsh but it's a good thing too. Nothing poisons a company quicker than when a person that makes decisions is not held accountable when things go wrong, even if its perception.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but Steve refuses to go.

But firing Papermaster means his testimony can be smeared by Apple during their class-action lawsuits. Muddy the waters.
 
superstrikertwo said:
So because you don't have the problem it must mean everyone else is lying. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

No. It means there really is no "everyone else." The iPhone 4 is selling out. Demand is sky-high. By the way, no reception problems here in Canada, thankyouverymuch.

US telcos SUCK.
 
cvaldes said:
Not going to happen. As a matter of fact, Apple went the opposite direction, stating that the antenna issue is insignificant by throwing a bunch of numbers and videos out.
Click to expand...

Exactly... they went the same route as British Petroleum when the pipe line first started leaking... Point fingers at others.

Papermaster leaving the company is most likely because of the iPhone 4 flaws. I'd say thats a pretty good indication that Apple in fact acknowledges it is their problem.
 
Amdahl said:
Yeah, but Steve refuses to go.

But firing Papermaster means his testimony can be smeared by Apple during their class-action lawsuits. Muddy the waters.
Click to expand...

I'm going to guess you've never worked for a large corporation. Steve's accountability comes from the shareholders and the bottom line. Steve is obviously doing fine in those areas. The accountability for the minutiae goes to those lower down the rung, thats why they too get the big bucks. It's the politics of corporate world. Don't feel sorry for these guys, thats the way it goes and they won't miss any meals.

As for the class action lawsuits, yeah right, never going to happen. There are no damages.
 
inkswamp said:
Get off it already. They acknowledged the problem.
Click to expand...

You have got to be kidding me.

So far they have pointed fingers and stated other phones have a similar issue. Although from my experience and many others, none of it is anywhere as significant as the iPhone 4.
 
*LTD* said:
No. It means there really is no "everyone else." The iPhone 4 is selling out. Demand is sky-high. By the way, no reception problems here in Canada, thankyouverymuch.

US telcos SUCK.
Click to expand...
Yeah, the Norwegians also dismissed the iPhone 4 antenna problem as a U.S. issue.

US telcos do suck. We pay more than anyone else for horrible service. The Swedes have the same population density as the U.S. and their cellular service is rocking. The excuse that America is big doesn't hold water, especially when cellular service in major metropolitan U.S. cities is sketchy whereas Tokyo has been rock solid inside subway tunnels for over ten years.

American cellular customers are too complacent and accepting of shoddy service.
 
Papermaster and Steve had a fight about recall? and we know who won the battle?

let the truth come out; it is going to be lots of story (of course not for the man who is affected -> papermaster)
 
cvaldes said:
Yeah, the Norwegians also dismissed the iPhone 4 antenna problem as a U.S. issue.

US telcos do suck. We pay more than anyone else for horrible service. The Swedes have the same population density as the U.S. and their cellular service is rocking. The excuse that America is big doesn't hold water, especially when cellular service in major metropolitan U.S. cities is sketchy whereas Tokyo has been rock solid inside subway tunnels for over ten years.

American cellular customers are too complacent and accepting of shoddy service.
Click to expand...

but US is so big in area (size) so it is tough to provide a good service, also here people complain about electric towers, antenna, cell towers and everything ...
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8A306)

So he got the boot even though there are no antenna issues. ;)
 
*LTD* said:
No. It means there really is no "everyone else." The iPhone 4 is selling out. Demand is sky-high. By the way, no reception problems here in Canada, thankyouverymuch.

US telcos SUCK.
Click to expand...

What happens is Canada is not important. Canada is just a US suburb. There always an everyone else. Whether you acknowledge that is not relevant. So what the iPhone is selling out. Does not negate that some are having an issue.
 
Heh... that's what I thought too....

When Apple first hired Papermaster, I thought, "Really? They think someone from the IBM corporate culture would be a good fit?! What were they smoking?"

Maybe I'm not being completely fair, but all in all, IBM strikes me as a company that had all these little "islands" of groups working on various products or technologies without management cohesively tying any of it together into a sensible "grand plan". Even if you called in for support, you likely got your call put on hold and forwarded around multiple times, so you talked to people in 5 or 6 different cities (or parts of the world!) before reaching someone who could even begin to help you with your product question. Half the time, they'd have a dedicated team working really hard to do something great that IBM could have really leveraged to gain a dominant position in the market -- but instead, some brainiac in management would decide to can the whole thing, or put it on the back-burner.

(I still remember when OS/2 was out ... IBM was so clueless, they were pre-loading their PCs with Windows NT, and often, you couldn't even buy some of them with OS/2 or get OS/2 compatible drivers for them! How dumb was that -- selling machines that couldn't even run your own operating system product!!)

And since then? Let's see... Their most highly regarded hardware product was probably the IBM Thinkpad laptop, so they quit making those and sold the whole thing to Lenovo. They decided they were better off as more of a "solutions provider" and "service" company -- yet I don't know a single business that hired them to solve any computer issues for them! They had the only real commercial competitor to Microsoft Exchange with their Notes product, but they've done very LITTLE to enhance or support it in recent years. So why again would Apple want this type of "leadership" ??


Popeye206 said:
Given he's been absent from the media for the launch, even before the media hype on the "antenna problem" I'm guessing he was leaving before all this happened. Because he's been there for such a short time, I'm guessing it was a bad fit (i.e. personality/culture). It happens.

Besides... IBM guy at Apple? That seems like a turtle going to work for the rabbits. Okay... bad analogy, but you get the point. :D
Click to expand...
 
Hang on a second...

The rather obvious gorilla in the room is that Papermaster only started work in April 2009... It is, of course, quite probable that the main design decisions on the iPhone 4, including those relating to the antenna, were substantially locked down well before Papermaster's tenure with Apple began. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the design decisions, it's highly likely that Papermaster wasn't even at Apple when many of them were made. That, to me, lends credence to the argument that it may well have been Papermaster who was the one who raised concerns about the design as the media reported in July. The media, of course, pointed the finger at a different individual, Ruben Caballero. Now, if Papermaster *was* the one who raised the flag, Jobs wasn't entirely blowing smoke when he denied that Caballero had come to him with concerns. Either way, the terms of Papermaster's departure will probably show up in a future 10K or other filing and the numbers involved will probably resolve the question on whether he jumped or whather he was pushed...
 
appleguy123 said:
The guy from Mac hardware engineering took over his job? This means even less time will be devoted to Mac :(.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, that's really good logical thinking. Did it occur to you that someone else is probably taking the Mac Engineer's place? Apple has been quite devoted to the Mac lately.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back