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Steve Jobs Replied to Me - Re: Horrible Networking Stack in iPhone

M

MacVault

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 10, 2002
1,144
59
Planet Earth
I can't beleive Steve-o actually responded to me this morning. And within 3 minutes! Here is the email with his response:

From: Steve Jobs [mailto:sjobs@apple.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 8:32 AM
To: [censored]
Subject: Re: iPhone Network Stack = Horible Engineering

I'm sorry, but I don't think this guy knows what he's talking about. iPhones network performance toasts every other smartphone out there.

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 14, 2010, at 8:29 AM, [censored] wrote:
Steve,

A [CCIE] network engineer I work with informed me of the following. What say you?

“…the wireless is very weak in the iPhones and 2) the implementation of the networking stack in the iPhones is about as bad as they come—absolutely horrible engineering. Believe me, I have an iPhone and it’s like pulling teeth without a painkiller sometimes.”
Click to expand...
 
Steve Jobs is right. Now tell Steve to put his little pinky over the "sweet" spot and see if it toasts any other phone lol.
 
So does the iPhone toast just every other phone, or all the smartphones on the market?

I think I'll take one of every other one. :D
 
MacVault said:
I can't beleive Steve-o actually responded to me this morning. And within 3 minutes! Here is the email with his response:
Click to expand...

Steve is absolutely right. Your engineer doesn't know what he is talking about. His comment about 'bad networking stack' is a bad as the analogy he made to 'pulling a tooth with painkiller'. Painkillers are not used during an extraction, anesthetics are.
 
is it becoming more common for Steve to respond to every email now? there are at least three other threads regarding responses from Jobs this week...can you post a picture of your inbox?
 
for cryin out loud, he's not single handedly replying to these emails. he's getting help.
 
I got a reply from SJ today too. He said he was stuck in Nigeria for some reason and wanted me to wire him some money for a plane ticket back. he promised me a free iphone every year (and I get to test prototypes) for the rest of my life.

What should I do?
 
rajjkamal said:
Steve is absolutely right. Your engineer doesn't know what he is talking about. His comment about 'bad networking stack' is a bad as the analogy he made to 'pulling a tooth with painkiller'. Painkillers are not used during an extraction, anesthetics are.
Click to expand...

The engineer probably didn't mean this, but while anesthetics are used for extracting teeth, people do take painkillers for it in the next couple of days. So in this case instead of it's painful just while it's happening (using his iPhone), he basically claimed that he could feel the pain long afterwards ("why the hell did I spend my money on this pos" :D)
 
SAD*FACED*CLOWN said:
is it becoming more common for Steve to respond to every email now? there are at least three other threads regarding responses from Jobs this week...can you post a picture of your inbox?
Click to expand...

Pic of message attached.
 

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MacVault said:
For the record, my network engineer was referring to the wifi performance, not the cell performance.
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It would probably be more helpful if your networking engineer friend were more specific than "the implementation of the networking stack in the iPhones is about as bad as they come—absolutely horrible engineering."

What's bad about it? What makes it "horrible engineering?" Without specifics, it just sounds like you're flamebating the sjobs account.
 
xenuprime said:
I got a reply from SJ today too. He said he was stuck in Nigeria for some reason and wanted me to wire him some money for a plane ticket back. he promised me a free iphone every year (and I get to test prototypes) for the rest of my life.

What should I do?
Click to expand...

Really? Steve's here?! That makes two of us :D
 
MacVault said:
I can't beleive Steve-o actually responded to me this morning. And within 3 minutes! Here is the email with his response:
Click to expand...

So, your friend says that he has an iPhone yet that it has horrible network engineering? Hmmm. Can't be that bad then if he refuses to switch from it!
 
scaredpoet said:
It would probably be more helpful if your networking engineer friend were more specific than "the implementation of the networking stack in the iPhones is about as bad as they come—absolutely horrible engineering."

What's bad about it? What makes it "horrible engineering?" Without specifics, it just sounds like you're flamebating the sjobs account.
Click to expand...

Ok, my Cisco engineer is more specific below:
======================

What I have seen has been field experience with my own phone and those of other iPhone users that I know personally. We have collectively seen device freezes, low signal reception in a known good signal area, fluctuating signal in a steady signal area, slow transfer rates where other devices have normal transfer rates, unpredictable IP address release/renew behavior, etc. Is this the network stack, the wireless hardware, or both? It is difficult to tell, so to be fair to Steve, I would need some harder evidence if I was going to back up that claim in an open forum.

It is noteworthy that we have seen wider issues with the OSX networking model in general. For example, the network stack appears to be unstable and buggy in various enterprise scenarios. In one case, several MacBook Pros would not release ARPed addresses from their ARP tables, which caused issues when there were MAC Address changes in the network (core multilayer switch failover scenario). This was verified on multiple platforms all running OS X. In the same test, various versions of the Windows OS and a Linux laptop functioned normally despite the changing network environment.

Another considerable (but separate) issue is that Apple has been a big holdout on supporting Cisco Compatible Extensions. The CCX program has brought badly needed performance improvements to the base 802.11agn standards over the last five or six years, and with the increasing load and client demands of wireless networks, we need to have all the intelligence we can get from not just the wireless infrastructure, but from cooperating clients as well. Most manufacturers, and therefore most devices, support CCX (just check out the supported clients list link from the CCX page). Remarkably, on my MacBook Pro, CCX does not run on my Broadcom WiFi adapter when I’m running OS X natively. However, I can enable it when running Windows 7 via BootCamp on the same laptop. I have heard it said that Apple is hesitant to support technologies that are not considered industry standards, however, CCX is so ubiquitous so as to be a shoo-in as one.

Just to be clear, I was saying two things in my original email. One is that the wireless is weak in the iPhones. I know because I have one and frequently see it firsthand. I would expect the smaller handheld devices to have weaker signal, and in fact, I’m okay with the WiFi radio consuming less power if it means better battery life. The fact that signal is weak from these devices (and by that, I mean smartphones in general) means that they make a better test device when surveying coverage of your WiFi deployment. While weak signal is not a unique characteristic of the iPhones, my assertion that the network stack (or WiFi hardware) on OS X based devices (iPhones, iPads, MacBooks) is lousy is a different matter and represents a real challenge for those of us trying to build wireless infrastructures to support a range of clients. The general consensus among those of us designing and supporting these networks is that Apple clients are among the least desirable because they don’t play as nicely with the other clients in the room.

In any case, I recommend that you test your WiFi coverage with a device that is known (by my colleagues and me, anyway) to both be an underperformer (in terms of WiFi) and a widely adopted device—the iPhone. If 37% of your guests with smartphones are going to be carrying iPhones, then that is a good platform to test on because you will have a better understanding of what the lower end of the user experience will look like.
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MacVault said:
Ok, my Cisco engineer is more specific below:
======================
Click to expand...

Oh SNAP! Uncle STEVE got OWNED! :eek:

BTW, Cisco engineers tend to know their stuff. I went to a pretty good engineering school, and the EE/CMPE's were lining up to try to get interviews with them.
 
Tarzanman said:
Oh SNAP! Uncle STEVE got OWNED! :eek:

BTW, Cisco engineers tend to know their stuff. I went to a pretty good engineering school, and the EE/CMPE's were lining up to try to get interviews with them.
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Yes I agree! I have had many first hand direct dealings with Cisco Certified Engineers and they do indeed know their stuff more specifically they are the what I consider top notch white glove support;)
 
Hey, After I sent Steve Jobs the details as seen in post # 19 above, this morning I received the email quoted below. Damn! Is Steve really dealing with my emails personally? Hard to believe, but way cool!


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon P[censored]
Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2010 7:04 AM
To: [censored]
Subject: iPhone Network Stack = Horible Engineering


[censored],

My name is Simon P[censored] and I am the Vice President of Core OS Software Engineering. My team is responsible for the networking stack on iOS and OS X and I am very concerned about the problems that your friend shared with you. Unfortunately even the longer description that you sent to Steve did not give us enough information that we could identify a reported bug. I do want my team to address any bugs that we can to make the Mac and iOS experience the best we can for our users, so I would appreciate it if you could somehow put me in direct contact with your friend so that we can work to resolve any outstanding issues we may have. You may pass my email address along to him so that he can contact me if he would prefer that over you sharing his contact information with me.

I hope you can help me improve our product.

Sincerely
Simon.
Click to expand...
 
CCIE = Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert
I wouldn't call them engineers but they do know their stuff

PS: Im a CCNP :p
 
The Cisco guy with the complaint further explained to me how he has solidly demonstrated that the iPhone will not upload more than about 6Mbps on TCP over wifi, whereas UDP works fine. Above the 6Mbps tcp he shows at least 50% packet drop every time. Can anyone confirm this?

Also, Apple's Vice President of Core OS Software Engineering, Simon P., keeps emailing me asking me to help him get in touch with my Cisco guy to help address his iPhone complaint. Cisco guy spoke with an attorney who told him to watch out - that this may be some type of trap... if apple feels threatened they could sue Cisco guy for knocking their product, and if Apple finds out who the contact is it could even lead to the pulling of a certain app from the App Store - severely affecting a certain app dev (not the Cisco guy).

Any thoughts?
 
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