Reality: Distorted

Jul 06, 2010 22:30

Last I heard there were three separate class-action suits being filed against Apple because their new iPhones lose signal strength when you hold them "wrong." Seriously, just how entitled do you have to be to go to court because you are simply disappointed with an unnecessary consumer entertainment device?

Let's get real, here; this isn't some safety hazard we're talking about, it just has a couple issues that keep it from working as well as people hoped. In a sane world, if you don't like your new toy, you don't go around suing anyone with their names on the box, you just take it back. The stupid thing hasn't even been out for 3 weeks--Not a single person could possibly be outside of their 30-day return policy. No one is forcing you to have that specific smartphone; no one is entitled to have their ideal iPhone. If this antenna thing is such a big deal, shut up and trade it in for a Droid. Or heck, I hear the iPhone 3Gs are pretty cheap these days, you could use one of those instead--forget about the fact that the overall reception is worse, it doesn't lose as many bars when you hamfist it!

I don't want Apple to settle these suits. I want them to counter-sue for wasting everybody's time and money, and contributing to the decline of society as a whole. I want Apple's army of lawyers to present a waiver to every person who signs on as a litigant that says "I, the undersigned, apologize for acting like a shameless money-grubbing git, and do hereby concede that, even with its wonky antenna, I still think the iPhone 4 is superior enough to its competition that I will continue to use it." If they don't sign, Apple will forcibly take their iPhone and refund their money.

While I'm on the subject, have you heard about Apple's proposed "fix?" Well, according to their PR department, the whole fiasco is really just in people's head because of an "inconsistency" in the way the signal bars are calculated that's been there since before the iPhone 4 even came out. See, it's not as bad as you think, because the bars were totally wrong in the first place! I saw a chart that showed that there was essentially as much dB of attenuation indicated by the 5th bar as the other 4 bars combined. In other words, the bars really only mattered when the signal was already pretty low. So they're just going to change the graphic to so that you probably won't see as many bars most of the time, but when you fatfinger that antenna you also won't see as big a drop.

Here's the funny bit, though: I remember back with the iPhone 3G, people were complaining about not having enough bars. Apple also said that was an issue with the calculation for the indicator (really guys, these antennas are awesome, but they need to fire the guy who draws the bars). So back in version 2.1 of the firmware, they put in a software fix to "Improve accuracy of the 3G signal strength display."

To clarify, not two years ago Apple's customers were griping because they didn't have enough bars, so Apple made the display show more bars. Now, those same customers are griping because they are losing too many bars, and Apple is saying that it's because they are displaying more bars than they should.

Now, I'm not saying these two issues are related. All I'm saying is, as a professional software developer, if I had a customer who just wouldn't stop griping about a hardware problem that couldn't be fixed until the next revision, I might hypothetically implement a superficial UI hack to shut him up. And let's say that, hypothetically, this hack started causing unexpected behavior on that next hardware revision, I think that "workaround" might--hypothetically, mind you--become a "bug." Customers and managers both really like it when you fix "bugs."
Previous post Next post
Up