After getting called out for having an issue every cell phone has, Apple did a photo shoot of a testing facility that every other cell phone manufacturer also has and used it as marketing.
Your comment reminds me of the Mad Men episode where they create a Lucky Strike ad campaign. The ad team offers up the slogan "It's Toasted" and the Lucky team replies that all cigarettes are toasted.
"It's Toasted" became the Lucky Strike slogan despite their protests and was a huge success. This wasn't entirely fiction of course, it was based on a true story.
We were talking about a similar thing at the Software Industry Conference today: apparently, telling people vacuously true things matters in some circumstances. For example, giving reasons using the word "because" causes compliance to requests: asking to cut in line at the copier works some of the time, asking to cut in line "because I'm in a rush" works more, but asking to cut in line at the copier "because I need to make copies" works almost as much (i.e. much better than having no explanation)!
If anyone else "dares"? What, like Apple's whole plan was to make competitors look bad if they publicize their facilities, as opposed to just doing damage control for the ass-whupping they've been getting in the press?
Does Steve Jobs have a curly mustache and monocle I don't know about?
Yes, I intentionally exaggerated. Apple isn't ruling the market with an iron fist (or a monocle). They are however making confident, clever marketing moves to continue to build their brand in inventive ways nobody has really done before. This recent one is especially clever in light of the fact that what they're doing isn't particularly inventive in an engineering sense, so the innovation is purely in public image. It's not going to completely counter their recent tailspin, but it's a lot stronger than I can imagine most other companies attempting. The only other one that I would believe capable of this sort of play is Coca-Cola.
And so yes, if anyone else does dare try the "we have cool testing facilities" move, they'll be patently copying Apple's marketing — not that this hasn't happened before.
The only other companies I've seen try to spotlight their facilities as being really cool and beneficial to customers have been car companies with their automated assembly lines and Intel. It doesn't work in a lot of circumstances, but there is definitely a huge cultural significance in the amazement at technology (or if you're not amazed, it's just nerd porn).
Well uh, Apple markets its products as being beyond Earth technology, extraterrestrial, life-changing, as if God himself had bestowed it upon us mere mortals...
... So yes, I don't think that's a ridiculous word to use.
If you haven't been following, the design of the antenna makes is such that you can short-circuit the antenna if you hold wrong. Even in areas with good to great coverage, this can make you drop calls and have weak or no reception.
Poor reception by AT&T is another real problem, but not at issue here.
Edit: More to the point, the grip that causes perhaps the greatest attenuation of signal is one of the more comfortable, natural grips for the phone. The effectiveness of any phone's antenna can be reduced if you hold it right. Most phones are designed so that the comfortable, natural ways to hold the phone minimally interfere with the signal.
Sure. Apple don't seem to acknowledge that their design is stupid anywhere. People will hold phones how they want to hold phones. It's ridiculous for anyone to claim they're holding it 'wrong'. If they're holding it 'wrong' then apple designed it 'wrong'.
Who needs those photos as marketing? I've seen enough YouTube videos entitled "Free cases!". Apple know how to play their market, those photos are just for the interested technical people.
Yea, because apple actually did it. :) Where was google with their photos of their insanely cool lab? If you wana take a jab at them make sure to kick them while they are down or they might think of a good comeback.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but so far this seems to be some excellent crisis communication.
I’m actually surprised by that. I always thought of Apple as a fairly undynamic one trick pony when it comes to PR. (The secrecy, suspense, big event and hype cycle.) I should have noticed something when they released their “Thoughts on Music” or “Thoughts on Flash” letters.
(— edit: wow. The top story right now on HN is not some article lamenting Apple’s reaction, it’s cool pictures of Apple’s testing facilities. This is fucking brilliant PR ;)
Will this be the next "intel inside" ploy? Except this time its "Apple's grab for your money inside"? Or "Steve Job's awesomeness inside"?
What was the quote? "The only thing worse than being talked about all the time, is not being talked about all the time". Because bad press can be turned into awesome press.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm guessing that the main thing that people will remember from this will be: "Wow, I bet Apple's competitors don't have a cool lab like that and that probably means their products aren't as advanced."
John Cage visits an anechoic chamber: 'Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, and yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."' - http://goo.gl/mFI5
Just as an FYI, an RF anechoic chamber is not the same as an acoustic anechoic chamber. One is designed for free-field testing of RF signals, the other for free-field testing of acoustic signals.
The one thing they never talked about is the difference between the iPhone 4's external antenna (exposed) and the internal antennas in most phones.
Testing a various websites shows that while most phones drop signal, the iPhone 4's signal dropped significantly more because the antenna is exposed and your skin comes in direct contact with the antenna rather than just in close proximity.
With the bumper "fixing" the problem, wouldn't putting the antenna inside the case essentially create the same fix by putting non-conductive material between the user and the antenna?
Dropped more (-24 dB vs -17 dB), and yet picks up signal in significantly more areas and is significantly more sensitive (-121 dB vs -113 db).
I like the innovative external antenna (Anandtech calls the design tradeoff "ballsy") and I like holding more calls in more places. I'm willing to hold it "right" in exchange.
Surely the solution though is to improve signal strength everywhere so it isn't an issue. Other (admittedly smaller) countries don't have any issues with cellphone coverage.
My questions is are those results due to the antenna being external or some other design feature of the antenna? Could they get similar performance with an internal antenna, or at least an antenna that had some insulation between the antenna and the user?
Fascinating. To my non-radio-engineer eyes the patterns look like acoustic dampers—is it an illusion that they resemble the foam wall inserts in a recording studio, and these are actually composed of a different material to affect megahertz radio waves?
Furthermore, how are they supposed to affect those waves, and to what end?
Wavelengths at RF frequencies and sound frequencies aren't very different; sound travels about 1/300000 as fast as EM radiation, but typical frequencies differ by about the same ratio.
In the RF chamber the foam inserts are impregnated with conductive material, sort of like antistatic IC foam.
The surfaces are designed to present maximal absorption area to any wavefronts within the room, and they're made all spiky and angular to disperse the reflections that do occur, not unlike the way a Stealth aircraft works. The goal, again in both the acoustical and RF test chambers, is to eliminate standing waves to the greatest extent possible, across the whole frequency range of interest. If you have standing waves, the measurements you make will have unwanted dependencies on the physical location of the transmitting and receiving antennas.
Play a sinewave through your speakers and you'll probably find large variations in loudness as you move around the room. The whole idea behind these expensive test chambers is to avoid that effect. They are also usually shielded to keep external sounds/EM fields out, but this is actually a secondary consideration for most users.
Edit: another reason for shielding the room, obviously, is so the company can operate things like base-station emulators without running afoul of the law.
This looks like something out of a James Bond movie villian's hideout - all it needs is a self-destruct sequence announced over the PA system by some lackey with a monotone voice who inexplicably sits through the entire process while paitiently waiting to be engulfed in flames by the resulting explosion.
A European pop band (Beborn Beton) had a track called 'Encounting', which they clearly mixed up with 'And counting', which is what those guys say in the movies.
Indeed, look at how they describe different phone models -- which of these are not like the others?:
In our tests, iPhone 4 dropped from 3 bars to 1 bar
In our tests, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 dropped from 5 bars to 1 bar
In our tests, the HTC Droid Eris dropped from 4 bars to 0 bars
In our tests, the Samsung Omnia II dropped from 4 bars to 1 bar
In our tests, iPhone 3GS dropped from 3 bars to 1 bar
I noticed some time ago that they absolutely refuse to refer to their mobile devices using articles, and avoid personal possessives whenever possible. It's always "with iPhone, you can blah blah blah", never "with the iPhone", and rarely "with your iPhone". They exclusively refer to their product as if it were an abstract idea, never grounded in physical reality.
It was always something quietly infuriating before, but here they've intentionally tried to contrast themselves against their competitors.
Now, hold on a sec -- people refer to me without an article, and I consider myself quite firmly grounded in physical reality. The point being, they're looking to talk about these devices on a personal level... the way you talk about some_one_ in your life. This is likely just as distasteful as the scenario you describe, but I think it is more accurate.
So if this not just FUD. I wonder why all these companies obviously put the antenna in the wrong place. If your hand affects the signal strength through the case, you shouldn't put the antenna at the bottom of the phone, because that is where you hold it.
It is due to regulations about radiation exposure to your head. With the antenna on the bottom, as all phones do these days, you don't get as much to your head, as if it was on the top of the phone.
Funny how movies there show that iPhone loses bars after gently holding by the base but you have to grab HTC Droid Eris really high and squeeze it like mad to get the bars down.
I tried this on my 3GS at different places. Some places, the bars dropped from 5 --> 0. Others it went from 5 --> 3. In some other places, it didn't drop at all. It's pretty random, but the effect is certainly repeatable at the same location.
I noticed just now that my iOS 4.0.0 3G was at 4 bars. Lifting it slightly, I got up to 5. Holding the base, sandwiched between both hands, I managed to push it down to 2 bars (you have to wait for a bit, there seems to be a delay of five to twenty seconds between each step).
However, I have to wonder at this PR, changing the discussion from whether it is unusual to dropbars from how the phone is held, from whether it is unusually easy to miss-hold the iPhone 4.
How rigid and tough are those spikes? If you fell off the walkway while walking out to the test platform in the first picture, would it likely cause serious injury to you, or would it just crush a bunch of spikes and get you in trouble with your boss?
Spikes in RF labs are generally a soft foam, so you would probably just crush a bunch of spikes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber for more information about these kinds of rooms
I have been on a tour of a chamber like that recently, and the blue material in the spikes has roughly the rigidity of cardboard. The material is reinforced by metal wires, however. Even though the wires are not very thick (you could bend them with your hands easily), I would imagine you would hurt yourself quite badly if you fell onto them.
In fact, the whole chamber is shaped like a cube, and the measurements must be made in the middle of the cube. In the chamber I visited, the "floor" was made of a wire mesh suspended at mid-height inside the cube, so there it was impossible to fall.
Ho ho ho. This chamber is a mere shadow of the facility that they test "The Field" in. Enter "The Pit" and you are standing in a three dimensional cross section of a high level, multi-dimensional reality disorter. Foam covered rotating tesseracts line the constantly phasing containment vessel. What ever you do, never approach the perimeter when in operation lest you be turned inside out in the most horrible manner imaginable and your quarks redistributed evenly throughout the cosmos as a slight fluctuation in the universal gravitational constant...
I was in one of the cell network provider's testing lab a few times. They also do things like RF testing before putting the device on sale, but their lab doesn't look any similar to that. They have a bunch of Faraday cages (think of labs with sheet metal walls) and lots of RF emulation equipment - phone's getting connected through the RF port on the back; RF emulators take care of simulating any bad RF conditions that you could possibly imagine. So, their labs don't look that fancy at all. Still they manage to have devices that could be held any way you want.
I don't see how this helps their situation. This just adds weight to the idea that they willfully ignored the problem and shipped the phone with full knowledge of the antenna problems.
See Anandtech's followup article from yesterday. Apple innovated on the antenna, trading possible (and typical) attenuation for more sensitivity.
Anandtech feels they "willfully" went for more sensitivity for most situations, at the price of variability depending on certain rarer signal situations. He calls the design choice "ballsy".
Does anyone know what material is used in making those cone-like pokey things? My immediate guess would be that its some form of dense foam to damp waves; but what exactly are they?
Before clicking the link I was about to post a pedantic "please change to a headline that doesn't editorialize", but after a second of looking at the pictures...holy crap! That is (objectively) insanely cool! :)
I bet you the money in my pocket that this lab was not called "Antenna design and test lab" prior to the press conference; part of the brilliance in this deflection of attention is most certainly found it the naming itself of this awesome place.
How can they make such a massive investment in this type of thing and end up with such a big 'oops'? It must be heartbreaking for the antenna engineers.
What would it take to convince you that it isn't a "Big 'oops'"? [Serious question]
I just checked my EVO manual and it specifically says where not to touch the phone (upper left). The difference seems to be that people learned where not to touch the iPhone and then made a huge deal about it as if it was something new.
"To assure optimal phone performance and ensure human exposure to RF energy is within the guidelines set
forth in the relevant standards, always use your device only in its normal-use position. Contact with the
antenna area may impair call quality and cause your device to operate at a higher power level than needed.
Avoiding contact with the antenna area when the phone is IN USE optimizes the antenna performance and
the battery life. "
A co-worker just showed me his new iPhone 4 this afternoon. I joked with him that he had interesting timing, and tried to show him the antenna issue. I've never used an iPhone 4, so I figured it would be easy to replicate the issue. It wasn't, and the reception at my office is terrible. I was able to drop a bar off by cupping most of the phone in both hands, but couldn't kill the signal completely. I think my co-worker installed the software update already, so perhaps this is partially why.
I have an iPhone 3GS and have put off upgrading because of the signal issue. I figured there was some media hype, but wouldn't have figured I'd be unable to replicate the issue.
Generally I would agree with that. Except that location on the iPhone 4 is rather unfortunately placed. And even more so, when Consumer Reports weighed in. I tend to respect CR quite highly. If they say there is a problem, I tend to believe them.
I felt the same way about Consumer Reports until they kept releasing new 'reports' about things that generally looked like link-bait to me. They did their whole initial review of the unit without noticing the problem, i.e. it worked as they expected it to work. It wasn't until it was brought to their attention that you could touch the spot and change the signal that they did the followup report. Then they released something about duct-tape working. Then posted something else about bumpers working, etc. It makes it very hard for me to have confidence in their testing after that.
It's a 2-meter handy-talkie for amateur radio operators. It operates at about 1/6 to 1/12 the frequency of a cell phone, so the antenna needs to be commensurately larger.
Seeing a giant 10-story, foam-padded test facility doesn't exactly seem like real world use to me, but then again I know nothing about proper cell phone testing procedures.
This is like equating the use of a wind-tunnel in airplane design to not 'real-world' use. Should all airplanes be tested by being built and then just taken for a flight?
I don't necessarily think it's a good ad, but I can understand it. EDS became the name on my dad's check for several years at Canadian National Railways, when they did their large windows 98 rollouts, y2k fixes and certification, and windows 2000 rollouts. I can see the metaphor of building/repairing the plane in flight.
Apple engineers tested iPhone 4 in a variety of scenarios, environments, and conditions in order to gauge performance. They spent thousands of hours in cities in the U.S. and throughout the world testing iPhone 4 call quality, dropped-call performance, call origination and termination, and in-service time. They tested iPhone 4 while stationary, at high and low speeds, and in urban, dense urban, and highway environments. In low-coverage areas and good-coverage areas, during peak and off-peak hours iPhone 4 was field-tested in nearly every possible coverage scenario across different vendor and carrier equipment all over the world."
-- Here's where Professor Steve sits down in his wheelchair and uses this helmet that amplifies his reality distortion abilities. We call it "Manzana".
Ah. So where did you get your degree in electrical engineering or physics? I just want to know where you get such a degree without ever having learned about anechoic chambers.
I'm not taking sides on whether or not this is a design flaw, but once you have a PR debacle you pretty much have to take some action to deal with it. Imagine if Toyota was just saying "actually no, the 'acceleration problem' with our cars is not statistically significant in comparison to other cars after controlling for demographic variables like the age of the driver".
And it was certainly curious how the "in depth" LA Times article (saying the Toyota problem was real) neglected to mention that all the cases they covered in the article--and listed ages for right in the article--were senior citizens...
No it doesn't. It is a relatively cheap way for Apple to show they "care" and appease the people who have issues with the design.
I'm not saying if the design is good or bad, but there are tons of instances in history of companies doing things to alleviate minor issues that had the potential to turn into massive PR cases and create much greater losses over the long-term.
Wow...that is so impressive (not)
I have seen tons of these anechoic chambers used by antenna manufacturers...Apple and their amazing marketing gimmics...
This lab looks really cool....but the timing of this page being seeded makes me believe its little more than a PR stunt! :) kudos apple fr givin us the iphone 3g/3gs/4...but the antennae problem was just too embarrassing for u guys!
No offense, but I find the humor in this reference far more insightful than the majority of the other offhand comments in this thread (that have many up-votes). The satire here is relevant and appropriate in my opinion, not tangential. I understand HN tends to frown on offhand comments (as it generally should), but knee-jerk downvoting humor without considering the context will make HN a dull boy. Voting up or down shouldn't be based on whether you agree or disagree with the comment, but whether the comment has merit. downvotes welcome
This is so silly. There's a feynman quote where he was talking about how at MIT they had this really fancy test facility, but it never produced any results, because the people running the tests were in another room an never saw anything happen.
Then at Princeton, where they were in the same room, the machine (which was much less fancy) produced much more information because people saw what was going on as it was running.
Seems to me that this could easily be something of the case. Fancy test facility with no grounding in anything.
Furthermore isn't it kinda more embarrassing when, instead of admitting there was a problem, they just say that the phone was tested. It seems to imply that the issue is intentional.
The difference here is that the guys at Princeton weren't clueless linkbaiters, or folks who think that the fundamental unit of RF signal strength is "the bar". The Princeton physicists were physicists. They did science. They took actual data, made actual scientific arguments backed by that data, and published them.
The subtext of Apple's PR here is: You want to have an argument about RF engineering and the complexities and tradeoffs involved? Bring it. Apple's engineering team stands by its work. But you better be prepared to argue like an engineer, not a gossip columnist.
First off what I'm saying is that while fancy pictures of high end lab equipment might look impressive, it doesn't mean that it is the best way to design things, even when the people doing it are really good.
Secondly, while I understand that the intent of this is to tell people something along the lines of, "We didn't give you a defective device, we really did a great job testing it first, look at our facility", it can easily be spun as, "well you can't have done that good a job because even with all this fancy equipment you still released a product that has a design issue"
Of course, then Apple responded like the PR specialists they are, presenting everything in The Bar (even going as far as to directly compare different manufacturers' bars!) rather than using a proper unit and risk confusing people with scary numbers.
But what percentage of iPhone users and potential iPhone customers who might have heard "iPhone has an antenna problem" will understand that all that fancy equipment might mean nothing?
