Apple’s thin plastic bumper cases, which fit around the steel frame of the iPhone and insulate the device’s external antenna, should address reception issues, Jobs said. The cases had retailed for $29 at the Apple Store, even though analysts had estimated Apple's manufacturing cost for the cases to be between $1 and $2.
“We do this because we love our users, and if we screw up, we pick ourselves up and we try harder,” Jobs said. The free cases will be offered at least through September 30, and users who have already purchased an iPhone case will receive a refund. The company has said that it expects its bumpers to sell out and will offer a limited number of other third-party cases for free.
Apple’s flagship smartphone has been panned for weeks by the blogs, users, and even late-night television hosts because of a widely reported problem with its antenna design. Users who hold the phone on its lower-left hand corner — where the antenna is positioned on the iPhone 4 — have sometimes experienced poor reception and dropped calls when not using a protective case.
But Jobs insisted that only 0.55% of iPhone 4 users have called AppleCare, the company’s technical support service, with complaints about the phone’s reception. He also said that the number of people returning the iPhone 4 is only a third of the number of those who brought the previous model, the iPhone 3GS, back to the store.
Apple’s U.S. carrier partner, AT&T, has reported that, based on a preliminary review of call data, the iPhone 4 only drops about one call per 100 calls more than the 3GS.
Jobs, who later said that he doesn’t use a case for his personal iPhone and has no problems with its antenna, then showed off the company’s $100 million testing chamber for smartphones and boasted that a team of highly trained PhD’s and experts carefully test each iteration of the phone that the company markets.
Jobs also attempted to hold competing smartphones in ways that appeared to cause them to lose signal strength. During the question-and-answer session that followed Jobs’ presentation, though, an Apple antenna engineer hedged when asked why the iPhone would lose signal when it was simply touched in a certain area, rather than gripped.
“When you touch the phone, you put yourself between the signal and your phone, so when you touch that spot you can attenuate the signal — and if you grip it with your whole hand — you can attenuate it even more,” said Bob Mansfield, the company’s chief hardware executive.
Apple’s CEO also hit back at a Bloomberg report claiming that a senior antenna expert had warned Jobs about problems with the iPhone 4’s antenna at an early stage in development. “That’s a crock, and we’ve challenged them to show proof that of that,” Jobs said, adding that the report was in fact “bullshit.”
Take comfort, Steve. I've worked for a long line of "imperfect" companies, within and outside the wireless industry. Maybe it's time to ditch the Microsoft testing methods before rolling the product out the door though.
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