Spots On Your Apple
A nice Lee Judge cartoon from the Kansas City Star to look at while waiting for the announcement of when there will be an announcement, possibly announcing the imminent announcement that could be about what might be a problem, or not, that might affect a product that was recently announced by Apple.
People are speculating that someone might tell them that if they actually try to hold the newest iPhone, they will ground out the antenna that was part of the elegantly designed stainless steel band that runs around the outside of the device. But maybe, not.
Oh, I had this problem with my first portable transistor radio, but a couple of layers of electrical tape fixed it… mostly. It was AM, so it was hard to tell.
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Also the subject of a Rudy Park three-strip series recently, where Rudy (who always has the latest fruity electronic toys) finds out that his nemesis Sadie has purchased an iPhone 4 (which he thinks is just so ultra-awesome)… just so she can try to make calls in the coffee shop where he works and taut him as the calls drop. “Oh look, my call is ringing, and someone is answering… hah! Call dropped *AGAIN*!” “Just go away, please, Sadie, just go away!”
That said, once the thing comes back in stock sometime last month, I’m likely to get one. My old iPhone 3G is just too slow for the new software. Apple apparently is taking lessons from the old Wintel duopoly — make the software run ultra-sluggish on the old hardware in order to drive sales of the new hardware. Funny how that works, huh?! Oh, the antenna issue? I’ll probably just put a case on the thing. Or if I don’t, a strip of black tape. Heh.
– Badtux the Geeky Penguin
Oh yeah, someone else noted that Apple has never held a press conference that was not about releasing a new product. The speculation is that Apple is going to release a new product Friday…. iTape. Which you place around the edge of your iPhone to keep it from iGrounding out. Which will *only* be $30 at your local Apple Store. 😈
I noted at one of the news sites that was carrying the story, in the comments someone suggested that Apple would send owners a band to cover the antenna, and the very next comment was: Apple giving something away for free? What planet are you from?
A couple sites are featuring duct tape fixes, but I would use the silicon tape, because it only sticks to itself.
One of the big problems with the level of security that surrounds Apple products is that they aren’t subjected to real world testing before release. This one was really restricted after that prototype was left in a bar.
By contrast, the plastic band at the bottom of my Arai motorcycle helmet that holds the liner on started coming loose around the 4th year that I had the helmet. These helmets have a 5 year warranty, so I went online and sure enough, there was a recall for a glue issue with a warning “do NOT try to fix this yourself, most glues won’t hold on the plastics we use for our helmets.” I dutifully sent the helmet in, and they sent me back the helmet all properly glued back together and with a three-year extension in the warranty. They even paid the postage to send it to them in the first place.
Now *THAT* is customer service. Sadly, nobody in the technology industry would even think of doing that for a YEAR-old product, nevermind a 4-year-old one…
– Badtux the Service Penguin
Customer service? What a quaint 20th century notion, to actually care what customers think about your product.
Once they discovered that people would pay not to wait on hold, customer service went the way of the glaciers and melted away.
If it was a car, it would already be recalled and fixed for free, but technology has escaped that “problem”.
It can only be hoped that someone finally develops a competing product to at least bring the price down.
There actually is a competing product now — Android. I was looking seriously at the HTC Evo 4G from Sprint. It has its own issues though — a screen that tends to detach at the bottom and a grounding issue that makes it unresponsive unless you’re actually holding it in both hands. Another competing product, the Motorola Droid X on Verizon, just came out today, as did a new Samsung competitor on T-Mobile. The basic problem with all of these is that Android is Linux, for better and for worse — the “worse” part being the haphazard user interface.
Every application on the iPhone works the same as every other application on the iPhone because they’re all forced through the same restrictive UI library that dictates to them what they’re allowed to do, which gives a unity of user interface experience that you simply don’t get on Linux. So for geeks, Android is a worthy competitor to the iPhone, but for ordinary folks, Android phones are just too friggin’ tedious. Like Macs, iPhones just work. Like Linux, Android just wants YOU to work to customize it to your own desires. For the majority of people, who just want a phone that does a few non-phone things like play iTunes, not a friggin’ supercomputer in their handheld, the iPhone meets their needs far, far better.
So anyhow, I’m still debating what to get. I have three weeks to think about it, at which point everything I might want to buy will be in stock. Wish me luck :).
– Badtux the Phoney Penguin
According to Apple Management… people who buy Apple products are morons who will put up with anything. And in my 3 years experience as an Apple Svc Manager, I can honestly say that Apple are correct. No other company selling any other product would get away with a fraction of what Apple does. 🙂 It always amazes and highly amuses me. 😉 😛 I am almost certain there is an Apple internal dictionary where “Customer = Alpha/Beta Tester”. I met very few Apple customers in my time with them who would ever admit they made a bad error, no matter how much pain Apple put them through! And yeah, the alternatives are not much, if any, better… but for the most part, they don’t charge as much as Apple do for the privilege of testing their products for them. 😆 I finally quit after a couple of years being yelled at by Apple for actually forcing Apple to honor their warranties! And that is a fact. Apple expects their service people to find any way possible to deny warranty claims (as do many companies these days), and the cost they charge out of warranty for parts and service would make even Porsche drool!
Now, they do what they usually do…
Apple looks for an Iphone antenna engineer
They have finally decided after 4 versions of the product to hire someone who actually knows what they are doing. 😆
Apple’s iPhone 4 denial: insulting or ignorant?
Expect problems with the first few iPad’s, just as there were with the iPod’s, MacBook, etc, etc… etc! 😆
Speaking of Dictionaries… I found an old definition I found somewhere years ago that made me laugh all over again! 😀 😆
Win.dows: n. A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which were created by two-bit companies that can’t stand one bit of competition.
OT: I haven’t been around much, and won’t be for awhile. Seeing several specialists (med) and doing lot’s of tests, etc. *shrug* Lucky you. 😉 😛
One more… for the rad (so to speak)! 😆
Steve Jobs denies Judas Phone antenna problems
Just keep in mind that if you think that there’s anything wrong with your iPhone 4, it’s the media’s fault.
In fact, according to Jobs, nothing is Apple’s fault.
Yup. And for the record… I haven’t believed a single thing Jobs has said since he was *reinstated* as BOSS @ Apple after his ‘Next’ failure, and he did the backroom deal with Gates.
Since Woz’ left Apple has been about marketing, not engineering. External design is more important than circuit boards.
They do, eventually, fix their products, but you have to wait for them to mature before buying one.
Badtux, et al. are right – essentially they are saying nothing is actually wrong, but here’s a free [I didn’t know that Apple knew that word] product so you will stop your whining.
They didn’t make a friends, but they don’t think they need them because the alternatives require too much thought.
As for the deal with Gates, he seems to have the M$ ability to always screw up a product launch, while figuring out that when you finally reduce the bugs to an acceptable level, you call a new product and make people pay for it.
“Feature: A bug as described by the marketing department.” — Apple 2 Programmer’s Manual, Glossary, 1978
My takeaway from Apple’s press conference: “There’s nothing wrong with the iPhone 4, but here, have a free case on us just to shut you up.”
I’ve been wavering over what phone to get for some time now. I’m still wavering. Despite its flaws, the iPhone 4 is still a very good product. If it sucked the decision would be easy — don’t support evil, don’t buy it. But it’s really still the standard to beat in the smartphone business…
– Badtux the Wavering Penguin
It is a pain to have to configure every program separately to get them to do what you want in a way that you don’t have to think about, and can lose the manual after a week without worrying. [From working support, a week is about the limit for any user to have a manual for their equipment or software.]
You want a tool, not a project.
Indeed, and the iPhone 4 is a tool. You learn how to work one program, you pretty much know how to work all of them, Steve Jobs is a fascist control freak but that’s the upside of him being a fascist control freak, your application *vill* vork ze vay Steve vants it to vork, as in, just like every other application on the iPhone, or it doesn’t make it into the App Store. Thus why he refuses to allow Flash on the iPhone — Flash could be used to write apps that don’t comply with Apple’s UI standards, and that simply Shall Not Be Allowed, period.
But that’s the upside. The downside is that you’re restricted from doing a lot of things that you’d like to do with what’s basically a modern Unix OS in a handheld unless you hack (“jailbreak”) the thing. Which is annoying… but as annoying as running Android? That’s what’s so frustrating here…
– Badtux the Phoney Penguin
It’s down to weighing the level of aggravation, and you won’t know unless you live with the different devices for a while.
Eventually there will be another “killer app” that is just too useful to be ignored, and things will move on or die.
A lot of great hardware never went anywhere, because it couldn’t run the current “killer app”.