"Probably the biggest thing I’ve taught the team at Apple is that people never know what they’re supposed to think about anything. This is true in Hollywood, in the book business, in the art world, in politics. And especially in technology.
"So we put out a new phone and everyone is sitting there wondering what they should think about it. What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.
"So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.
"It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it."
....
"Which brings me back to iPhone 4 and the antenna issue. Right now you’re confused. You’re worried. You don’t know what to believe. You just wish someone would come along and tell you that everything is squared away and there’s nothing to worry about."
"Well, stay tuned for that. And remember: There is no spoon."
Fake Steve was eerily prescient here. From June 24: "First of all, this is not a big issue. If you’re experiencing this, most likely it’s not the phone at all — most likely you’re just living in a place where there’s bad reception, in which case the solution is simple: you need to move." http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/you-assholes-need-to-stop-s...
Compare that to the real thing: "Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place."
Dan Lyons has been covering tech for a long time, so he'd hopefully get some things right. And this isn't the first time he's been spot on--his blogs on Schmidt's involvement on the Apple board are amazing and hilarious.
But every time he's right these days, I think it's karma balancing out how wrong he was on SCO-Linux.
Hitler understood the exact same thing. Please realize I am in no way saying there is any similarity or connection with Steve Jobs beyond this narrow point. Just pointing this out. In fact I think a lot of people with strong personalities and charisma who achieve great success have skills in interpersonal communication and manipulation that exceed the average, and are good at 'hacking' this particular weakness of human minds.
I could care less about the signal problem. The proximity sensor thing is insanely annoying. I am much much more likely to end the call or put it on mute than I am to drop the call due to reception issues. I've exchanged the phone once already and the replacement phone has the same issue. At first, I thought it was my face (shape? texture?), or the way I was holding it (am I suppose to push it with force against my ear to make sure zero space is between the phone and me?). No luck. Right now, all my calls have issues with it unless I put it on speaker phone. But then, I shift the problem from my end to the receiver's end (other side: "what? I can't hear you, can you repeat that, wayne?"). I'd rather them fix how the proximity works, than fool around with how the antenna displays.
So, RDF was hard coded into the bar display (50% = 5 bars?), and the sudden drop shows up if you're at the floor of that green bar, then you use your hand to cover the phone and force it to drop slightly, it will go into freefall mode since you're now crossing the threshold. Fix is to remove the RDF.
I second that. I love my iPhone 4, but the proximity sensor problem causes me to accidentally mute calls, call random people in my contacts list, etc., etc. It is beyond frustrating and I'm surprised there hasn't been a greater mention of this.
yea, while the antenna is arguably theoretical/subjective (apple: faulty formula / world: rdf?), the proximity sensor is very real and affects calls now. i too am also surprised people are focusing on antenna and not proximity.
Thank you - the proximity sensor issue is a much bigger deal for me as well!
I took my iPhone into a genius appointment yesterday. They took it into the back area and upon returning informed me that they installed a "patch," I couldn't restore from my previous back-up, and that it was a known problem.
Apparently this is a software issue that only affects those upgrading their iPhones (the iPhone 4 doesn't like something in the back-up), not brand-new users.
wait, what? genius bar can fix it with a patch? did they install the patch for you and did that fix the issue for you? do you now have an iphone that has proximity sensor fixed? when they returned the phone, were all your apps/settings intact or was it fresh? what does your about screen say for version numbers?
That's what I was told, but to be honest, I doubt anything was installed.
All my apps/ settings were intact and my version number is the same as the regular shipped build.
I was told to restore my iPhone fresh (which would delete the installed patch, no?) and not to restore from back-up, which is possibly the fix itself. I'm going to do it now and will report back on the results... did you upgrade from a previous iPhone and restored from a previous back-up?
yes i did, as soon as i got back with the replacement i restored from previous (original) iphone 4 backup made earlier that day. however the first iphone 4 i got, i didn't do a restore. proximity sensor issue was there too (which prompted the need for an exchange).
Initially, problem appears to be fixed. I can hold the phone around an inch away from my face, at varying angles, while the screen remains disabled. Before, any cradling of my phone / shoulder would make the screen active, but now it remains disabled.
Just tested against a co-workers by placing on a flat table and moving fingers to cover up the sensor... mine seems to work consistently within about an inch of cover-up, his is hit-or-miss even while physically covering / pressing on the sensor.
nice. what steps did you take? did you do a reset and delete all settings on the device? when you say "restore from original instead of from backup", what do you mean by "original"? do you do both steps (reset on device, then some restore from itunes?)
isn't it a relief to know it's not your face and not the way you're holding it? once i found out others were experiencing it, it was a great relief. you can now stop doing hand gymnastics with the phone and wait for some fix too.
Still have to do hand (and shoulder/ear/etc) gymnastics while waiting for the fix. Though, yes, it's a relief to know it's not my face nor just my particular phone that's broken.
There are far more people and bloggers bitching about the Antenna issue, so it's become Apple's biggest priority. Just give it time, these issues have a way of getting solved.
i hear you. the part that irks me is that in the year since the time of 3GS release, this passed QA for call making. while we give them more time now, we suffer the affected calls. <sarcasm> maybe Gary Powell was the guy in charge of making sure calls worked properly </sarcasm>
Ever since the first iPhone was launched I've made sure to complain very little about it. Do you remember how bad smart phones were before Apple entered the game? I do, I went through about 5 before getting an iPhone. I'm astonished these devices do everything they do, to be completely honest. Little issues like these don't get me down.
>Ever since the first iPhone was launched I've made sure to complain very little about it.
Complaining gets issues fixed, period. Living with issues and accepting them may be better for your health and outlook on life, but it doesn't bring about progress. If Apple had just accepted the things wrong with smartphones there would be no iPhone in the first place. I agree that complaining and entitlement sometimes go too far (though not in the case of dropped calls; a phone should be able to be used as a phone), I'd say that complaining overall remains very much a good thing. Satisfaction leads to stagnation.
Edit: And although I don't agree with your post, I didn't find it downvote worthy. I hate to bring karma into discussions, but it seems like it keeps things more civil when one side doesn't downvote the other, so I don't.
For now just lock the phone with the top button during every call. The antenna seems to be a much bigger issue and possibly even a hardware problem whereas the proximity sensor issue sounds like a calibration problem.
You can only lock the phone with the top button if you're using headphones or on speakerphone (or a Bluetooth headset, I assume). Otherwise, lock hangs up the call.
This doesn't seem to jive with AnandTech's testing which ignored the bars completely and installed some software to read the signal strength directly.
Their conclusion was that the iPhone 4 had better reception overall than the 3GS for various reasons, (a fact which Apple seem to be clinging to like a life raft) but that the external antennae was still faulty even when held "normally" and if fixed would make a major difference in areas with poor reception.
Anand doesn't mention it explicitly, and neither do you, but I'm assuming that signal to noise ratio drops when you short the iPhone 4 antennae too otherwise his conclusion doesn't make sense:
"At the end of the day, Apple should add an insulative coating to the stainless steel band, or subsidize bumper cases. It's that simple."
The problem is that Anandtech's conclusion is out of place with the rest of their article, even if you take into consideration the shorting of the antennae.
The iPhone 4 loses 24.6dB of signal strength when cupped at the bottom vs 17.7dB for the Nexus one. If Apple should be required to add an insulative coating to the stainless steel, then shouldn't Google also be required to make their phone thicker (or make other adjustments) until it reaches the 14.3dB reduction of the 3GS?
If Apple is required to subsidize a bumper case, to bring the signal reduction down to 7.2dB, then shouldn't Google also be required to subsidize a case (even with a case, Google's signal reduction would still be 7.7dB).
Also, the iPhone 4 can hold a call quite well at the absolute minimum signal level of -113dBm. If the Nexus One can't do this, then should we demand that Google recall the Nexus one until it can do so?
This whole issue and the hundreds of news stories around it are ridiculous. This is not a black-and-white issue of the antenna working or not. The phone has a weaker signal for some people, and a stronger signal for others, depending on how you hold it and where you are. Take that into consideration when choosing a phone. If it's not working out for you, then just return the phone and buy one you like.
What does the Nexus One have to do with the iPhone's antenna issue? There is no oversite body that is 'requiring' anyone to do anything. It's not Nexus One owners that are complaining about the antenna issue, it's iPhone users.
Actually, the people I've heard about this non-issue the most from are Android evangelists and Apple haters that are looking for any reason possible to trash Apple. So it might make sense to compare it to their beloved Nexus One in a head to head comparison.
I believe losing 24dB of signal strength is roughly ten times worse than losing 17dB. As I understand it, there is no other phone out there with this level of signal attenuation problem.
NB: I am not a signalology expert and only vaguely understand decibels.
As other's have noted, the number of dBm being received by an antenna is not really a very interesting figure. What is much more interesting is to know what is happening to the signal to noise ratio.
Imagine someone talking to you in a load bar. That person can, by shouting at you, make themself understood - but just barely. Although the signal is high, the noise (bar music, other conversations etc) is also high, and the quality of the communication is much reduced. That same person talking in a library could use a tone just barely above a whisper, and still be more clearly understood because the noise floor is so much lower in a library.
Many people don't realise that noise is actually the limiting factor in communications - if a signal has been attenuated, we can always just amplify it back up, but amplification amplifies the noise as well as the signal. Eventually, once the signal and the noise reach roughly equal amplitudes, amplification just gives you the noisy bar situation, you can't ever get back to the quiet library...
Bringing this back to the iPhone's antenna, we same to be in the library case, rather than the bar case. The signal that is being received when the antenna is being held is much quieter than what we see in other phones, but when we look at the only metric that really counts - bandwidth - we see that the iPhone is achieving consistently high transfer speeds, even when the antenna spacing has been bridged by someone's hand.
If I had to guess, based on the anandtech data, what we are seeing is an antenna that performs extremely well at reducing noise from the environment. Alternatively, the calibration of the sensor giving the signal strength readings in the 4G might not be terribly good. Either way, the independent tests done so far have all indicated that the iPhone 4G is outperforming every other phone out there at the moment, when looking at signal throughput.
Apple has claimed not touching the black gap or using a case helps. Random people online seem to think that sticky tape or nail polish can fix the problem. Anand seems to think some thin layer of diamond would do the job too.
Are you saying it wouldn't work? And if not could you explain why not, and what would be needed?
I'm also a suspicious of the insulative coating fix. I think the proposed solution hinges on the idea that electrically isolating the hand from the conductive surface of the antenna would prevent it from loading/bridging the antenna. While a thin insulating layer would accomplish this at DC, it may not at higher frequencies, especially when you get up close to the GHz range.
Your finger and the metal of the antenna are essentially two conductors separated by a thin insulator, which forms a capacitor. A capacitor blocks DC current, but its impedance (resistance) goes down as the frequency of the signal increases. What tesseract is suggesting is that the frequencies in the antenna are so high that our capacitor's resistance is practically nil; the thin insulator essentially does nothing to fix the problem.
A possible way to fix this is by lowering the capacitance of our capacitor. The simplest way to do this is to simply increase the distance between the two conductors, i.e. move the finger farther from the antenna. If you look at Apple's bumper case, you'll notice that it is far thicker than any of the proposed insulating layers.
I think that what he's trying to say is that at high frequencies thin coating is not enough. You've got a similar situation in capacitors where with no physical and conductive connection between the sheets, you get the effect of a good conductor of alternating current. You'd create a similar effect by coating the antenna and pressing your conductive (to some extent) finger on the coating - you'd be a part of a large capacitor.
How exactly would that affect the signal is up for discussion. It depends on how conductive is your body, what's the thickness of the coating, what area would be needed to create a visible effect, etc. etc.
It seemed to me to actually jive with AnandTech's testing, and with user experience with the holding problem occurring in already weak signal areas. To wit many report that they only have the full drop in some places.
As for holding the phone, I'm not so troubled by the antennae, could it be better, yes, but is it that terrible, doesn't seem so.
My thoughts as well. The Apple article seems to be saying exactly what the AnandTech article said:
However, in locales that have less signal, but where iOS
still displays 5 bars, the drop of 24 dB is visualized
much differently. For example, at another test location,
signal without holding the phone is -89 dBm, which is
still displayed as 5 bars. Cup the phone, and you'll fall
all the way to -113 dBm. All the bars dramatically
disappear one after the other, people think they've
dramatically lost all the signal, and you know the rest...
That's not what the parent claimed. He claimed they changed perception. Which way did it change is not really important. They change what you see, but the reception / what really happens stayed exactly the same.
To phrase that another way, it's not that covering the antennae gives you poor reception, it's that you've always had poor reception but didn't realize it.
Doesn't seem right to me, as I thought I had hear complaints about calls being dropped upon covering the antenna - not just fewer bars.
Nobody would be that surprised if hugging the antenna causes a call to be dropped when the signal was already marginal, but if you thought that the signal was strong, it would be a big disappointment. The iPhone 4's design, which doesn't make it at all obvious where the antenna is, compounds the gap between what the user thinks is happening and what actually is.
"...which doesn't make it at all obvious where the antenna is..."
Ironically, I now have a much better idea of the iPhone 4's antenna location than that of any cell phone I've owned since they had protruding antennae.
Yes, my iPhone 4 essentially mutes immediately when you tap the gap. That's presumably a big drop in SNR, enough to silence the call, but for a brief tap, the call is not dropped. Note: the bars drop with a much greater delay, so there seems to be some kind of time averaging going on.
It's not a huge deal to me, but changing antenna execution (if not design) fundamentally, seems to have been quite a rash move, when suddenly the phone acquires a new behavior that other phones don't have.
This sounds exactly right, considering all the reports about the signal issue mention that it's worse in areas where coverage isn't great to begin with.
If the "mistaken" network reporting really was an attempt to make the reception look better than it is, I wonder whether AT&T was involved in or informed of the decision.
Just did this experiment with my Nexus One:
Lying on the couch: -75dbm.
Held by the top away from body: -70dbm.
Held by the top by ear: -75 - -87dbm, depending on which direction I face.
Held across the bottom by ear: -75 - -97dbm, depending on direction.
So it seems that in the worst case, holding it across the bottom attenuates the signal by about 10dbm, i.e. by a factor of 10, compared to holding it across the top, which is about the same effect as the relative position of your head vs. the tower.
It's weird, though, that in the best case, holding it by the bottom has no effect at all on signal. You'd naively think that the best case would be when the phone is on the side of your head facing the tower, in which case the hand across the bottom should make maximum difference. I guess this just goes to show how nonintuitive the results are of loading the antenna with a bunch of conductive goo of strange shape...
I can't recall ever seeing my iPhone report 2 or 3 bars -- it's always a very low or very high signal indication. And yet, so many times I've gotten bad performances at "full signal"...
"As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund."
This is more pragmatic than bitching on the Internet (I concede a difference between investing and reporting these problems and merely bitching) or class action lawsuits[1]. Vote with your wallet, eh?
There shouldn't be. I believe most cell companies give you a 30 day window to change your mind and cancel service.
Verizon does, and I ended up taking advantage of that when I returned the Droid and switched back to the iPhone after 2 weeks. Unfortunately, because Verizon's billing department is terrible, they charged me the ETF even though they shouldn't have and I had to go talk to a CSR to get it removed.
Just after releasing a phone that uses a metal ring all around the chassis as an antenna (which is something that perplexed every engineer living outside of the reality distortion field as soon as they saw the first pictures of the phone), they discovered that they've always used the wrong algorithm to calculate the signal strength.
Not really a coincidence: users are much more likely to complain about this problem due to the new antenna design being so prominent in the marketing. If Apple never said that the antenna was the metal rim (and assumingly are telling the truth here) then people would not be forming these theories.
It's interesting to me the language calling it a "metal rim" and "metal band", when Jonathan Ive says it's a solid slab of metal, that the groove is machined in. The iFixit teardown makes it appear that the groove is machined in as well, and the metal you see is all part of a slab.
I contrast Ive's comments and iFixit's teardown with the Keynote presentation, and think someone's simplifying something in the explanations.
From what I've seen, on the right hand side, the groove is effectively 'fake' - designed to create a symmetrical look. One part of the rim is small (3G), and the other is larger, (WiFi) and has the 'fake groove'.
Well, the dB to bars transformation does have some peculiar bar widths, http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/apple/iphone4/ba... , (some might even say intentionally misleading). But they chose to tempt antenna fate by putting the antennas in electrical contact with the user in normal operation. That was a design choice most other manufactures don't make, and, according to Anandtech's review, it has had real and measurable impact on the performance beyond the "holding-it" factor for other phones. They still aren't copping to their choice having added that extra performance hit.
yeah. what they were saying is that AT&T's suggested method to calculate bars is better, but that they went ahead and displayed more bars in week areas to give the illusion of signal strength.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if the problem is just the software that displays the number of bars, why does the iPhone 4 drop more bars than other iPhones which are running the same software?
It seems like there's still a problem with the antenna design that was just made more obvious by the software.
I think what's obviously going on is that Apple was deliberately displaying more bars in areas where there was week signal in an act of deception to try and make up for AT&T's crappy network.
Sure. But, in my opinion at least, his "Thoughts on Flash" seemed much more carefully worded than this.
Everyone refers to signal strength as the quantity of "bars" they have, so I suppose this is the colloquial way to write this. But sentences like "Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place." just boggles my mind that it made it through Apple PR.
This is the same company that has the following boilerplate on the bottom of their press releases: "Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh. Apple continues to lead the industry with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system, and iLife, iWork and professional applications. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store, has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices."
"Thoughts on Flash" would have gone through several lawyers, as there's a real chance of a serious lawsuit in that instance. This one would be more marketing driven and would probably only get a cursory review.
From paragraph six, "We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see."
It's a psychological thing. A few extra pixels do indeed give the illusion of better network reception, albeit the actual level doesn't change.
Similar to designing progress bars, the actual progress is hidden from the user. Instead, the user is presented with the illusion that the process is progressing faster than it actually is.
good observation. i'm wondering why bars are not equally the same height across. the quantity alone should be enough (1 vs 5) to convey strength. with the height being variable, it seems to make things seem worst in the worst possible way -- 5 will still be 5, but when its a 1, because the height is so much shorter, it seems worst than 1. what is the upside to variable height when you already have variable width in terms of number of bars? it's not as if there's an algorithm that determines the correct height for that particular signal, as there is a (faulty?) algorithm to determine the correct width (bars).
"Bar rendering" debates and the actual signal (yes, a physical quantity!) that the phone sees from the AT&T network are non-issues with a BlackBerry thanks to its wondrous ability to display RSSI directly: http://www.blackberrycool.com/2009/04/22/converting-signal-s...
Yes. I really wish companies would stop stressing me out with pointless things to interpret. What is the effective difference between three or four bars? All I really need/want to know is:
* No connection
* Slow/intermittent connection
On the other hand, all this hype is encouraging people to perform Science, with cameras, posted to YouTube, so maybe there is a purpose to all of this.
So you're also telling me that my 3G reception is actually worse then I had previous thought? All those places I get 4 bars are really 2? I guess this explains why I often got dropped calls when I have "full reception".
Wonder why they didn't mention the proximity problem. From what I have heard that's actually more annoying then the signal issue.
With the proximity problem, it's very cut and dry. "Yes, we will fix it." isn't much of a press release.
And the only reason Apple made this PR release is to get ahead lf this story. I've had people ask me if I'm returning my iPhone because "I heard it can't make calls when you hold it wrong" or other crap. They're just trying to respin the story that the public has latched onto.
I think it's funny to imagine what would happen if Apple didn't tell us what's wrong and just released an update. Suddenly the voodoo bars work better and everyone says, "Oh wow Apple's firmware engineers are geniuses! I no longer lose 4 bars when holding my phone!"
It's also interesting that the fix is a few weeks away and you only have 30 days to return your phone (early adopters are already a week in). So basically if the fix doesn't make you feel better, you can get the iPhone 6 in two years.
I'm surprised that anyone considers this explanation reasonable. The real problem people are seeing with the iPhone 4 is measured in throttled bandwidth and dropped calls, not bars of signal.
Using a speed test app, I measure 2-2.3mbs 3G downline bandwidth with the phone sitting on my desk. Holding it gently in my left hand, the speed test drops to 0 and eventually fails. I can also reproduce that data transfer failure by lightly touching the left and bottom sides with two fingers.
This focus on the displayed signal strength is somewhat insulting misdirection.
Especially entertaining is the update note at the bottom:
The "3G signal strength display" fix certainly seems to have done something for my iPhone 3G: it's sitting here in the same place on my desk, and has gone from two bars of 3G signal with the 2.0.2 software to a whopping five bars in version 2.1.
Yep, they effectively made the signal strength meter useless in that update so that users would psychologically feel that they had a good connection even though AT&T's network was terrible in places.
When your phone shows 5 bars yet you still get dropped calls, distorted sound, etc, you know there is a problem with the signal strength meter.
They might as well have just made it 1 bar, either you have signal or you don't. But there may be something about the placebo effect, or maybe illiterate tech reviewers would actually write "my iPhone has more bars!1!1!11!1!"
Right now, iPhone 4 shows that if the signal is in the top 50% of dBm range, then it shows 5 bars. If that was implemented back in 2.1, then yes, you're right, the fix coming out would make it "even more accurate" by undoing what 2.1 OS patch did.
I particularly liked the reminder about the return policy. I think that was put in there as a hedge against those class-action lawsuits. It makes no sense to sue over a product that you can still return. And now, the issues are so well documented that I doubt anyone buying a phone now could claim to be oblivious to the issues.
Edit: I didn't understand your original comment. Rereading it, yeah, that doesn't make much sense. Perhaps the dear leader only cares about the Droid family on Verizon. Well, more likely they just didn't want to acknowledge the existence of Android in a press release where they are delivering a mea culpa.
This is going to make AT&T look even worse. Maybe apple knew this algorithm was in place all along and now they are telling AT&T that they can't play games anymore.
Apple is now placing the blame on AT&T by saying that the problem is actually low bars (i.e. the network).
It seems like Apple solved a "perceived" problem with their phone (it is probably a problem with all phones, but never so heavily publicized like for the iPhone4) by fixing the the source of that perception. Clever.
But the solution doesn't really address the real complaint -- that holding the phone in some ways seemed to change the number of bars shown. It seems like overall the bars display will be conservative now, so people just won't perceive such a large drop in the number of bars.
Actually Apple seemed to have biased the iPhone's display of bars to show 5 bars when the signal falls in the top 50% of the range. As Gruber noted, the exposed antenna in iPhone 4 highlighted the downside to that issue -- when you're near the floor of the 50% range, you suddenly go down in bars dramatically.
So the fix is to make what was fake before, more accurate.
Apple should have said: "Since AT&T has such a crappy reception in most places, we now give you the illusion of having an improved connection!" instead of "We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see."
My palm is pretty big, and when i fully cover my nokia 1100 cell phone, not a single bar of network is lost. Stop Covering up Apple, and admit that you guys committed a mistake.
My phone has six bars, and they never, ever go away, even when the phone is powered off. Take that!
(Electrical engineering textbooks should come with warning labels. "DANGER: once you understand how reality works, human psychology will occasionally give you migraines.")
What happens when you cover iPhone 4 on the same spot?
According to anandtech if signal is strong even the maximum loss of signal they could get is not enough to drop a bar.
I have trouble believing this is just a display issue. Has anyone done experiments to show this is a hardware, rather than software issue? It seems that my 3GS reception actually got much worse after I upgraded to the 4.0 firmware. This would explain the widespread perception that the iPhone 4 is worse than the 3G/3GS, since previous owners would have been running the old firmware.
Am I missing something here, but if there is a bug in how they calculate bars shouldn't it apply equally in all the cases.
for example, if signal == some-weak-signal, then bars = 5
then, if signal == some-weak-signal - 1 (for example), then shouldn't bars = 4 instead of bars = 0 (or 1).
This seems like horseshit to me.
Though it seems people are buying this explanation, so as far is Apple is concerned, it worked.
Bars are a very basic representation of a complex set of logarithmic measurements. I don't think it's all that simple. They're probably doing something like a 95th-percentile calculation on top of that. You don't want to change the bar signal meter for every normal fluctuation in RF. Otherwise the bar meter would constantly be moving up and down all the time. From an RF perspective it's also not as simple as just looking at the signal level. You can have great signal levels and poor SNR for example.
A 30 dB drop can both not change how many bars are displayed at all or get you down to no bars at all. If you have a signal strength between -51 dB and -61 dB and the signal drops 30 dB five bars will still be displayed. If you have a signal strength between -83 dB and -91 dB and the signal drops 30 dB you go all the way from five bars to zero bars.
What AnandTech found seems consistent with what Apple writes. More or less, at least. The drop in signal strength when holding the phone is a bit larger than with other phones (and previous iPhones), but not dramatically so. That’s the only thing Apple is still quiet about.
> To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula
Clever. As I was reading this my mind started reeling "What if they intentionally showed more bars to make AT&T's crappy network look better than it really is?"
I bet they anticipated the rumors this might start.
"We were tricking you into thinking you had better signal than you actually did since the first iPhone, so we're gonna stop that and fix the problem by making the weak-bars look taller."
It's great to see Apple taking on the problem head-on. I'd much rather see honesty from a company than have them deny it and sweep it under the rug as if it were never a problem.
"taking on the problem head-on" - my reading of this was just the opposite.
They are attempting to put a different spin on the whole issue , its not that the phone has a faulty antenna or you are "holding it incorrectly" - its that we display incorrect number of signal bars, nonsense.
A correct- taking the problem head-on approach would be - "We apologize for the mistake and are aiming to rectify it in the next software update. Thank You."
This makes no sense to me. Maybe I'm ignorant, but it sounds a lot like going to a mechanic because your car keeps turning off and they offer a new paint job to fix the issue.
I don't know if this is really the case or not, but what Apple is saying is more like going to a mechanic because your gas gauge keeps dropping to E when you hold the steering wheel a certain way, and the mechanic informs you that your gauge has been reporting more gas than you actually had _for several years_.
But its only been reporting more gas than you actually had _for several years_ because Apple chose to lie to you in 2008 to make AT&T's network look better than it is.
Precisely. But to keep the analogy going: because Apple chose to lie to you in 2008 to make that hybrid look like it gets better gas mileage than it actually does.
I imagined the signal to UI representation would be a fairly standard algorithm. I'm surprised this issue didn't come up in their testing.
Then again, I really don't know how complicated this can be. It just seems like there have been enough phones released that did (perceivably) display the bars correctly that this should be a non-issue.
I don't know about the Droid or RIM phones, but here is a video of a Nokia E71 exhibiting the same signal drop behavior when being held: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amPG52DVQuk
In the anandtech iPhone review he has it compete with a Nexus One and can measure a significant (though smaller) signal drop with the Nexus One using the same grip. I imagine you could reproduce the problem with every phone of similar dimensions.
Finally, can we all accept that it's bars and not reception we were ever talking about. Every single iPhone 4 user has had their phone for less than a month.
This is all kinda bad, but... really... if you're so convinced that your phone is b0rken, why not just stop yapping and go make use of your return policy?
add.: yes, YOU, DOWNVOTER! Solve the problem you're holding in your hand instead of just focusing on pointing your finger at Apple - enough people are already busy doing that 24 hours a day.
As a reminder, if you are not fully satisfied, you can return your undamaged iPhone to any Apple Retail Store or the online Apple Store within 30 days of purchase for a full refund.
"Probably the biggest thing I’ve taught the team at Apple is that people never know what they’re supposed to think about anything. This is true in Hollywood, in the book business, in the art world, in politics. And especially in technology.
"So we put out a new phone and everyone is sitting there wondering what they should think about it. What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.
"So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.
"It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it."
....
"Which brings me back to iPhone 4 and the antenna issue. Right now you’re confused. You’re worried. You don’t know what to believe. You just wish someone would come along and tell you that everything is squared away and there’s nothing to worry about."
"Well, stay tuned for that. And remember: There is no spoon."