When Apple published a webpage about how other phones also got reduced reception when you held them in a particular way, but then basically immediately pulled it. And then a while later they offered a free bumper case to mitigate the whole issue.
None of that suggests any malice. We don’t know what happened internally, other than the arial designer was eventually let go. That engineer could have been pushing the “every phone has the problem” narrative and brushing it off. At some point the pressure from customer feedback could have meant they were overruled and ordered to retest, or test under the specific conditions.
The fact that Apple changed their stance from “here’s a workaround” to “here’s a free bumper” is a sign they reacted to something, and that could have been anything from the conclusion of internal testing to a PR job to keep customers happy.
If they had said there was no design flaw from the start and stuck with that the whole way then I’d understand people’s reaction, but all I see is a company that said “don’t hold it that way” as a workaround then eventually issued free bumpers, thus confirming the issue. That doesn’t suggest they were blaming the user for doing something wrong. The sentiment just wasn’t there.
Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.
Everyone makes fun of Sammy batteries exploding, but forget antennagate, bendgate, software gimping of battery life, butterfly keyboards, touch disease, yellow screens (which I believe were when Apple had to split supply Samsung/LG), exploding Macbook batteries (not enough to cause a fuss tho). Etc.
Other companies can of course be ne'er-do-wells, but people actively defend Apple for the company's missteps.
I rarely see anyone defending Apple, but I do see people constantly applying logic to them specifically that they don’t seem to apply to other companies. Take this:
> Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.
You can’t immediately address any issue. You need time to investigate issues. You might not even start investigating until you hit some sort of threshold or you’ll be chasing your tail in every bit of customer feedback. It takes time to narrow down anything to a bad component, bad batch, software bug or whatever it is.
As for weighing whether the issue is worth addressing at all - this is literally every company. If you did a recall of every bit of hardware at the slightest whiff of an issue you’d go bankrupt very quickly. There are always thresholds.
I wish we would just criticise apple in the same way we do with other companies. There is no need to invent things like “you’re holding it wrong” or intentionally misunderstanding batterygate into “they slowed down phones to sell you a new one”. They already do other crappy things, inventing fake ones isn’t necessary.
