Η συνέντευξη τύπου της Apple ολοκληρώθηκε και ο Steve Jobs μαζί με Tim Cook και Bob Mansfield απάντησαν στις ερωτήσεις των εκπροσώπων του τύπου σχετικά με τα προβλήματα σήματος που παρουσιάζουν ορισμένες συσκευές iPhone 4, κάτω από ορισμένες συνθήκες.

Το event ξεκίνησε με την προβολή του “The iPhone Antenna Song” (!) ένα video παρωδία που κυκλοφόρησε μόλις εχτές στο YouTube (!) και συνεχίστηκε με τον Steve Jobs να ανεβαίνει στη σκηνή και να απευθύνεται στο κοινό:

We’re not perfect. Phones aren’t perfect. We know that, you know that. But we want to make all our users happy. If you don’t know that, you don’t know Apple. We’re going to talk about how we’re going to do that.

We’re going to talk about the problems and the data we’ve got. The iPhone 4 is perhaps the best product we’ve ever made at Apple. We’ve sold over 3m since we launched it just over 3 weeks ago. It’s been judged the #1 smartphone by a variety of publications — people seem to like it. Users seem to love it.

It has the highest customer satisfaction rating of any iPhone, and of any smartphone. However, we started getting some reports about people getting issues with the antenna system. … people have been seeing a large drop in bars, and this has been since dubbed antennagate.

It’s been 22 days. Apple is an engineering-driven company. The way we work, we want to find what the real problem is before we come up with a solution. We wanted to find out what the real issues are, and we want to share what we’ve learned. So let’s go to the data.

“‘Antennagate’ — it doesn’t seem like a good idea if you touch your phone in a certain way and the bars go down. But one of the first things we learned: it’s certainly not unique to the iPhone.”

Το event συνεχίζεται με τον Steve Jobs να παρουσιάζει δημοφιλή ανταγωνιστικά κινητά τα οποία παρουσιάζουν το ίδιο πρόβλημα… χάνουν την ένδειξη σήματος όταν κρατηθούν από συγκεκριμένο σημείο:

“We did our own testing — let me show you an example of some other smartphones. First, BB Bold 9700, perhaps the most popular business smartphone.” Video showing the bars — they drop from four or five to one. “Pretty much identical to the videos on the web about the iPhone 4.”

“Five bars to one bar. You can imagine that’s a popular way to grip that phone. Next: the HTC Droid Eris.” Shows the bars dropping from 4 to zero bars.

“Samsung’s Omnia 2 — it’s got four bars to start. None of this is standardizes by the way. Manufacturers come up with their own ways to show bars.” It went from five to one bar by holding it tightly. “We could have gone on and on, but most smartphones behave exactly the same way.”

“This is life in the smartphone world. Phones aren’t perfect.”
“X marks the spot. You know exactly where to [not] hold it! … we screwed up on our algorithm. Again, all smartphones seem to do this — we haven’t figured out our way around the laws of physics. Yet.”

“It’s a challenge for the whole industry, and we’re doing the best we can. But every phone has week spots. Now, we’re not perfect: we made it very visible (with a little help from some of our friends from certain websites).”

Αναφορά στο “Antenna lab” της εταιρείας. Εντυπωσιακή επένδυση από την Apple:

“We have an extremely sophisticated antenna lab.” Yes, those are some serious antenna lab! “This is a state of the art antenna test facility. We have 17 anechoic chambers. We’ve invested over $100m in our antenna testing facilities over the last 5 years, and we have 18 PhD scientists and engineers doing some very advanced antenna design.”

“We knew that if you gripped it in a certain way the bars would go down a little — just like every smartphone. It’s a challenge to the entire industry, and we’re hoping to make some contributions to this in the coming years.”

Παρόλα τα προβλήματα με την ένδειξη του σήματος, οι χρήστες αναφέρουν καλύτερη ποιότητα λήψης:

“People are reporting better reception from our antenna than we’ve ever seen before. So what have we learned? Smartphones have weak spots. … If you read all these articles out there, you might think half our customers have had complaints about this issue. What percent have actually called Apple about this? One half of one percent. 0.55%.”

Συγκριτικά με το iPhone 3GS το iPhone 4 χάνει περισσότερες κλήσεις… ωστόσο το νούμερο αυτό είναι λιγότερο από μία ανά εκατό κλήσεις:

“AT&T won’t give out the absolute call drop data for competitive reasons, but they’ll let us release the delta. But how do the call drops on iPhone 4 compare to 3GS a year ago per 100 calls?”

“I can tell you that since we’re being totally transparent, even though we believe the iPhone’s antenna is superior, the data says the iPhone 4 drops more calls than the 3GS. But how many more calls per hundred does it drop?”

“Again, listening to ‘Antennagate’ on the web, it must be dropping many more calls! The iPhone 4 drops less than ONE call per hundred than the 3GS. Less than one.”

Ο Steve Jobs πιστεύει ότι η διαφορά αυτή ενδέχεται να οφείλεται στο γεγονός ότι όταν το iPhone 3GS κυκλοφορήσει υπήρχε ήδη μία μεγάλη αγορά από θήκες (οι διαστάσεις του 3G ήταν ίδιες με του 3GS) οπότε αυτό έπαιξε σημαντικό ρόλο:

“I have my own pet theory about this — when the 3GS came out, there was already a healthy market for cases that fit it. But in our store 80% of iPhones walk out without a case.”

Παρόλα αυτά, το νούμερο συγκριτικά με το 3GS παραμένει πολύ χαμηλό:

“But again, zooming out, less than one call drop per hundred calls.”

Ο Steve Jobs αναφέρει ότι το πρόβλημα φαίνεται πως είναι υπαρκτό ωστόσο παρουσιάζεται σε μικρό αριθμό χρηστών:

“When our engineers and scientists look at this data, it’s very hard to escape the conclusion that there is a problem — but it’s affecting a very small percentage of our users.

I myself have gotten over 5000 emails from users telling me their iPhone works fine, and they can’t figure out what this is about.”

Τι θα κάνει η Apple για να ικανοποιήσει τους χρήστες στους οποίους παρουσιάζεται το πρόβλημα;

“Having said this, we care about EVERY user. And we’re not going to stop until every one is happy. But it’s important to understand the scope of the issue — the data says the issue has been blown so far out of proportion, it’s incredible.”

Αρχικά, προτείνει την αναβάθμιση στο iOS 4.0.1 το οποίο κυκλοφόρησε εχτές:

“It’s fun to have a story, but it’s less fun to be on the other end of it. So here’s what we’re going to do. Yesterday we released iOS 4.0.1 that fixes some of these bugs with our algorithm. We recommend every iPhone owner update to it.”

Δεύτερον, ανακοινώνει την διάθεση ΔΩΡΕΑΝ bumper cases για όσους χρήστες έχουν προμηθευτεί το iPhone 4:

“Secondly: a lot of people have told us the bumper solves the signal strength problem. Okay. Great. Let’s give everyone a case. We want to give everyone is going to get a free case.”

“One for every iPhone 4, if you’ve bought one we’ll give you a refund, and we’ll keep this going through September 30th.”

Φαίνεται όμως ότι τα iPhone 4 bumper cases δεν είναι αρκετά ώστε να καλύψουν την ζήτηση, οπότε ο Steve Jobs ανακοινώνει ότι θα διατεθούν και άλλες θήκες μέσω του Apple store. απλά επιλέγετε ποιά θέλετε και η Apple σας την στέλνει:

“Now, everything in life is more complicated than it seems on the surface. We’ll send you a free case. But we can’t make enough bumpers. So what we’re going to do is source some other cases — you’ll pick a case, and we’ll send it off to you.”

Οι χρήστες που παραμένουν δυσαρεστημένοι μπορούν να επιστρέψουν το iPhone 4 πίσω στην Apple και δικαιούνται πλήρη επιστροφή των χρημάτων:

“And, if you’re still not happy even after getting a case, you can bring your iPhone 4 back undamaged for a full refund. We are going to take care of everyone. We want every user to be happy — and if we can’t make ‘em happy, we’ll give them a full refund.”

Αναφορικά με κάποια προβλήματα που έχουν αναφερθεί με τον proxomity sensor του iPhone 4, η Apple σκοπεύει να κυκλοφορήσει νέο update:

“So, I’ve got some other updates. We’re tracking some problems with the proximity sensor, we’ll have that in the next update.”

Το λευκό iPhone 4 θα αρχίσει να διατίθεται στο τέλος Ιουλίου:

“White iPhone: lot of people are waiting for it, and they’ll start shipping at the end of July in limited quantities.”

Η ημερομηνία διάθεσης του iPhone 4 στις υπόλοιπες χώρες δεν μεταβλήθηκε, όπως είχε ακουστεί από κάποιες ανυπόστατες φήμες:

“On July 30th we’re going to bring the iPhone to 17 more countries — these are the same we announced before.”

Επίλογος:

“We love our users. We try very hard to surprise and delight them. We work our asses off. And it’s great, and we have a blast doing it. And we make some pretty interesting products for them — Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, the Apple TV… we make some pretty great products.”

“So we do all this because we love our users. And when we fall short — which we do sometimes — we try harder. We pick ourselves up, we figure out what’s wrong, and we try harder. And when we succeed, they reward us by staying our users, and that makes it all worth it.”

“That’s what drives us. When we have problems like this and people criticize us, we take it really personally. Maybe we should have a wall of PR people to insulate us, but we don’t — when our users have a problem, we have a problem.”

“We’ve been working really hard over the last 22 days to figure out the problem to solve the real problem — we think we’ve gotten to the heart of the problem, and that is smartphones have weak spots. Some took advantage by demonstrating that — and it was easily demonstrable — but for those small number of customers having problems, we’re going to give them free cases or a full refund.”

“But the data supports the fact that the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone in the world, and there is no ‘Antennagate,’ but there is a challenge to the entire industry. Today, we love our customers and we’re going to take care of them.”