| So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements - and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!
This is analogous to saying driving experience doesn't matter as long as car pases emission tests which is certainly not true (I hope). People don't buy phones because it passes FCC testing they buy phones to make calls! If you don't factor human hand into your design, word of mouth will kill the phone.
Whenever we hear a prediction about "word of mouth" stunting the sales of an Apple product, we have to take that statement with an iPhone-sized grain of salt. Word of mouth doesn't hurt recent Apple products. The Gizmodo "leaks" were word of mouth about this particular phone and Apple sold 1,000,000 phones today.
If you will think back a few months, "word of mouth" was that the 27-inch iMac had screen problems. That "word of mouth" amounted to thousands of posts on the Apple support site. Apple simply fixed/replaced the machines with problems, improving their reputation as a make-good company. I haven't heard any "word of mouth" about the iMac lately because the customers are satisfied and the FUD has evaporated.
When these iPhone problems are resolved, this entire thread will dry up and blow away in the wind.
The disconnect has always been there. People have always had immersion bias. That's why it goes by many names: Parochialism, regionalism, racism, class bias, tribalism.
It's fun to watch people blame the disconnect between tribal culture and reality on the Internet -- one could have predicted that; new technology tends to get blamed for anything and everything, no matter what the technology is -- but history is replete with examples of clueless, reality-disconnected people who managed to construct their bubbles without the benefit of any kind of networking tech. Lysenko didn't need the net. The pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy didn't need the net.
I'm not so sure. Of all the complaints about AT&T consistently dropping calls, people are still flocking to the iPhone. I realize they don't have a choice, but once again, people are voting with their dollars. They're willing to accept a subpar network for a cool phone.
people are voting with their dollars. The design of the product is more important than its functionality (this is to say: the average consumer likes pretty things).