Apple's secrecy might be responsible for the new iPhone's reception issues | Hacker News Reader

Apple's secrecy might be responsible for the new iPhone's reception issues

ipadwatcher.com

12 pointsmlongo13 comments

Do you need to rely on field testing to discover a problem that apparently causes a 50-75dB signal degradation? The antenna itself would have been designed by a group of RF engineers who would have also realized they were designing an external antenna so the issue must have come up at some point. Whatever the issue is I don't think secrecy plays a big role. Inexperience and naivety? Yeah. Maybe they just didn't realize that out of millions of units a good number of people were going to hold them the "wrong way" and have issues. Short of handing out thousands of test units I'm not sure they could have uncovered this. That's the risk of doing something different.

Flagging this as this article is wasting a lot of words to just say, "Apple keeps everything secret. Maybe they always had them in cases to keep them secret." Sorry... but lame. The Andantech review is more like what I like to read.

Sounds plausible, but surely there would have been some on-site tests without the rubber shields? It still seems like epic fail to let something like that through.

Most phones ship with similar epic fails. iPhone 4 actually performs better than iPhone 3GS in the case of low signal: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2

There undoubtedly would have been some amount on-site tests without the shield, but it is possible that they didn't hit the issue in those tests.

Maybe it was ignored in the rush to ship? The development process could have been quite far along by the time they could have done such testing.

There is no way this is the reason. To believe the engineers didnt test the attenuation caused by direct human contact is insanity. More likely is that they tested it thoroughly, found that it didn't appreciably affect the actual number of dropped calls (as substantiated by anandtech), and shipped it feeling comfortable with the product. When the iPhone 4 shipped, the reviews were all gushing over it, despite the pent up frustration over Apple's dominance and questionable app store policies, and people jumped on the first publicized flaw. Much ado about nothing. With any luck, this whole farse will make it easier for me to land a white iPhone 4 when it becomes available.

This speculation may or may not be correct, but you are absurdly naïve if you actually consider it "insanity" to consider that a company may have shipped some number of defective units due to a failure of testing.

There is a difference between shipping some defective units and shipping a defective design.

Some defective units are expected because it happens. Like the other person who replied to your post, I can't imagine an engineering group putting the antenna on the outside and not testing it.

Engineers, most of them likely PHD's, created a phone where the antenna wraps around the outer edges, and it doesn't occur to a single one of them that hands touching it might affect the signal? Does that sound even remotely plausible to you?

Yes.

I got an iPhone 4 today and even in weak signal areas where I have less than 5 bars I can barely get it to drop another bar (it'll bounce up and down in my testing). I thought on day 1 this whole fiasco might have been a manufacturing defect in the first batch phones, and my experience seems to add some support to my theory

To those with a phone that goes from 5 bars to no signal, simply call it defective and exchange it.

Is there a cell phone manufacturer that doesn't test unreleased models in secret? It's an extremely common practice.

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