Apple’s Antenna Design and Test Labs

(edit: simplified)

"It's Toasted" became the Lucky Strike slogan despite their protests and was a huge success. This wasn't entirely fiction of course, it was based on a true story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Strike

See also: David Ogilvy's Shell campaign

http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/famous-david-ogilvy-tv-a...

And Claude Hopkins' Schlitz campaign

http://www.copywriting1.com/2007/10/claude-hopkins-schlitz-b...

FWIW, I think it's a lame response from Apple.

I’m actually surprised by that. I always thought of Apple as a fairly undynamic one trick pony when it comes to PR. (The secrecy, suspense, big event and hype cycle.) I should have noticed something when they released their “Thoughts on Music” or “Thoughts on Flash” letters.

(— edit: wow. The top story right now on HN is not some article lamenting Apple’s reaction, it’s cool pictures of Apple’s testing facilities. This is fucking brilliant PR ;)

I like the innovative external antenna (Anandtech calls the design tradeoff "ballsy") and I like holding more calls in more places. I'm willing to hold it "right" in exchange.

In the RF chamber the foam inserts are impregnated with conductive material, sort of like antistatic IC foam.

The surfaces are designed to present maximal absorption area to any wavefronts within the room, and they're made all spiky and angular to disperse the reflections that do occur, not unlike the way a Stealth aircraft works. The goal, again in both the acoustical and RF test chambers, is to eliminate standing waves to the greatest extent possible, across the whole frequency range of interest. If you have standing waves, the measurements you make will have unwanted dependencies on the physical location of the transmitting and receiving antennas.

Play a sinewave through your speakers and you'll probably find large variations in loudness as you move around the room. The whole idea behind these expensive test chambers is to avoid that effect. They are also usually shielded to keep external sounds/EM fields out, but this is actually a secondary consideration for most users.

Edit: another reason for shielding the room, obviously, is so the company can operate things like base-station emulators without running afoul of the law.

"75 seconds ENcounting!"

  In our tests, iPhone 4 dropped from 3 bars to 1 bar
  In our tests, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 dropped from 5 bars to 1 bar
  In our tests, the HTC Droid Eris dropped from 4 bars to 0 bars
  In our tests, the Samsung Omnia II dropped from 4 bars to 1 bar
  In our tests, iPhone 3GS dropped from 3 bars to 1 bar

It was always something quietly infuriating before, but here they've intentionally tried to contrast themselves against their competitors.

Also: "bars" is not a scientific unit.

In fact, the whole chamber is shaped like a cube, and the measurements must be made in the middle of the cube. In the chamber I visited, the "floor" was made of a wire mesh suspended at mid-height inside the cube, so there it was impossible to fall.

Anandtech feels they "willfully" went for more sensitivity for most situations, at the price of variability depending on certain rarer signal situations. He calls the design choice "ballsy".

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-...

I just checked my EVO manual and it specifically says where not to touch the phone (upper left). The difference seems to be that people learned where not to touch the iPhone and then made a huge deal about it as if it was something new.

Apple engineers tested iPhone 4 in a variety of scenarios, environments, and conditions in order to gauge performance. They spent thousands of hours in cities in the U.S. and throughout the world testing iPhone 4 call quality, dropped-call performance, call origination and termination, and in-service time. They tested iPhone 4 while stationary, at high and low speeds, and in urban, dense urban, and highway environments. In low-coverage areas and good-coverage areas, during peak and off-peak hours iPhone 4 was field-tested in nearly every possible coverage scenario across different vendor and carrier equipment all over the world."

He was sitting in the chair, didn't you see him? ;)

I'm not saying if the design is good or bad, but there are tons of instances in history of companies doing things to alleviate minor issues that had the potential to turn into massive PR cases and create much greater losses over the long-term.

The subtext of Apple's PR here is: You want to have an argument about RF engineering and the complexities and tradeoffs involved? Bring it. Apple's engineering team stands by its work. But you better be prepared to argue like an engineer, not a gossip columnist.