Executive Leaves Apple After iPhone Antenna Troubles | Hacker News Reader

Executive Leaves Apple After iPhone Antenna Troubles

nytimes.com

58 pointscredo30 comments

I obviously don't know what's going behind the scenes, but I question the wisdom of ousting someone who makes such a mistake.

Constantly pushing the technology/design envelope as Apple does seems prone to the occasional snafu. Having engineers and managers on board that have personally experienced such problems and solved/triaged/otherwise dealt with them seems valuable. Firing them runs the risk of creating a chilling effect toward risk taking, as well as lobotomizing some valuable experience from the company.

Now, maybe the executive was let go because he knew about the antenna problem beforehand, misrepresented its severity to Jobs, and launched the product anyway, in which case, yeah let him go. I recall some speculation that Apple knew about the problem before hand.

But for honest mistakes, with no deception involved, that hurt in the short term but are solvable and no more than a blip in the long term, maybe that's not so wise.

Thoughts?

Your theory makes sense, but if this is true, he fucked up the iPhone and man, even if letting him stay would create a better executive, increase value to the entire company, etc., I just flat can't see Jobs letting him stay in any manner at all.

That sort of thinking is really stupid, and much as I dislike Apple I do believe their management is smarter than that.

>I do believe their management is smarter than that.

The evidence would suggest otherwise.

I believe it's called 'accountability'.

It is really hard to judge why something like this might have happened. However, I would bet it is related to one of two things: Either he had information (as you mentioned) or his actions after it hit the fan was inexcusable.

I can't imagine Jobs being very keen on somebody worrying more about covering his ass than taking care of Apple when things go wrong.

The Apple /// came without any fans because Jobs wanted it so, and therefore overheated.

In this case, it may be equally difficult to know who's really responsible of what.

This may signal that return rates for iPhone 4 have exceeded expectations and that iPhone 5 development will have to be accelerated. I can't see this happening if the antenna situation hadn't had a significant financial impact as manifestation of customer dissatisfaction.

That's unfortunate because many of us are awaiting the latest OSX iteration, and Apple is a company that doesn't really focus on more than one major product release at a time, based on personnel limitations and so on.

Their original plan might well have been to release a ‘iPhone 4S’ next, i.e. unchanged exterior design and a speed/storage bump. I don’t think they can do that now, they will have to change something about the antenna. Which means that everything just got quite a bit more complicated for them.

What is the significant financial impact? Have apple reported any? The phone has been out in Australia for 2 weeks and is still constantly sold out at every single phone store, with no signal problems reported at all on our cellular networks.

http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=I4Stock shows how much this thing is still selling.

Unless the impact is "material" (an accounting term of art: "Information important enough to change an investor's decision" http://www.ais-cpa.com/glosa.html) then they won't be reporting it. It could be big enough to sting, and more importantly big enough to do intangible brand damage, without it being material.

The two people that I know that upgraded (from G and GS) both say that overall reception is better than before and they love their phones. We're in a hilly area. The phones are still sold out in many places, I can't believe there is any significant financial hit over this.

Certainly any revisions to later production and next model antenna design would have no impact on the timetable of whatever OS X and iOS projects are in the works. If anything siphons talent within Apple, it'd probably be those continuing to improve iOS for iPad in particular. Although the iPad is doing extremely well, being so new they're no doubt working very hard to make things better yet. Apple is working hard on many fronts. Their projects are planned, so there's no reason to expect any significant unforeseen migration of engineers between projects.

Realistically, the biggest thing that drives some people away from the iPhone is AT&T. (on a personal level it is about general dislike of the company not any actual service problem, it's similar to how some have grown to feel about Microsoft. I had the feeling even before the iPhone came out) If Apple can expand to another U.S. carrier without a significant loss due to changed AT&T terms, we could see a real change in the financial picture... more growth.

The comment about "many of us are awaiting the latest OSX iteration" puzzles me a bit. While I'm sure Apple will add some cool new things in the future, without knowing what they are can you really be chomping at the bit? Apple certainly does work on development of many things at one time. Release timing is determined by many factors beyond engineering.

As far as hardware updates go, I think more people are interested in watching Mac hardware iterations as improved Intel chips come out. But for the bulk of consumers the existing chips are plenty powerful. I'd probably most like to see third parties (including open source projects) make more use of the excellent support for using multiple cores and GPUs in the OS. In particular I'm thinking of VLC and ffmpeg (which is the basis for many video utilities).

You can add a 3rd person to your analysis. I've had the iPhone 2G then the 3GS and now the 4 and the 4 has the best signal of the 3 by far.

In my experience all the cell phone companies in the US suck. Go to any of their message boards and you'll see the same complaints over and over. The nature of Apple tends to draw a lot of hype from both sides and that certainly spills over to AT&T. Personally, I had zero problems with AT&T when I lived in the south east. When I moved to Denver I just happened to move into a dead zone and would lose calls constantly. I used the mark the spot app and complained a few times and they apparently did something on their end to the point where I can't remember the last time I dropped a call now.

No-one in Australia is having antenna issues. (We can get it to drop 1 bar maybe). Blame AT&T (Or the SF Hype chamber).

I'm in the US and can only get 1 bar to drop. Overall the i4 signal is much much better than the 3GS though. AT&T uses 2 different frequencies from what I understand so I'm wondering if one is more impacted than the other?

From my understanding, we really should be looking at the dB drop and not the number of bars lost, as a drop in 20dB or so may only show up as only a bar lost (if you started out at full bars). (or did they fix this in the software update?)

So maybe this is why nobody in Australia is experiencing the antenna problem, because the 20db drop is hidden by only being a single bar loss? That or they changed something in the manufacturing...

But I digress from the original discussion...

If I start with full bars it's hard to lose a bar at all because of the 20db drop and how the bars are calculated. When I start with less than full bars the most I can get to drop is a single bar.

I've never been able to replicate the youtube video even in areas with a weak signal. My guess all along has been that yes you can get a 20db drop in signal with touch, but that also some phones from the early batches had manufacturing defects. Combine the two (plus the software that showed more bars than you really had) and you can get the go from 5 full bars to no signal problem.

I work in NYC, notorious for crappy at&t coverage. 30 people in my office tried to replicate the problem and nobody could.

I doubt it. Even if returns suddenly skyrocketed after the PR damage control event people would have already bought something else along with a 2 year contract that prevents them from buying an iPhone 5 in the next 12-18 months for anything less than $400-$500. There would be no good reason to move up the date for the iPhone 5. At worst maybe a Rev B model could appear but that would be an industrial design project. I don't think it would tax OSX developers or be a major distraction.

Not true. Most of these early adopters were upgraders who probably still have te 3GS in their possession.

From Gruber's comments in http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/08/07/papermaster , it appears like some folks at Apple are spreading the word that Papermaster was fired and that he was responsible for the problems.

It is unclear whether Papermaster will respond to the rumors or whether he'll ignore them.

Maybe the antenna issue played some role but keep in mind he was an IBM old timer (26 years) coming into a very different company. Imagine what his first day was like? I'm not sure it was a good fit. So there may be a lot more to this than the obvious knee jerk reaction of trying to connect it to the last notable event in our minds. With all the different people involved in launching the iPhone including Jobs himself it just seems unlikely to me they'd pick this guy to walk the plank for it. If he wasn't meshing with the culture before all this it could have been enough to push him over the edge.

"Reached on his cellphone, Mr. Papermaster declined to comment." - so now we know he already got a job at Nokia.

Haha, I was going to make the same comment. However, for the HN audience, I wasn't going to add any commentary. The comment, in its entirety, would have been:

Reached on his cellphone, Mr. Papermaster declined to comment.

He did make a comment, however the way he was holding his phone dropped the call.

We know very little about the design process that led to the iPhone 4 antenna. It's very hard to guess how much blame, if any, Papermaster has on the design flaw and where, in the continuum between "he was fired for covering his ass" or "he decided he could not work with the kind of external interference in the design by Ive or Jobs that caused the problem", this decision happened.

Jobs really spend a large amount of time on the Antenna during launch. And he ended up looking pretty bad, and someone must have been responsible for making him think he could go ahead and talk about in during launch. If he had known about these issues I am sure he would never have dedicated a full 5 minutes on this 'magical antenna design'. Perhaps he never said anything about the antenna, than the reports might have been different. Jobs himself put the this under the microscope.

I suspect Apple never caught this call dropping issue due to the fact that everyone who had one of these new 4G iPhones was required to keep it in a case when they were field testing them. Wasn't the phone that Gizmodo got their hands on in a big case that made it look like a 3GS? How can anyone but the people who insist on this secrecy be responsible for the fact that the field testing seemed like everything was working fine?

This is a common misunderstanding. In fact, Apple showed members of the press specially-equipped vans that they use to systematically test reception in the field under a variety of scenarios, in addition to the dozen or so anechoic black rooms they have indoors. [1]

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/inside-apples-black-lab-w... (among others)

Simulated and real world are two different ball games. In the real world tests with sh- er um crappy AT&T signal strength, they were testing in privacy cases. Ideal tests in the anechoic chambers or iVans were just that - ideal.

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