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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

Duh, its been the same way with all of their hardware manufacturing errors. The standard template is:

Numerous social media posts about the same problem.

Denials and costly fixes for them. To the point of specialized third party accessories. Remember the iPhone antenna “bands”?

Apple acknowledges the issue.

Class action lawsuit filed.

Leaks about Apple knowing about the issue months before any corrective action.

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For all that people keep mentioning antennagate, I personally never noticed this being an issue while owning the iPhone 4, nor did any of the other people I knew with an iPhone 4. It just wasn't something that ever came up in practice. And (seemingly as always), the iPhone 4 managed to beat out every other device of its time in consumer satisfaction surveys.

Does Apple make missteps? Sure. The new MacBook Pro keyboards are genuinely a disaster. But 95% of the complaints people actually bring up seem to be dramatically overblown.

Apple have positioned themselves as a luxury brand, so they'll be held to a higher standard. They sell enormous volumes of a very small number of SKUs, so a design defect will affect an unusually large number of customers. It clearly isn't doing too much damage to Apple's bottom line.

Interestingly I view the new Apple keyboards as overall reasonably good, although obviously with a few problems. A disaster for me would be the 2011 Macbook Pros that died over and over again just outside the warranty period. Worse, Apple‘s fix was to swap out to a working motherboard with the same latent flaw.

I actually love the new keyboard, except I've already had one die and now have to keep the new one under a silicone cover to keep it clean.

The failure rate on them is nuts though.

I worked at Apple doing phone tech support during this time and it was a big issue. You could take the iPhone and hold it one way to drop the signal almost completely. For users, it was incredibly frustrating.

I distinctly remember reading article that they fixed this on later production runs with some sort of coating. Wasn't the white iPhone 4 delayed for this?

Yeah and Papermaster being made scapegoat despite the issue mostly being Apple UI overestimating signal strength to the end user... but yeah, you be holding it wrong.

That's why I pay the "Apple premium" on all my devices, so that apple can claim their hardware has the highest quality, and can pay to fend off all the class action lawsuits that claim otherwise.

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