iPhone 4 users are tired of hearing about trumped up antenna problem

Our stance on the iPhone 4 antenna has gotten us into some trouble with some very angry people. It’s not a “defect” if you have to do something specific to try to trigger the signal reduction and it doesn’t otherwise happen during real world use. And that’s what we’ve found with our own in-house tests, and it’s also what we’ve overwhelmingly heard from our audience and from real world iPhone 4 users at large. But that hasn’t stopped some folks (geek headline writers in particular) from becoming enraged over the supposed antenna controversy, and in turn enraged at us when we called them out for purposely overblowing the situation just to draw attention to themselves. But after wading through all the incoherent, profane and slur filled nonsense that we’ve received from angry geeks with an anti-Apple axe to grind, we did manage to receive a strong amount of support from satisfied iPhone 4 users who are as tired of hearing about this pretend-controversy as we are:

“I’ve dropped one or two calls since I got the iPhone 4 on launch day. I would say the whole antenna thing is way overblown. What kills me about the Consumer Reports article is that they are saying they can not recommend their HIGHEST rated smartphone. That’s right, based on their testing and scoring system, the iPhone 4 scored higher than any smartphone they tested!” – DSmit

“my reception has actually improved a bit and I’ve also had way less dropped calls,if any(so far).” – RobFuzz

“Did I get a a special made 4 just for me? I can’t scratch it it doesn’t drops calls. Sounds great! It’s the best hardware I ever touched.” – MrTatu

“THANK YOU. Everyone who sees i have an iphone 4 asks hows the reception. I always respond with its perfectly fine. Im tired of how the media has to make a big to do about nothing.” – Brett

“The antenna hype is ridiculous.” – Feldmeister

“A few of my friends have the iPhone and do not have any problems. One of them is a lefty & he uses his left hand to hold the phone and has no complaints .” – RJ0403

Additionally, our followers on Twitter have weighed in on the fact that with several million units already sold, if the iPhone 4 antenna actually were defective, we’d have seen hundreds of thousands of units returned to the store by now; in reality there are little to no reports of any iPhone 4 units being returned:

“I am so with you on this” – Victor Cajiao

“I keep looking for a deal on the UK refurb store but it ain’t happening” – Gazmaz

We’re not sure whether he intended to, but Engadget editor Ross Miller summed up the situation best. While he says that he “can most assuredly recreate the problem,” he admits that “It’s not affecting me day-to-day.”

This echoes what we’ve been saying all along: if it’s something that you have to specifically go and try to make happen, and it’s not something that happens during real world day to day usage, then it’s not a “defect” or a “problem” or a controversy – it’s just a matter of geeks with too much time on their hands and an agenda-driven desire to concoct a negative headline about a popular anti-geek product.

iPhone 4 antenna? Manufactured iPhone controversy nothing new

“For Apple to say you’re holding your iPhone 4 wrong is absurd!”

Sorry, but I disagree. With the first three iPhones, if you put your finger in a certain place along the bottom, it would completely cover of the mic and the person you’re talking to wouldn’t be able to hear you. Some people (including me) discovered this back in 2007, and decided to simply not put out finger over the mic. It was a non-issue and it was treated as such.

The antenna thing in 2010 is nearly the exact same scenario: if you hold it in a very specific way, your fingers will interfere with its operation. The only difference this time is that the tech headline writers have turned against Apple so thoroughly in the past three years (for the crime of making products that aren’t geeky enough) that this same kind of non-issue is being blown up into a phony controversy.

If I had wanted to, I could have single-handedly manufactured a “controversy” of this level with the original iPhone by claiming that there was a “mic problem” if you held it a certain way. And everyone would have panicked and blown it up into being as big of a “problem” as the antenna thing is being treated in 2010. Believe me, any “problem” that starts off with “try holding it a certain way…” in a manufactured phony controversy. I guarantee you no iPhone 4 early adopters even know this “problem” existed until they started reading the headlines.

I stand by what I said: this is a non-issue, entirely a media creation. Stop purposely holding it wrong and you’ll be fine.

iPhone 4 antenna controversy now includes fake Steve Jobs emails

Attempts on the part of the geekdom to manufacture controversy about the iPhone 4′s antenna reception have reached a new low. Apple CEO Steve Jobs does sometimes answer emails from customers, but one alleged email conversation between Jobs and a customer never happened, according to Apple. Steve’s email replies can be notoriously terse, but the notion that he would tell a customer to “calm down” seemed out of place, and so it’s not surprising that the email exchange never actually happened, and on top of it the fabricator of the fake emails had tried to sell them to the highest-bidding publication. This comes in the same week in which an obvious (and clearly labeled) Steve Jobs parody account on Twitter was quoted by a major newspaper as being the real Steve Jobs. The trumped up controversy stems from the discovery on the part of some geek tech pundits that the iPhone 4′s signal strength could be slightly weakened by holding the iPhone with ones fingers in just the right places, and has since blossomed into a full-blown imaginary controversy. It’s not clear whether the geeks are targeting the new iPhone because it’s so clearly a non-geek product and represents a threat to the future of geekdom, or whether geek tech journalists are merely attempting to extract a measure of revenge on Apple after the company took extreme measures in dealing with a journalist who bought an iPhone 4 prototype from someone who claimed to have found it in a bar.

iPhone 4 is latest Apple product to overcome phony controversy

As the geek tech pundits spent Thursday coming up with their gameplan for poo-pooing the iPhone 4 with something slightly less obvious than “Don’t buy an iPhone 4 because it’s not geeky enough” and collectively settled on an imagined controversy over the iPhone’s antenna placement, those Thursday headlines from geek-specific publications mushroomed into similar headlines on Friday from the geek tech journalists who write the same geeks-only propaganda for mainstream publications. Those Friday headlines were along the lines of “iPhone 4 has reception problems” and “Don’t buy an iPhone 4 due to antenna problems” and my favorite type of headline, “Apple admits iPhone 4 antenna problem” which the author pretty much made up just for fun. But all of this blatant anti-Apple propaganda, even though it’s now being blindly parroted by even the local television news broadcasts in small town USA, won’t hurt the iPhone 4. How do we know this? Because these phony geek-generated anti-Apple “controversies” never have.

On launch day we looked at some of the trumped-up “problems” that the geeks manufactured in an attempt to hurt other Apple products in the past. But the common thread among all of those attempts is that they failed completely. The iPod owns a majority of digital music player sales despite the fact that the geeks have attacked nearly every iPod model with one kind of nonsense or another over the years, and the iPhone has been a major success despite all the attempts on the part of geeks to libelously label the iPhone as a “closed” platform even though it has a quarter million different third party applications available.

In contrast, today’s geek-written headlines and going on and on about how wonderful the new Droid X phone is, even though no one outside the geekdom cares about the Android platform or ever will. But that hasn’t stopped the geek tech press from attempting to prop up the Android platform, and for the simple reason that it’s “open” to the point of total anarchy and was specifically designed to be hacked with homebrew apps; an official app store for the Android platform has been made available almost as an afterthought, as the assumption is that anyone geeky enough to buy a Droid is probably coding their own apps by hand anyway. Yes, the Droid is that far removed from being suitable for anyone who’s not a hard core technology geek. And when you start to understand that that’s what the geeks want in a smartphone, you then understand why they both hate and fear the iPhone so thoroughly. The more mainstream success the iPhone achieves, the less the mainstream will have to rely on the geeks for buying advice, usage advice, or really any advice at all. And to add actual injury to the bruised ego of no longer being able to feel important, geeks see products like the iPhone and iPad as signifying an end to the era in which consumer tech products are suitable for geeks. No wonder, then, that the geeks are clinging to their Android dream so tightly, despite it being such a thoroughly underwhelming product: it’s the only hope they have left.

Well, that and Linux, the desktop operating system that’s built around the same kind of total anarchist geekery, an operating system which has seen literally zero adoption outside the geekdom despite the fact that the geek headline writers have been touting Linux as “the future” for more than a decade. Rather than admit that Linux is a complete mainstream failure, the geeks have instead merely transferred their enthusiasm to the Android, a platform which hasn’t yet officially failed, giving them license to attach as much irrational hope to the future of geek products as they wish.

But even as these insulated geeks manage to libel the iPhone on a daily basis with their geek-agenda headlines, and have seemingly stepped it up a notch with the phony iPhone 4 antenna controversy, mainstream sales haven’t been hurt. It’s almost as if the mainstream public have spent so many years (decades really) reading technology headlines that invariably turned out to be wrong-headed and worthless that they’ve instinctively learned not to trust those headlines. The proof? Geek tech pundits have openly attacked every product that Apple has brought to market over the past decade, and yet nearly every one of those products has proven to be a mainstream success. In contrast, the only two Apple products that the geeks supported from day one, the Mac Mini, and the Apple TV, have been Apple’s only two notable flops during that same time. It’s not, then, a question of how irrelevant the geek tech pundits have become, but instead just how much of a counter-indicator they’ve become. The next time Apple launches a new product that the hard core geeks fully support and don’t bother to manufacture phony controversies about, Apple might want to think twice about that particular product’s mainstream suitability.

In the mean time, iPhone 4 is already a mainstream success. The pre-order numbers clearly demonstrated it, the massive lines on Thursday made it even more clear, and the likely press release from Apple on Monday morning announcing more than a million iPhone 4 units sold will seal the deal – at which point the geek headline writers will find a way to spin that negatively and try to prop up their latest Android fetish instead. You heard it here first.

Five iPad “controversies” that turned out to be irrelevant

With the iPad reaching the two million units sold milestone today in fifty-nine days on the market, sales of the tablet have surpassed the expectations of everyone involved, likely including even that of Apple itself. So with the iPad now an inarguable early success, here are five issues that were supposed to have been controversial about the iPad which turned out to be non-issues or at least haven’t negatively impacted sales in a noticeable manner:

Lack of Flash: The theory that the griping about the lack of Flash on the iPad was merely coming from a small number of very loud people appears to have been validated by the iPad’s success.

Second generation syndrome: By now everyone paying attention knows that the second generation of a new Apple product comes with a better feature set and often a better price tag. While some may indeed be waiting for iPad G2 to arrive, it doesn’t appear to be the default behavior of the general public.

Multitasking: Like with Flash, the “public outcry” over the lack of third party multitasking on the iPad appears to have actually been just a handful of folks screaming at the top of their lungs in an attempt to appear more numerous than they actually are. As it turns out, the mainstream users buying the iPad don’t even know what the word “multitasking” means, much less care.

iPad 3G surcharge: Not only does the iPad 3G cost $15 to $30 a month for use of AT&T’s 3G network, users have to pay a $130 surcharge right out of the gate just to get the 3G enabled iPad model. While the 3G iPad pricing scheme feels like a racket, it hasn’t prevented iPad users from seeking out the 3G model – so much so that it’s been more difficult to find at retail than the non-3G model since it launched.

The name “iPad”: Remember how the iPad was going to be scoffed at and flop because its name contained the word “pad”? The early jokes have died down, sales are through the roof, and the joke appears to have been on those who honestly thought that the name “iPad” would somehow harm sales.