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by cesare 5824 days ago
What a strange coincidence.

Just after releasing a phone that uses a metal ring all around the chassis as an antenna (which is something that perplexed every engineer living outside of the reality distortion field as soon as they saw the first pictures of the phone), they discovered that they've always used the wrong algorithm to calculate the signal strength.
3 comments
gfodor 5824 days ago
Not really a coincidence: users are much more likely to complain about this problem due to the new antenna design being so prominent in the marketing. If Apple never said that the antenna was the metal rim (and assumingly are telling the truth here) then people would not be forming these theories.
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Terretta 5824 days ago
It's interesting to me the language calling it a "metal rim" and "metal band", when Jonathan Ive says it's a solid slab of metal, that the groove is machined in. The iFixit teardown makes it appear that the groove is machined in as well, and the metal you see is all part of a slab.

I contrast Ive's comments and iFixit's teardown with the Keynote presentation, and think someone's simplifying something in the explanations.

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confuzatron 5824 days ago
From what I've seen, on the right hand side, the groove is effectively 'fake' - designed to create a symmetrical look. One part of the rim is small (3G), and the other is larger, (WiFi) and has the 'fake groove'.
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nooneelse 5824 days ago
Well, the dB to bars transformation does have some peculiar bar widths, http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/apple/iphone4/ba... , (some might even say intentionally misleading). But they chose to tempt antenna fate by putting the antennas in electrical contact with the user in normal operation. That was a design choice most other manufactures don't make, and, according to Anandtech's review, it has had real and measurable impact on the performance beyond the "holding-it" factor for other phones. They still aren't copping to their choice having added that extra performance hit.
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gregn 5824 days ago
yeah. what they were saying is that AT&T's suggested method to calculate bars is better, but that they went ahead and displayed more bars in week areas to give the illusion of signal strength.
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