[ErrantX]

What you are saying boils down to "Surely it's obvious that...".

Of course, the problem there is that it's not obvious to a non-trivial number of people. Who apparently in this case work in Apple's review department.

The most obviously idiotic things often look perfectly sensible from "inside", or from a singular perspective.

[triblib]

But like any big organization, there are likely idiosyncrasies that have bubbled and been allowed to continue just because, "that's the way things are." For example, the whole iphone4 antenna thing was surely seen by many people...but it's likely that someone at top said, "It's passable" and everyone else on the team learned to just accept it. Just because lots of people recognize a big problem doesn't mean that all efforts have been made to rectify/smooth it out.

[chris_wot]

The Apple antenna happened because Johnny Ives and Steve Jobs loved the design look and feel of the metal around the edge of the phone, and told the engineers to make it happen. Unfortunately, this time hey couldn't bend the laws of physics. I suggest looking up "Steve's Folly"...

[glenra]

There was nothing wrong with the Apple antenna. It was a perception issue, not a flaw. People kept buying that phones even after Apple stopped giving away the free cases and people kept giving it a higher customer satisfaction rating than any other phone on the planet at the time...because the benefits of the new design generally outweighed the costs - it was a good design given the constraints faced at the time.

> I suggest looking up "Steve's Folly"

Which turns out to be a rant about Adobe Flash for Mobile, which even Adobe has since given up on.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/11/adobe-reportedly...

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/02/adobe-confirms-n...

[chris_wot]

Ah. Obviously more than one of Steve's folly!

Try this one: http://www.cultofmac.com/125623/the-best-revelations-quotes-...

"Steve Jobs’ obsession with aesthetic details could be taken to ludicrous extents. For example, when they built a state-of-the-arty factory in Fremonth to manufacture the Macintosh, Jobs wanted all the machines repainted in bright colors. Apple’s manufacturing director, Matt Carter, fought him on it, because this was precision equipment, and repainting them could make them not work right. Steve persevered, and one of the most expensive machines broke, being known as Steve’s folly."

[glenra]

My top google result on the phrase was this, FWIW:

http://radleymarx.com/blog/steves-folly/

[chris_wot]

Doh! Not an instance of folly :(

[JBiserkov]

Exactly - it was a perception issue - in that the signal strength indicator was showing 5 out of 5 bars with signal strength ranging from 60% to 100%. When you covered the antenna with your hand, the signal strength dropped ~40%. So if you were in an area with strong reception, you would get ~60%, which Apple considered so "good enough" that we might as well show Full bars. If you on the other hand were in an area with weaker reception, say 60% (which still shows as Full bars), and cover the antenna you get 60-40=20% signal strength which resulted in a lot of issues and dropped calls.

Now, about the customer satisfaction rating... did users rate the phone (calling) experience alone, or the overall experience of using a 326dpi, internet-enabled, capacitive touch screen pocket computer with 500 000 "apps" that also happens to have a GSM capability besides Wi-Fi/FaceTime/Skype-video-calling??

[glenra]

The iPhone is as much a music player as a phone, so every iPhone comes with a special microphone headset with some external controls in the chord. Many iPhone users (myself included) prefer to talk on the phone via this headset. Using the headset you get better sound quality for both parties, can hear with both ears, can move more freely and be more comfortable and can use the phone to take notes or check your calendar or look something up on the internet while you talk. So when you talk on an iPhone, the phone might be in your pocket or in your lap or on the desk in front of you or just about anywhere. This presumption that people who are talking on the phone must be holding the phone by its base against their head is frankly a relic of an earlier time when phones weren't also good music players.

If you're listening to music and receive a call, one squeeze to the headphone chord answers the call, then the music comes back up where it left off when you or the other party hangs up. It's really convenient.

The AT&T network was kind of crappy for a while because they had trouble keeping up with demand. This perception issue only affected people who didn't use headphones and held the phone in a certain way and had unusually poor local signal strength...but even then, it wasn't appreciably worse than the situation those same people would have faced with the prior model, the 3GS.

[dhimes]

My iphone didn't come with this. Maybe it's because I am a business customer and had to buy it through the ATT store? I'm in the Boston area, in case that's pertinent.

[Shorel]

Heh. I use headphones to listen to music in a cheap Nokia 1616.

Not using headphones is truly a relic of the past.