So a ton of news has been happening with the iPhone 4 and Apple this week.
First, in response to Apple showing videos of other smart phones having “weak spots”, the CEO’s of the smart phones manufacturers who were highlighted and even a few that were not, chimed in to say that Steve Jobs was full of BS and that their phones do not have the same issue that the iPhone 4 has.
This is rather humorous since there are hundreds of videos on YouTube clearly showing the same signal loss when holding their smart phones “incorrectly”. Samsung even went as far as to put a sticker on the phone saying not to obstruct the area covered by the sticker during calls.
In fact, there is now a Tumblr.com blog called “Don’t Hold It Wrong” with screen shots of documentation from several smart phone manufacturers showing where “not to hold their phones”. There is also a Flickr set of pictures showing the same kind of info.
Scott Adams, the artists/author of Dilbert, has a great article about the press conference and how Steve handled the whole Antenna issue.
Wired.com has a great piece on how AT&T tried to get Apple to throttle back on it’s features (and succeeded in many cases; namely tethering and MMS with the 3GS came out for starters). I suspect that if Apple had gone to any other carrier, they would have had the same issues that they are currently having with AT&T since no cell carrier would have been prepared for the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone and it’s ability to access the Internet and other data services.
I normally wouldn’t mention other podcasts/video podcasts, but MacBreak Weekly #204 had a great show about the iPhone 4 and it’s antenna issues as well as some other great insights. The show features John Gruber of DaringFireball.net, Andy Ihnatko The Chicago Sun-Times’ tech columnist and Leo Laporte of TWiT.tv. It’s a 2+ hour show, but well worth the listen/watch if you have the time.
Some of the more interesting insights revealed in that show:
- Reason why Apple made the Bumper cases
- Why Google Voice was rejected from the App Store
I’ll start with the Bumpers. This actually makes a ton of sense, and would have made Apple a ton of dollars. Apple is known for it’s secrecy. So much so that we the public had known about the iPhone coming out back probably 6 months to a year before it was announced January of 2007. OK, Apple tries to be very secretive.
So when it was time to totally redesign the iPhone for it’s 4th incarnation, case manufacturers had no specs to design their cases. Apple was the only company that really knew the exact dimensions of the phone. So it makes sense that they were the only company with a case on the day the phone was released. Apple knows how profitable the case accessory business is. I mean really. Spend about $1 and sell a finished case for $30! It’s pretty clear why Apple came out with a case for the iPhone 4.
Also, they had great numbers from the iPhone 3GS launch where case manufacturers knew the dimensions since the phone didn’t change in shape or size. They knew that 80% of every iPhone 3GS buyer also bought a case. So with nearly 3 million iPhone 4’s sold in just 3 weeks, they knew they could have sold 2.4 million cases for nearly $70 million dollars in profit. $70 million in just 3 weeks. This was clearly a no brainer.
So there really is no conspiracy here that Apple knew that they had a problem with the antenna and had cases on hand to fix it. In fact, they are going to lose a ton of pure profit giving the cases away through September.
Next, the Google Voice thing. I don’t remember who brought up the topic in the MacBreak Weekly show, but someone said that if a call was made through Google Voice, FaceTime wouldn’t be able to make a connection and would cause all kinds of problems for their customer support or Genius’ when the iPhone 4 came out.
Google Voice works by you, the user, telling Google Voice what phone to call when you receive and make calls. Then, when you make a call yourself, Google calls both the number you gave Google Voice to call and the phone number on record for yourself. Thus eliminating any long distance charges you might have to pay since you are not initiating the call. Google then connects the two lines together and presto, you are good to go. Google Voice doesn’t use VOIP like some folks seem to believe the reason for the lack of Apple’s approval.
Obviously, they couldn’t tell Google why they were not approving the app they submitted. As it was, the actual phone was seen well before it’s announcement by some poor Apple employee that accidentally left it at a bar, or was it stolen?? Still, the fact that an app that more or less makes phone calls wouldn’t work with FaceTime would throw a pretty big wrench into Apple’s plans to sell FaceTime as a big deal.
Other news items to come out this week were some pretty clever “cases” to fix the antenna issue. A company called Antenn-aid has come out with a great sticker that looks like a band-aid to cover the spot on the phone that when touched by a hand/finger causes the signal to drop. They are $4.99 for 6 multi-color stickers and is a great looking fix for the problem.
Someone else posted a fake ad for something similar:
It’s not a real product, just a joke, and a good one.
A great piece of news a trivia also came out recently. Thanks to Bill Atkinson, one of the original developers at Apple for the Macintosh and it’s OS at the time, the source code for MacPaint and the QuickDraw graphics library were made public at the Computer History Museum website. It’s the full Pascal and Assembler source code and is just a work of art to look at. At least to anyone who has ever written a computer program in their lives.
Finally, Apple’s quarterly financials came out yesterday and showed that they have had their best quarter yet. No real surprise with nearly 4 million iPads and probably 4 million iPhones sold so far. However, I don’t think the iPhones are a part of last quarters figures. Still, Apple sold as many iPads as they did computers last quarter and had a 60%+ increase is profits over last year’s 3rd quarter.
Steve Jobs, while talking about the great quarter, hinted at some possible new products coming by the end of the year:
“It was a phenomenal quarter that exceeded our expectations all around, including the most successful product launch in Apple’s history with iPhone 4,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPad is off to a terrific start, more people are buying Macs than ever before, and we have amazing new products still to come this year.”
There have been some pictures of what appears to be a stand-alone wireless trackpad that could be connected to desktop Macs to allow them to have the same multi-touch features that the MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s have. Plus there are still rumors of a $99 AppleTV that would use iOS instead of the OS it’s currently using.
All in all, a very eventful week.
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