Apple: incompetent, dishonest, or both?
It’s been nearly a year since my last blog entry, partly since Facebook and Twitter have satiated my desire to express myself online, but mostly because I didn’t really have anything important to say… until now.
We bought our first iPhone a little over a year ago, for Cathy. She really liked it, and after spending some time with it, I finally decided to replace my Nokia E51 with Cathy’s old iPhone 3G, and purchased a 3GS for her. While I had some problems with my iPhone 3G (particularly with wifi and GPS reception), I was pleased, overall, with the phone. On the announcement of the iPhone 4, I had already made my mind up to change carriers in Germany, from E-Plus to T-Mobile, due to poor signal reception in our house. Since the release of the iPhone 4 together with iOS 4, it’s all gone downhill.
First, the iPhone 4 had widely-publicized antenna problems, due to the new design. I had expected to get better reception with the new phone, but instead find myself often losing service completely if I simply held the phone naturally. Apple insulted its customers with a press release that skirted the edges of flat-out dishonesty.
Really, Apple? You were “stunned” to learn that your formula for mapping signal strength into bars was “totally wrong”, since the first iPhone? Did you think nobody would remember that software update you released that “gave” people more bars, often without improving actual reception? (“You really only have 2 or 3 bars, but we’ll show you 5, to make you happy!”)
And yes, Apple, “gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars.” Agreed. But the iPhone 3GS, when held naturally, drops about 1.9 dB (approximately 35% of received power), which seems perfectly reasonable. Compare that to the iPhone 4, which loses 19.8 dB when held naturally, which equates to a 98.95% power loss! (measurements performed by AnandTech) Perhaps Apple disabled “Field Test Mode” capability on the iPhone 4, hoping to distort those immanent discussions of faulty antenna design by talking about “bars” instead of decibels?
Now, let’s address the ridiculously poor performance of iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G. Understandably, some features in the new iOS were disabled, due to the 3G’s inferior hardware specs, relative to the 3GS, iPad, and iPhone 4. Disabling those features wasn’t sufficient, though. iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G is a complete pig. A blend of either hung processes, memory leaks, and/or poor memory management turned my recently-useful iPhone 3G into a nearly useless brick. Case in point: frequently, I’m unable to even answer an incoming phone call, because the phone is so badly bogged down that the UI doesn’t react before the call is redirected to voicemail! If this was a Microsoft product, I might expect the slow, buggy version to be replaced with a newer, slower, and even buggier version… (eg, XP to Vista)
Someone once said “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” I’ve heard accusations that Apple has sabotaged the iOS 4 release on the iPhone 3G, simply to leverage existing customers to upgrade to the new iPhone 4. While I don’t want to believe that, it’s pretty hard to imagine that Apple is unable to thoroughly test a software release on 4 different devices. Even if Apple didn’t discover the problem during testing, they certainly heard about it very soon after the iOS 4 release, and nearly 2 months later, there still isn’t a software update to alleviate the issue. I could almost forgive all of this, but Apple has also artificially blocked the ability to downgrade to the last functional iOS release for the iPhone 3G: 3.1.3, and even continues to push the “upgrade” to unsuspecting users still on 3.1.3!
What’s an iPhone 3G user to do? We have to resort to hacks to restore our devices to full functionality. Owners of the original iPhone and original iPod Touch have also been left completely in the cold by Apple, with no security patch for the recently disclosed critical PDF vulnerability (though a solution exists, thanks to the jailbreaking community). This “forced obsolescence” seems to contradict Apple’s claims to care about our environment, as well.
As of today, my iPhone 3G has been downgraded back to 3.1.3, despite Apple’s efforts to prevent me from doing so.