In case you weren’t paying attention (and most likely, you probably weren’t), Apple provided us with an expert lesson in PR 101 today.
You may have heard that Apple recently began selling the new iPhone 4. It’s done fairly well.
And yet, it hasn’t. A novel approach to the phone’s antenna was supposed to improve the reception. Depending on who you ask, it has or it hasn’t, or both.
But this post isn’t about the reception issue. It’s about an expert example from Apple’s PR team about how to respond to such a situation where as few people as possible will pay attention.
The iPhone 4 launched on June 24th, but some people got their pre-ordered phones a couple of days early. Almost immediately, reports began to come in about the iPhone Death Grip causing the phone to mysteriously lose signal strength.
Naturally, frustrated iPhone buyers emailed Steve Jobs. And (almost as naturally) Steve responded.
First, it was a simple response.
Just avoid holding it in that way.
Then, it was boilerplate from Apple PR, guised as a Steve response:
Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.
Eventually, it returned to being a non-issue:
There is no reception issue. Stay tuned.
So basically, Steve says there’s an antenna issue. Or not. As Fake Steve Jobs puts it:
We call it “clouding.” Right now, for example, we’ve sent out the following messages about iPhone 4 and the antenna issues:
1. All mobile phones have this problem.
2. Our mobile phone does not have this problem.
You see how this works? These two statements cannot both be true.
Yet we’ve said both of them. And now you don’t know what to believe.
Finally, an official response from Apple.
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong….Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.
We have gone back to our labs and retested everything, and the results are the same— the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is the best we have ever shipped.
Let me see if I’m reading this right. It’s not an antenna issue, instead it’s a matter of how the iPhone displays the strength of the reception. Riiiiiiiiight. So that means this video makes perfect sense:
It’s no surprise then that Apple released this dubious statement addressing the iPhone reception issue on a Friday, especially a Friday before a long holiday weekend. Because when you send something like this out on a Friday, it has the entire weekend to die down, as opposed to releasing it on a Monday or Tuesday when it has the entire week to get legs. Add to that the fact that it’s the 4th of July weekend, when many people are out of town and are paying more attention to their families, barbecues and travel plans than the latest Apple news, and this story should be sufficiently quiet by the time we’re all back to real life on Tuesday.
