Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4

July 2, 2010

Dear iPhone 4 Users,

The iPhone 4 has been the most successful product launch in Apple's history. It has been judged by reviewers around the world to be the best smartphone ever, and users have told us that they love it. So we were surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and we immediately began investigating them. Here is what we have learned.

To start with, gripping almost any mobile phone in certain ways will reduce its reception by 1 or more bars. This is true of iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, as well as many Droid, Nokia and RIM phones. But some users have reported that iPhone 4 can drop 4 or 5 bars when tightly held in a way which covers the black strip in the lower left corner of the metal band. This is a far bigger drop than normal, and as a result some have accused the iPhone 4 of having a faulty antenna design.

At the same time, we continue to read articles and receive hundreds of emails from users saying that iPhone 4 reception is better than the iPhone 3GS. They are delighted. This matches our own experience and testing. What can explain all of this?

We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising.

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. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.

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S'funny, Jobs didn't hold the phone "properly" when he showed it off in San Francisco -- he, too, lost connectivity holding the phone in a normal manner.

Though I never thought about it, I just now *LOOKED* at how I hold my Motorola RAZR V3. It's in my right hand and my pinky at the lower left corner. On my RAZR the pinky covers the USB port, on the iPhone4 it would connectively bridge the gap (the slot) between the two antenna segments causing a signal drop as 10000s of people are experiencing and reporting.

I call BS on Jobs. Within 24 hours of the iPhone4 hitting the streets Apple was inundated with angry communications from dissatisfied users and immediately RFP'd two PhD-level RF and antenna design positions which are still open as of today, Saturday, July 3, 2010 per:

Additionally, comments from Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Chronicle are justifiably ridiculing Jobs and Apple in the "Reader Comments" section of this article:

which also claims a math error in the bar presentation.

Previous articles commented that Apple's testing prior to product release was intrinsically flawed: the iPhone4 was camouflaged in a case that didn't have the external antenna (i.e., the Gizmodo incident with a prototype found in a bar).