July 12, 2010: The iPhone 4 suffers a major blow when respected trade publication Consumer Reports says it can’t, in good faith, recommend the new Apple smartphone. The reason the magazine refuses to give its vaunted “recommended” label to the previously top-ranked device in its devastating iPhone 4 review? A little Apple scandal called “Antennagate.”
July 2, 2010: Apple opens up about “Antennagate,” issuing a letter that addresses iPhone 4 reception problems publicly for the first time.
In a letter addressed to iPhone 4 users, Apple admits to being “surprised when we read reports of reception problems, and … immediately began investigating them.” However, the company’s findings do little to dispel the growing Antennagate controversy.
June 16, 2010: Apple reports a massive surge of interest in its latest smartphone, with iPhone 4 preorders racking up 600,000 sales on their first day.
The company calls the number “far higher” than expected. At the time, it’s the most iPhone preorders Apple has ever taken in a single day. AT&T suffers server problems thanks to the demand — with 10 times the usual traffic on its website. It’s proof positive that Apple is onto a winner!
March 29, 2012: Apple settles its “Antennagate” controversy by giving affected iPhone 4 owners the chance to claim a whopping $15 payout. The settlement covers customers who experienced problems with the phone dropping calls due to its cutting-edge design, but were unable to return their handsets (or didn’t want a free bumper from Apple to mitigate against the problem).
While it’s arguable whether a $15 payout was worth filing all the paperwork necessary to claim the cash, the Antennagate story — and the resulting class-action lawsuit — generated big headlines at the time.
Few of us know what it’s like to have our music played at an Apple keynote, but 37-year-old Apple fan Jonathan Mann does. Way back in the days of the iPhone 4, he composed a song about Apple’s Antennagate PR disaster. Not only did it get played at an Apple event, it actually made Steve Jobs dance.
For the past 11 years, Mann has recorded a new song every day, using his trusty Mac setup. That’s more than 4,000 songs in total. Now he’s launched a new podcast revealing his creative process. And, true to form, the latest episode features a song about the Mac Pro.
“My first computer, when I was just a toddler, was an Apple IIe,” Mann told Cult of Mac. “My mom used it for work, and my favorite activity was just to hold down different keys on the boot screen and watch the letters go and go.”
Imagine an organization that’s loved by its devoted, cultlike followers, but despised by haters. The close working relationship between its mercurial leader and one of the greatest talents in the field led to an unprecedented run of success. Even the occasional “-gate” style controversy failed to dent its success. But despite all this, analysts still question its long-term viability.
I’m referring, of course, to the New England Patriots. They may not be in the NFL playoffs this year, but people just can’t stop talking about the Pats. Kinda like the way everyone talked about Apple at CES last week, even though it barely attended.
Love them or hate them, the Patriots are the Apple of football.
Apple finally bumped the storage on the baseline iPhone model to 32GB this year, but it looks like choosing the cheapest model may come with some serious speed setbacks.
The 32GB versions of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus suffer from slower storage speeds, according to benchmarks that reveal the memory chip on the baseline model scores markedly worse than other versions.
The first crisis to hit the iPhone 7 Plus is already here, and this time it could be a lot more annoying than Bendgate and Antennagate.
Some iPhone 7 Plus owners are reporting that Apple’s new devices emit a strange hissing noise when performing processor-intensive tasks. And no one is sure what’s causing it.
Hear it for yourself:
Apple is 40 years old today. In that time, the Cupertino company has delivered some incredible products and services, and revolutionized smartphones, tablets, and music players. But is it boring now?
Some say Apple’s innovation has stalled in recent years, and it has become too predictable. The surprises we used to see during its big keynotes no longer show up, and despite its secrecy, you can almost predict its product roadmap for the next year.
Are those claims harsh? Is Apple really past its best, or will it deliver groundbreaking new products again that can shake up the consumer technology industry?
Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac as we fight over Apple at 40.
Steve Jobs wasn’t in the habit of dancing at Apple events. But in 2010, prior to a press conference where he addressed concerns about the new iPhone’s antenna, a song lampooning the controversy got Jobs dancing in the wings before he faced off with journalists.
The song in question, which played on a big screen to kick off the event, was the work of YouTube musician and Apple fan Jonathan Mann, who has spent the past five years composing a new song each day and posting it online.
“I heard later on from an Apple PR person that Steve Jobs was bopping along in the wings as the song was playing” at the Antennagate press conference, says Mann, speaking with Cult of Mac. “It was a surreal moment in my life.”
Antennagate went away, but Mann became the go-to guy for jingles about all things Cupertino. To date he has written 38 songs about Apple, touching on everything from Craig Federighi’s WWDC performance to the unveiling of the Apple Watch. His clever ideas and quick turnaround times have turned him into YouTube’s premier Apple songsmith.
Bendgate is the latest in a long line of minor Apple problems that get blown out of proportion by the Internet’s echo chamber and the media jackals that inevitably swoop in and howl about the latest “crisis.”
The same sort of over-the-top backlash happened with the iPhone 4’s reception issue (Antennagate) and the iPad’s trickle-charge feature (Batterygate). It’s a familiar cycle: Apple’s fantastic new device captures the world’s attention, a glitch arises and suddenly the world is coming to an end — at least until it’s not.
“Apple’s ability to trigger consumer demand is probably without rival across the globe — that’s no small feat,” says Larry Barton, a pioneer in corporate crisis management who studies the causes of and responses to incidents like these. “Their core, loyal customer has proven to be forgiving across several minor incidents, and Bendgate is just that — a relatively minor snafu that’s not uncommon with a first-generation design.”
This week on The CultCast: Bendgate! Some say it’s Antennagate 2.0, but is there a legitimate issue happening here? We’ll tell you what we think about these “bent” iPhones… Then, we’ve used it for a whole week—catch our updated impressions of iPhone 6. Plus, why you should hold off on installing iOS 8.0.1, and what you can do if you already have. And finally, it’s not just the big screen, there might be another reason the iPhone 6 has been impossible to buy. We’ll tell you our stories from launch day…
Heartily guffaw your way through each week’s best Apple stories! Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast now on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing on iTunes, or hit play below and let the chuckles begin.
Our thanks to lynda.com for sponsoring this episode! Learn virtually any application at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials at lynda.com.
Click on for the show notes.
If you got a $15 in the mail for no apparent reason, well, it’s because way back in 2010, Steve Jobs failed in convincing the world at large to “just avoid holding it that way.”
Yes, that cool $15 bucks you got in the mail? It’s an Antennagate settlement check.
Apple doesn’t have a rich history of apologizing for their errors, big or small. When AntennaGate shook the web, Apple held a conference but they never said they were sorry. They just told us that antennas suck sometimes but they’ll give us a free bumper to be quiet. In fact, I can’t remember many times at all where Apple came out and publicly admitted a mistake.
Tim Cook’s apology this morning was a great gesture. It was almost a first for the company. Admitting that Apple’s not perfect and made a mistake isn’t easy, but did Tim Cook need to apologize to satisfy Apple customers? Could they have done something else to resolve the situation? We’d love to hear your ideas, so come over to the forums and talk to us about it.
Click here to go to the Cult of Mac Forums and talk about Tim Cook’s apology
Remember Jonathan Mann? He became popular on YouTube for writing and uploading a brand new song each and every day, and he’s famous among Apple fans for writing a song about the iPhone 4’s Antennagate, which was played at a special press event held by Apple to discuss the issue. He also did a duet with Siri, which we covered back in October.
Mann’s now back with Apple’s digital assistant for a special happy birthday song.
Speaking at a company event in Sydney, Australia, this week, Apple co-founder and everyone’s favorite geek Steve Wozniak spoke out about Apple’s new Maps service, which got its public debut alongside iOS 6 last Wednesday. Like most of us, Woz says he’s disappointed with the new app, and that Google’s Maps service is better. However, he doesn’t feel that the issues users have been experiencing are “that severe.”
Apple has settled a class action lawsuit over the ‘antennagate’ debacle that surfaced shortly after the launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010. Around 25 million customers in the U.S. will be entitled to $15 in cash or a free bumper case.
It seems early iPhone 4S adopters the world over have discovered a new issue with Apple’s latest handset. No, it has nothing to do with poor battery life, but rather a complete loss of signal for no apparent reason. To be clear, this isn’t a new “antennagate” — the issue does not occur while holding the device in a certain position — it’s a new problem that causes the device to lose its signal randomly. Users report they can be enjoying a full five-bar signal one minute, then be greeted by that frustrating “No Service” status the next.
Apple issued its first iOS 5 update to the public yesterday — an update which was released to fix “bugs affecting battery life” under the latest firmware, amongst other issues. Following the update, however, users have reported that their battery life has seen no improvement, and that iOS 5.0.1 comes with more bugs of its own.
The placement of the cellular and WiFi antennas between the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 couldn’t be more different, but that’s not stopping a small but vocal minority of iPad 2 owners to cry about an Antennagate of their own.
Despite having a brand new antenna, the Verizon iPhone 4 also has antenna issues when held in a “Death Hug,” iLounge has discovered.
The “Death Hug” is when the phone is cupped by both hands and held in landscape orientation — not exactly normal. Still, iLounge found it slows both cellular and WiFi reception when loading web pages. But as Steve Jobs pointed out in response to the original Antennagate controversy, holding any smartphone in your hands degrades the signal to some extent.
This doesn’t look like Antennagate redux. We can’t see the VZW Death Hug turning into another PR headache for Apple.
Yesterday, a firm named GlobalDirectParts put together an extensive five minute video showcasing what they say are the components of Apple’s next-generation iPhone.
While the video could have been an elaborate fake, GlobalDirectParts’ video gave a clear look at the charging port flex cable and a new design for the external antenna design. Unfortunately, the video was quickly pulled by YouTube because of a copyright claim by Apple, gifting the video with at least some tint of posthumous veracity.
A site called Smartphone Medic is now confirming the GlobalDirectParts video with several images of a new iPhone antenna, which has four black bands separating the antennas, compared to the current iPhone 4’s three. Since antenna attenuation (aka “death grip”) happens when you bridge these antennas with your hand, four separations would presumably mitigate the issue compared to three.
2010 was a huge year for Apple news. As we close out the year, we look back at some of the year’s biggest stories and what they might mean for 2011.
Apple’s deservedly racking up a lot of year-end awards as the New Year fast approaches — from the iPad being named Walt Mossberg’s gadget of the year to Steve Jobs garnering the Financial Times’ Person of the Year award — but you can end this one to the more ignominious trophy pile: CNN has just listed Antennagate as one of their ten biggest tech fails of 2010.
Even if Apple thought Antennagate was overblown, let’s face it: their last attempt to put the iPhone’s antenna into the exposed edges of the device didn’t work out so well, prompting a PR catastrophe so bad that Apple was actually forced to hold an emergency press conference… something they never do.
That in and of itself suggests pretty strongly that Apple’s going to try something new for the iPhone antenna in future handsets, and if a new patent is any indication, that new approach to hiding the iPhone’s antenna may be by hiding it under the iconic Apple logo.