A company like Apple really ought to have wasted no time at all in dealing with the iPhone 4 antenna issue with the aim of burying it as quickly as possible, so why haven’t they done that?
Let me explain. This week Mark Papermaster who was head of Apple’s mobile device hardware operations was fired from Apple. No one really knows why but the rumours are rife that he is the scapegoat for the iPhone’s antenna problems.
The thing is, we already know that Jobs was aware of the antenna problems quite some time ago, perhaps even for as long as 2 years, and when Papermaster entered the Apple scene, testing on the iPhone had already begun so it was hardly his fault.
Now you’d think that a high profile company like Apple would be well aware of what would be said considering the timing of Papermaster’s departure.
As MG Siegler from TechCrunch put it “Apple had to know that’s the way this would play out. And they had to know it would bring the antenna issue back to the forefront of the news. So why on Earth would they want that?”
Exactly my point!
The whole antenna problem has been badly dealt with by Apple from the very beginning. I mean how can you just ignore a warning about it and then shove the iPhone out on to an unsuspecting public regardless. That’s just asking for trouble.
When the first complaints started rolling in we had Jobs emailing people telling them not to hold the phone in a certain way, I mean what sort of advice is that?
Then Apple held a hastily convened press conference to say there was nothing wrong with the iPhone which only served to highlight the problem even more. Why a press conference to tell us that?
The rumoured recall didn’t materialize and instead the final solution was that Apple would issue users with a free bumper and everything would be fine, but it wasn’t was it.
Apple started pointing the finger at other companies saying they had antenna issues too, as if that made it any better, however, these other companies didn’t hit the headlines in the same way that Apple did.
Apple must either want all the negative publicity for reasons known only to them, or they really didn’t and still don’t have a clue what to do and are making a bad situation worse by handling it all wrong.
