Apple: iPhone 4 Fix Is Coming

Apple on the iPhone’s antenna and signal drop problem:

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

In other words, it won’t cost us much money, and you’ll have to live with whatever we tell you it is.

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.

Let me see if I get this straight. When my iPhone 4 displays five bars of signal strength, it really means signal strength may be anywhere from 100-percent to 10-percent? And anything less than five bars is even worse signal strength than I thought?

For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. 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.

I suspect this is an inherent, de facto scam brought about by cell phone carriers and cell phone makers. Both have a vested interest in displaying five bars as often as possible. The cell phone carriers want users to believe that their network gives better reception; more bars. The cell phone makers want users to believe their cell phones get better reception than other phones.

Apple exposed the scam by shipping a cell phone with a superior antenna design which exposed the inaccurate signal strength reading displayed by one to five bars.

Assume that Apple’s upcoming software fix more accurately reports signal strength in the number of bars displayed. Some iPhone 4 users and Androtards will then say that signal strength on the iPhone 4 is worse than before. We have not heard the last of this.