Now that Apple’s “antennagate” has died down, let’s take a look back, shall we?
If anything, this whole fiasco has illustrated the difference between a blogger and a journalist.
The thing lost in all the “OMG! The sky is falling!” reports is actual data. There wasn’t ONE report from any of the blogs and/or news outlets of how many people this affected.
MacWorld said “Report: Users having iPhone 4 antenna reception issues”
Network World: “iPhone 4 owners report reception and signal issues”
The list goes on. Notice how none of those reports quantified the number of users? Then the mainstream media gets wind of this (also without doing due diligence), and suddenly your molehill is a nice mountain.
Contrast that to the press conference that Apple held in response to this mess. 0.55% (one HALF of ONE PERCENT) of users have called in with this issue. What? What was that? An actual FACT? That’s odd. And their return rate is 1/3 of the return rate of the 3GS.
Apple backed up their stance with hard data, but at that point, it didn’t matter; perception had become reality.
Lost in the noise was the fact that the iPhone 4 had an EXTERNAL antenna. Of course if you put your hand over it it will attenuate the signal. BUT, the new phone got much BETTER reception than previous models (by having the external antenna) so the trade-off was worth it in Apple’s eye(s). But based on the media reports, you’d be hard-pressed to find this little nugget of information.
The news is supposed to report facts. Instead it’s all about eye-balls. And page/ad impressions for blogs. By jumping on the bandwagon, this whole issue spun out of control. Even after Apple showed that other smartphones also “lost signal” when gripped over their antenna, you didn’t see ANY reports about those other phones, did you?
ZDNet might have been the worst of all:
Consumer Reports: Thumbs down to iPhone 4; antenna to blame
Really, ZDNet? In fact, that’s a bald-faced lie. Consumer Reports didn’t say “don’t buy”, they said “we cannot recommend”. Not exactly splitting hairs there. Thumbs down would be “don’t buy the phone”. But that doesn’t get people to click on the story on their website, now does it?
