You can call Apple’s products many things. Overpriced, elitist, overhyped, restrictive — all of these have a ring of truth to them. Then again so do words like beautiful, brilliant, easy and awe inspiring. The words you almost never hear, though, are “defective” or “faulty”.
But that’s just what Consumer Reports, a well respected product comparison magazine, has said about Apple’s latest-and-greatest device; the long awaited (and salivated over) iPhone 4. In fact it refused to give the device its seal of approval — the first time this has ever happened to an iPhone.
The problem? Consumer Reports claims to have confirmed, using lab testing, that holding the phone in a certain way (particularly in your left hand) affects the reception and causes calls to drop. I say “confirmed” because the accusation has been floating around the tech blogosphere ever since the device was launched on June 24.
Dubbed the “death grip” the problem stems from the bottom left-hand corner of the phone. Unlike its predecessors, the iPhone 4 uses its case as an antenna. It’s a neat design twist that Apple crowed about when they launched the device.
Unfortunately “neat” may end up being “expensive”. Apple sold 1,7-million iPhone 4’s in the first three days, and will probably sell tens of millions by the end of the year. When they announced you could pre-order the device on the 15th of June, the resulting stampede crashed their ordering system.
That sounds like a dream come true for any company, and indeed it was trumpeted as “the most successful product launch in Apple’s history.” But if it has to issue a product recall, as many PR experts are urging it to do, then all that momentum turns against Apple. Such a recall might cost the company as much as $1,5-billion.
Apple obviously wants to avoid such a gigantic cost, and so it has been fobbing off unhappy customers ever since the launch. Solutions offered so far have included helpful tips like “avoid holding it in that way“, “buy a case” and “it’s just a software glitch.”
In its defence, it appears that Apple has been quite unlucky here. Although Consumer Reports confirmed the glitch, other experts have weighed in pointing out flaws in their methodology, and several other testers have had significantly different results.
The US suffers from notoriously poor cellphone signal strength — particularly on their West coast — which has exacerbated this small flaw. In fact visiting Americans were amazed by the quality of cellphone reception during the World Cup. The older models of the iPhone were also known to drop calls in America’s urban areas, as were many other smart phones — something virtually unheard of in Europe or South Africa.
But that’s the thing with PR — it doesn’t matter how unlucky you are, how overblown the issue is, or how good a track record you have. Yes, most of the people making noise are grumpy, left-handed bloggers who live in valleys, but they have turned a small flaw into national news.
Apple has spent the last decade growing a tribe of customers whose messianic fervour is like a force of nature. No wonder it is now worth more than Microsoft. You can bet no one’s crashing Microsoft’s servers with pre-orders for Office 2010 or the Kin.
That whole tribe is united by three magic words “it just works.” Apple needs to swallow its pride and fix this issue — in public and in full. In the end those three words are worth far more than $1,5-billion.