Apple to Users: Your Signal was Never Real to Begin With

Apple Gets its Signals Crossed

Ah this will help calm everyone down, Apple iPhone 4 users rejoice your wireless signal issues are over. The resolution: your poor signal is your real signal and we are going to make your signal bars bigger.

Seriously Apple? Who comes up with your PR for this stuff? Might want to seek some new advice. Great idea lets tell everyone there is no problem and that we have been using the wrong formula to calculate signal strength since 2007 and only JUST figured it out. That will definitely put everyone’s mind at ease and boost consumer confidence.

My real quandry is if Gizmodo would have figured this out if Apple hadn’t shut the phone off on them and if this issue is why Apple was really ticked off at Gizmodo to begin with.

NEW YORK — Apple Inc. said Friday that it was “stunned” to find that its iPhones use a “totally wrong” formula to show how many bars of signal strength they are getting.

In this June 7, 2010 photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs uses the new iPhone 4, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Apple said Friday, July 2, it is “stunned” to find that its latest iPhone model uses a “completely wrong” formula to show how many bars of signal strength it’s getting. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)

Apple said that’s the reason behind widespread complaints from users that the latest model, iPhone 4, shows a big drop in signal strength when held in a way that inadvertently blocks the antenna at the bottom of the phone.

That drop seems exaggerated because the phone can wrongly display four or five bars of signal strength when it shouldn’t, Apple said.

“Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place,” the company said in a statement.

Apple launched the iPhone 4 on June 24 in the U.S. and four other countries. The incorrect formula was present in the original iPhone, launched in 2007, Apple said.

Some outside engineers and users have blamed the iPhone 4’s apparent reception problems on the design of its novel antenna, which is incorporated in the case. But the company said that any phone will show reduced reception if held that way, since nearly all manufacturers put the antenna at the bottom. It maintains that the iPhone 4’s wireless performance is better than previous models.