iPhone 4: The Consumer Reports fiasco - Jul 2010
It's been a wild ride for Apple (AAPL) and Consumer Reports, and nobody came out of it looking good. It started Monday morning, when the magazine's staff -- catching up to a two-week old story -- announced on its website that it couldn't recommend the iPhone 4 unless Apple did something about the phone's reception issues.
But as some reporters remembered, CR's staff had been impressed with the phone -- and dismissed the antenna issues -- 10 days earlier. And as All Things D reported Monday afternoon, the same phone just got the equivalent of a Consumer Reports rave in its formal evaluation -- 76 on a scale of 100, two points higher than the next runners up, the iPhone 3GS and the HTC Evo 4G.
Wall Street, meanwhile, reacting to the flood of negative headlines, knocked $6.99 off Apple's share price (and $6.36 billion off its market cap) in the space of two hours. The stock dropped $10 in early trading Tuesday.
Apple handled the evolving PR disaster with its usual thin skin. Although it had touted CR's original report -- the one that couldn't reproduce the antenna problem -- on its Hot News list, the company couldn't countenance talk about the second one (the "can't recommend" report) on its official discussion threads, and as TUAW reports, it
began systematically deleting the topic from its user forums as fast as they sprang up.
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Lab tests: Why Consumer Reports can't recommend the iPhone 4 - Jul 2010
It's official. Consumer Reports' engineers have just completed testing the iPhone 4, and have confirmed that there is a problem with its reception. When your finger or hand touches a spot on the phone's lower left side?an easy thing, especially for lefties?the signal can significantly degrade enough to cause you to lose your connection altogether if you're in an area with a weak signal. Due to this problem, we can't recommend the iPhone 4.
Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4's signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that "mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength." The tests also indicate that AT&T's network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4's much-reported signal woes.
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Damn glad I didn't fork good money for this piece of shit.