Apple 3G iPhone Issues: Finger Pointing
August 19th, 2008
The iPhone 3G still has issues. As I write this, the two biggest bugaboos are MobileMe and wimpy 3G reception.
Mobile Me: Rob Schoen, the guy in charge of MobileMe, lost his job last Friday. But the kicker: he came from Microsoft and brought several of his Redmond buddies to Apple.
Blame Deflection: Who Apple Fans May Blame Instead Of Apple: The MobileMe fiasco is Microsoft’s fault. Microsoft.
3G Reception: There’s bad driver code in the 3G chips which were developed outside of Apple (Infineon?). Apple isolated the bug, but the supplier has a “lack of urgency” even though their driver code is an “absolute travesty.” A fix is at least two months out.
Blame Deflection: Who Apple Fans May Blame Instead Of Apple: The 3G reception fiasco is the 3G chip vendor’s fault. The 3G chip vendor.
It seems, almost intentionally, Apple positions themselves where blame for problems may be deflected onto someone else (iTunes DRM is because of the music labels). Certainly, Apple could blame AT&T for any iPhone issues. But despite our dislike for AT&T, the blame for these two annoyances are working their way to Apple’s front door. The blame deflection isn’t going to work for most iPhone customers – especially those who are mainstream users and not Apple fanboys. Apple needs to take care of this stuff, and the ball very much in their court.
The Mobile Me situation hasn’t affected me directly for one simple reason: I gave up using it. I signed up just before the iPhone was launched, and couldn’t log in for about a week. When I finally got in, the “push” email was messed up so I haven’t touched it since. Luckilly, I’m still on the courtesy “free” clock so I haven’t paid anything for something I’m not using.
The 3G reception has been noticeably spotty on my iPhone. But I still hold out hope that the reception issue will be solved through a software fix deployed in an upcoming iPhone OS update. This is how my Apple TV which was dropping its WiFi connection got repaired.
But the thing that frustrated me about that situation, is Apple doesn’t like to admit to problems until they releases a fix. A lot of troubleshooting time and effort would be eliminated if Apple would just admit fault right off the bat. But Apple doesn’t generally do that. They’re still a company of secrecy and along with that comes a reluctance to communicate with customers, especially when it comes to problems.
I think that’s pretty weak. Especially when Netflix had an outage last week and was totally upfront about their screw up, and gave an ETA for the resolution and updates, all on their company blog.
Meanwhile, Chuqui notes Apple’s temporary Mobile Me blog has shuttered. Sigh.
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Posted In: Apple
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The whole 3G reception issue really bothers me. Everyone would like to thing that it's the software at fault, but there's at least a couple rumors saying that it's the hardware, which would explain the rather slow and reluctant response by Apple. I remember when the iPod Touch came to market. Many of them had a terrible viewing angle problem. At first, Apple did what all other consumer product companies do: they denied the problem, even suggesting that it was supposed to be that way! Then, they suggested that they could remedy the issue with tweaking the contrast/brightness settings on the device. Finally, an engineer on some forum explained the issue fully and chalked it up to shoddy QC during the screen cover manufacturing. Apple eventually gave in and offered replacement units (most likely refurbs).
Don't even get me stared about the iPhone 3G's case cracking phenomenon!