Some of the questions & answers:
Steve, how’s your health? How are you doing?
Steve: I’m doing fine, I was doing better earlier in the week when I was on vacation in Hawaii.”
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Are you doing anything else to address the issue? Perhaps changing hardware?
Steve: You know, the 3GS has the same problem. We’re getting reports from customers that this is better than the 3GS. So I don’t know changing the antenna design would help — I don’t know what our next antenna design will look like.
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Were you told about the design before the phone was released?
Steve: Are you talking about the Bloomberg article? That’s a crock, and we’ve challenged them to show proof that that. If anyone had said this thing has problems, we would have dispatched people to deal with that issue.
The Blommberg report was “total bullshit.”
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Wait for Bloomberg’s response.
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Are you willing to make an apology to investors?
Steve: You know we hear from customers who love this phone and have a great experience with it, and we’re doing a lot to help them with any issues they’re seeing. To investors, you know, you invest in the company we are, so if the stock goes down $5… I don’t think I owe them an apology.
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Apple share went down after this response.
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Do you think you’re making users choose between form and function?
Steve: No, we strive to do both. For instance, we make the phone smaller, so it fits well in your pocket… the Retina Display… it’s like a fine printed book, it blows away other displays. It costs a little more, but we made it work. The iPhone 4 is an exterior antenna, so it doesn’t live inside the case, we have a larger battery for better battery life. We try to have our cake and eat it too, we try to have great design and great performance.
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Is there anything you could have said in the launch keynote to lower expectations?
Steve: Not really. We could have said “hey if you hold the phone in this certain way you might see some signal attenuation…” We’re human. We make mistakes, and we figure it out fast. That’s why we have the best and most loyal customers in the world.
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On the September 30th date, is that to let people know that you’ll have to buy a case?
Steve: Not really, we’ll reevaluate then. Maybe we’ll have a better idea. Maybe Eminem will come out with a band-aid that goes over the corner and everyone will want that.
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Will the refund include third party cases?
Well it’s interesting, there aren’t any cases out there, and it’s hard to get cases now. If the third party case buyers can produce a receipt, why not give them one?
Steve: It’s really simple, if we tell people what our next product is, they stop buying our current products. Sometimes websites buy stolen property and they get out there… and case makers have a history of showing off their new cases for our new products. The case vendors haven’t had a history of helping to keep our work under wraps.
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Do any of you use the cases? I don’t.
Steve: Well I don’t. And I get better reception, I hold it like this [death grip] and never see problems.
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Would you have done anything differently knowing what you know now?
Steve: Well, of course the Consumer Reports stuff was bad, and of course we would have liked to get on this sooner. We just got this data. We just learned what was going on. We’re an engineering company. We think like engineers. We love it, we think it’s the right way to solve real problems. I don’t think that’s going to change, and the way we love our customers isn’t going to change. Maybe it’s human nature — when you’re doing well, people want to tear you down. I see it happening with Google, people trying to tear them down. And I don’t understand it… what would you prefer? That we were a korean company, that we were here in America leading the world with these products… maybe it’s just that people want to get eyeballs on their sites. We’ve been around for 34 years… haven’t we earned the credibility and the trust of the press? I think we have that from our users. I didn’t see it exhibited by some of the press as this was blown so far out of proportion. I’m not saying we didn’t make a mistake — we didn’t know that it would have these issues, we didn’t know we were putting a bull’s eye on the phone… but this has been so overblown. But to see how we could do better is going to take some time.
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Is there a hardware redesign in this generation that could fix this problem?
A: You can go on the web and look at pictures of Nokia phones that ship with stickers on the back that say “don’t touch here” — you can go on YouTube and see these. We should you three phones today, all good phones. So right now the state of the art of the entire industry is that no one has solved this problem. Would I like Apple to be first? Yes. Can we make it better right now? Maybe, we’ll see.
Steve: But not everyone is seeing this — a small number encounter it. For those customers we’ll get them a case, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll get them a full refund. And we’ll continue to work on antennas that don’t have this problem. But I think we’re where the rest of industry is right now.
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Was a recall ever up for discussion?
Steve: We get email from people all over the world about issues. We’re really serious about this. We try to figure this out. We come out to their places with test equipment, we want to see logs. We try to get the info and figure it out…
Bob: For the record, we told them we were coming first.
Steve: And we didn’t break down any doors.
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Scott Forstall says that the statement in The New York Times about an inside source claiming there could be a fix of that type coming was “patently false.”
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Oh, boy, first Bloomberg, and now The New York Times…
This is open war.
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What kind of impact do you think this will have on sales?
Tim: We’ll hold financial stuff for our Q2 results call next week.
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You released a software update for the iPhone about two years ago which improved the signal. You say now you’ve got a long-standing bug that doesn’t show the right bar data. Can you square those two things?
Steve: Well let me say something about Apple. We didn’t want to get into any business where we didn’t own or control the primary tech, because if you don’t the people who do own it will beat you. Our big insight about 8 years ago, was that it was going to shift from big displays or optical pickup heads, or radios being the most important component, we thought it was going to be software. And we’re pretty good at making software, we showed that in the iPod… other people are good at it too, like Palm, but we brought great software to the smartphone space. We’ve been able to create and distribute major updates to this software since the iPhone was released, and we’ve made the product better and better for free. Everyone is copying us now, but we were the first ones to do it. To answer your question, the formula we use the calculate bars has been off since the beginning, and the new update fixes that for the iPhone 4, 3G, and 3GS… I don’t know if I understand the other part of your question?
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Well you fixed this bug two years ago, and now you say there’s always been a problem…
A: They’re probably unrelated. I honestly don’t remember what the issue was before, but they’re probably totally separate.
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You’ve been communicating with customers through email quite a bit — how is that impacting how you’re dealing with these issues.
Steve: I always have, and you know, the address is out there and I’ve always emailed people back. I try to reply to some of them because they’re our customers. But now people post them to the web… and some people just make things up. So don’t believe everything you read!
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Will the bumper offer extend outside of the US?
A: Yes.
Q: And beyond September 30th?
A: We’ll evaluate.
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“Okay so I think this is it. Has that helped? I wish we could have done it sooner, but then you wouldn’t have had anything to write about.”
Ended at 11:26 am (PT)
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Apple shares UP again in a day that Dow Jones lost more than 240 points and Nasdaq more than 60.
Thanks to Engadget and its brilliant live coverage.