What Steve Jobs should have said about the iPhone 4 antenna

The iPhone's antenna design was a trade-off: You get better reception under most conditions, and a smaller phone with better battery life. Unfortunately, under some conditions, you'll get worse reception.

That's what Steve Jobs should have said on Friday. Daring Fireball's John Gruber makes that point in his analysis following Apple's unusual press conference, where CEO Steve Jobs and top executives defended the iPhone 4 against criticism that poor antenna design leads to dropped calls when users touch the bottom-left edge of the device. Gruber writes:

What I took away from the press conference is that Apple believes the iPhone 4 antenna is better than the previous iPhone antennas, but it has a more sensitive “weak spot”. And, that more sensitive weak spot is inherent to the external antenna design. In short, that it’s a trade-off — better signal quality overall, better aesthetics, more structural rigidity, even better battery life because there’s room for a bigger battery without an internal antenna. The trade-off is that all of those benefits come at the expense of a more sensitive “weak spot”. (I put that in quotes because it’s Jobs’s term for the infamous lower-left gap in the antenna frame.)

But Jobs never used the word “trade-off”, and clearly didn’t want to. I think he should have.

Gruber is often a better spokesman for Apple than Apple is itself. I don't mean that as a criticism, I mean it as high praise. Gruber is one of the best tech bloggers in the business. He loves Apple, he's passionate about their products, and he seems to understand how the company operates.

Gruber is at his best when Apple is under fire, whereas Apple doesn't take criticism well. If Apple were one of your co-workers, it would be the guy who always takes the last cup of coffee and gets all defensive when you call him on it. ("Dude, it's no big deal. Just, y'know, make a fresh pot every now and then. Ow, stop hitting me with the stapler.")

How'd Apple handle it?

How long will antennagate be an issue for Apple? I thought Apple pretty handily disposed of antennagate criticism Friday.

Blogger Michael Mace agreed. On a scale of 1 to 10, antennagate is a 1.5, just a hair above "utterly meaningless," said Mace, principal at Rubicon Consulting, who headed Apple’s home and education division 1987-97 and held high-level positions at Palm 1999-2001. "Unless there is some huge, hidden problem that Apple still isn't telling us about, the story is now over."

My colleagues at Computerworld are more skeptical. JR Raphael, who writes our Android Power blog, says "Apple's iPhone defense is total nonsense." And Gregg Keizer interviewed a crisis-communications consultant who gave Apple a C grade for its iPhone 4 response.

Oh, grow up

Apple does have real challenges -- competition from Android among them -- but Antennagate is not one of them, Mace says.

Another problem, says Mace: "Apple is gradually learning that the rules of behavior for a successful industry leader are different than the rules for a scrappy upstart. Aggressiveness that's cute in a five-year-old kid will get a 25-year-old football player arrested."

Scripting News's Dave Winer, a serial entrepreneur who created the first user-friendly blogging software a decade ago, amplifies the point. Apple needs to grow up, Winer says: "Apple has no concept of what's it like to be disbelieved, untrusted, seen as an American corporation and nothing more." He adds: "Apple is a company that desperately needs to grow up and wipe the smile off its face, and roll its sleeves up and start to appreciate that they're no longer the upstart, the underdog, the Crazy One in the Richard Dreyfus ad. They are The Man, the Boss, the one who, from now on, everyone is going to be taking shots at and [defecates] on."

By the way, Mace and I have an unusual connection. I was interviewed by the BBC about the iPhone 4 problems Friday; my interview starts 5 minutes and 5 seconds in. As Mace explains, the BBC also planned to interview him, but they decided at the last minute that Mace's and my perspectives were too similar, so they bumped him from the show.

Mitch Wagner is a freelance technology journalist and social media strategist.