Apple claims that an e-mail exchange between CEO
Steve Jobs and a customer over the iPhone 4’s reception issues is a fake,
according to the company. The conversation had originally been printed July 1
on the blog Boy
Genius Report, and features Jobs trying to placate an irate, self-described
“Mac fan.”
An Apple spokesperson “emphatically”
denied to Fortune magazine that the exchange between Jobs and the customer
had ever occurred.
“You are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down,” Jobs
allegedly wrote to the customer, whose original e-mail accused Apple of being
“arrogant and rude” concerning reported reception issues tied to the iPhone 4.
The customer’s next e-mail detailed how his friends had also experienced
dropped-call issues with their iPhone 4s, leading Jobs to supposedly reply:
“You are most likely in an area with very low signal strength.”
That drove the customer to new rhetorical heights in his next e-mail, where
he accused Jobs of “jackass comments” and ended with, “Geezzz I hope [this] is
not really you.”
Jobs—or fake Jobs, if you believe Apple—then sent a follow-up e-mail: “You
may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on
it.”
In the same blog posting that reprinted the e-mails, Boy Genius Report wrote,
“We have verified the email headers and information, and believe this exchange
to be 100 percent legitimate.” In a subsequent update, the posting suggested
that the last e-mail in the conversation— “Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It
is just a phone. Not worth it”—came from the customer as opposed to Jobs, as
had been erroneously reported by some Websites.
In response to Apple PR’s assertions, Boy Genius Report updated its posting
yet again with screenshots of the e-mails’ headers and footers.
In
a July 1 posting, the blog Apple Insider detailed an offer by an Apple
customer to sell an e-mail exchange between him and Steve Jobs.
Jobs
has developed a habit of responding to customers’ and developers’ e-mails
with pithy one-line notes of his own, a habit that has sparked praise from
certain circles for his forthrightness and transparency. Given the early-morning
timestamp on some of these exchanges, one can presume that Jobs is writing
most, if not all, of these missives himself, with minimal oversight or
back-checking from Apple corporate; there is always the possibility, however,
that Jobs has never been the actual writer of some or all of these same
messages.
That being said, there now exists the possibility that Jobs—once burned,
twice shy—will now assume the position of most other tech CEOs and stop
responding directly to customer e-mails.
Within hours of the first customers receiving their iPhone 4 June 24, the
first day of general release, reports began to emerge of a technical issue: Touching
the device’s metal antenna band, which runs along the outer rim, seemed to
reduce certain users’ reception to zero. Tech blogs such as Gizmodo quickly
began posting video of users touching the smartphone’s rim and making its
on-screen reception bars disappear.
Apple has started insisting that the problem is software-related, despite
the fact that it can apparently be solved by enclosing the iPhone 4 in a rubber
or plastic bumper.
“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to
calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple
wrote in a July 2 statement posted on its corporate Website. “Our formula, in
many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given
signal strength.” In the company’s offered example, that means an iPhone is
liable to display four bars’ worth of signal strength when it should be
displaying as few as two bars.
The company promises a software fix within the next few weeks.
Enterprise Mobility News & Reviews 
