First, there is no issue with the antenna on the iPhone 4. And second, no fix was needed. The bumper give away is not to “fix” anything. It’s to change the headline from “Apple refuses to admit there’s a problem – does nothing for users” to “Apple offers free case to all iPhone 4 users.”
Don’t ever try to solve a media problem with logic and truth. It will get you nowhere. (Just ask Al Gore and John Kerry.)
There were two audiences Apple had to reach today with that press conference. The first was a group of technology specific reporters. Those were the invited attendees. Many lean in favor of Apple, which is helpful. But more importantly, most will report on the full story and help the fanboys like me develop a good word-of-mouth strategy. That’s the reason why Apple offered video and hard empirical evidence that there was no problem.
But that only gets you so far.
The much larger audience of your average consumer is the real trick. This story had seeped into pop culture, and threatened to hurt Apple’s reputation in a real way. Readers of Consumer Reports, people watching your local news tech correspondents, etc. aren’t going to care about state of the art anechoic testing chambers. People only read flashy headlines, and don’t really dig into the meat of the story. So you need to change the headline.
I admit, I didn’t think Apple would give away free cases, just because it does SEEM like an admission of guilt. But now I sort of get it. It’s actually pretty smart. Do exactly what all the naysayers were suggesting, and they can’t credibly argue with you anymore.
Note how Jobs phrased it: “People say we should give away free cases. Okay.”
In other words, fine. We’ll do what you say will fix this. What are you going to do now? Argue that your own suggestion was no good?
Well, maybe they will. Consumer Reports, despite having said just a few days ago that they can’t recommend the iPhone 4 until Apple offers a free fix or other sort of way to compensate for the issue, today has said that they still don’t recommend the phone, despite Apple’s offer of a free case or full refund. If that doesn’t make you question Consumer Reports’ motives, I don’t know what will.
At the end of the day, the most important thing to remember about all this is that minuscule number of users who have been affected by this. 0.55 percent of users. Like I said before, Apple made a tough but I think good engineering decision, to help the vast majority of users with improved reception while hurting a very small percentage of users who happen to get slightly worse reception. It’s a tradeoff, just like a thousand other tradeoffs you make whenever you make a product.
Will this strategy work? Hard to know. If the iPhone 4 gets out of the headlines by the end of next week, I’d say it was a successful. There was a problem, and Apple took action. Seems like the story should end there. Wall Street analysts will say this was the cheapest possible way out of what could have been a much larger recall cost. Consumers will be busy choosing a bumper color. And Whoopi and Letterman will move on to other things as well. I’d say there’s a good chance we’ll all be able to move on, with the exception of the usual Apple haters, but that’s a hopeless cause, anyway.
