> Though this does not mean that Apple’s software is the most insecure—the report takes no consideration of the severity of the flaws—it points at a growing trend in the world of security flaws: the role of third-party software. Many of Apple’s flaws are not in its operating system, Mac OS X, but rather in software like Safari, QuickTime, and iTunes. Vendors like Adobe (with Flash and Adobe Reader) and Oracle (with Java) are similarly responsible for many of the flaws being reported. The headline for this article is: “Apple the new world leader in software insecurity.”

And yet the second paragraph begins: “Though this does not mean that Apple’s software is the most insecure…”

Which one is it, guys?

This is one of those cases where you just have to use common sense. The research says that Apple’s software is more insecure than Windows. But EVERYTHING YOU’VE EVER HEARD about viruses, attacks, worms, Trojan Horses, spyware, etc. has exclusively referred to Windows computers.

As I’ve said before, always be cautious, but the bottom line is that your Mac is not in grave danger of being hacked, unless you do something stupid, like give your password away to a strange program.

And journalists, please quit with the misleading, link-baiting article headlines. Seriously. If you can’t get people interested in your content any other way, you’re not trying hard enough.

> Google may be suffering from trying to be too many things to too many people,” the report noted. “In fact, when asked what they like least about Google, survey respondents commonly mentioned issues like advertising, overwhelming search results, privacy concerns, and too many special features (like maps and shopping.) This article is mainly about Facebook, and the odd paradox that barely a majority of Facebook users is satisfied with the site, and yet Facebook is still growing. I chalk that up to the peer pressure factor; you go where your friends are, and right now your friends are on Facebook. Why they are all hanging out there is anybody’s guess. Why did people listen to the Thomson Twins? Why do more people like Pepsi than Dr. Pepper? Somewhere, someone decides these things, and the sheep follow.

The quote I put up top there about Google is very interesting, too. Funny that the things people complain about most with Google are the only things that make Google money: advertising, links to shopping, etc.) People want a free ride, because that’s what the web has trained people to expect.

Which is exactly why I think Google has a much shakier future than most people realize. It really wouldn’t be hard to imagine the search and advertising business hitting another wall, and all these pet projects of Google’s don’t seem to get them anywhere, financially.

Still, I think unseating Google would be a lot harder than Facebook, with its 64% user satisfaction rate. If Buzz can’t manage to grab some marketshare away from Facebook, considering those numbers, then Google really should give it up on Social networking.

> Did it work? Check out the media response. There’s lots of talk about whether other smartphones are perfect or not. There’s lots of talk about whether Jobs’ response was the right one. But the central question that was in everyone’s head before the press conference – “Is the iPhone 4 a dud” – has, well, evaporated. Part of the change in attitude is because the fixes Apple offered are adequate. But those fixes easily could have become part of the joke if handled in an apologetic “please kick me” way. This was my point the other day when I was blaming Arrington for his logical fallacy. It doesn’t matter what the explanation was; all that matters is that the headlines change.

“The iPhone 4 is flawed” became “Phones aren’t perfect.” It’s subtle, but it works. “All antennas have weak spots.” Count how many times Jobs said that during that press conference.

Even though all the other cell phone manufacturers (RIM, Nokia, etc.) have been crying for the last three days that Jobs was playing tricks when suggesting that “all phones are flawed,” the fact of the matter is that the public is left thinking that all phones might just be flawed. We now are asking that question, instead of anything specific about the iPhone.

After all, there are tons of YouTube videos floating around, showing the “death grip” effect on various other models of phone. Is the iPhone 4 worse than any of those?

For the vast majority of users, it isn’t.

And is suggesting that all phones are flawed any more a lie than suggesting that the iPhone 4 is seriously flawed, a major bungle, a huge mistake by Apple due to insufficient testing? I think not.

Never fight a media war with the plain and simple truth. Especially when your opponents aren’t making an honest argument, either. While what Jobs showed last Friday was no doubt a convenient, specific truth (“Other phones can be death gripped, too.”), it was no less misleading than the notion that the iPhone 4 is “seriously flawed.” He fought a half-baked, exaggerated truth with a well-crafted, cherry picked one. You can make ANY phone do this. To what degree, with how much or little effort—these things are not important. Every phone has this problem. True, if not the whole truth.

The more this looks like a general cell phone problem, and not an Apple-specific problem, the more Apple wins. Nokia can come to its own defense all it wants; that only helps Apple change the headline.

The real test will be how long it takes for these kinds of stories to be relegated to the tech nerd media, blogs, etc. Will the local news still cover this issue anymore, now that Apple has given free cases and offered full refunds? We’ll see. I imagine the quarterly earnings call tomorrow will warrant at least one mention of the “death grip issue.” But sales figures should help combat the notion that sales have been hurt. So most likely, the final word on your newscast tomorrow night will be “but the issues don’t seem to have an effect on sales or customer satisfaction.” We’ll see.

The biggest thing that will keep this story from staying alive, as Andy Ihnatko has suggested, is the conspicuous lack of victims. Toyota got maimed in the press because real people died from faulty cars. We have yet to hear a story from ANYONE about how the iPhone 4 antenna effected a real person in the real world. Not one saga of a lost call to grandma on her birthday. Nothing. Just a bunch of people sticking their fingers on the sides of their phones, and going “Oh yeah. That does happen.” And then moving on.

> However, Android isn’t the only operating system that’s victim to junkware. HTC’s HD2, a Windows Mobile phone for T-Mobile, also includes some unusual software picks, including a Blockbuster app. > > So who’s to blame for this annoying bloat? > > “I’d say the carriers might be more nefarious on this than the device manufacturers,” said **Steve Drake**, a mobile analyst for IDC. “The carriers have the final say about what goes on there” because they generally handle promotion, support and distribution of the phones. > > The exception to this is Apple, Drake added. Because the company has its own stores for distribution and technical support, the iPhone maker has avoided many of the pitfalls of the standard U.S. carrier-manufacturer relationship. > > “What goes in the box is a fight between the carrier and the device manufacturer that you wouldn’t believe,” Drake said. “A lot of it can be driven from a revenue perspective.” There are many reasons why I don’t like the fact that Apple uses AT&T as its exclusive carrier in the US.

The lack of competition for AT&T has led to higher pricing, longer waits for features like tethering, and an overloading of the network, which has led to the now infamous crappy reception and poor coverage areas, particularly in certain US cities.

I firmly believe that if (when) the iPhone gets on some more carriers in the US, the iPhone experience will improve greatly, even if I don’t choose to leave AT&T at that point.

Just look at any of the other countries where the iPhone is offered on multiple carriers, and you can see that many of our US specific grudges would quickly go away if this long-term exclusivity were to end tomorrow.

There is one reason, however, why I’m glad Apple stuck it out with AT&T, and managed to use that exclusivity for at least one great advantage over every other phone available here in the US. And that’s Apple’s total control over what apps are preloaded and hard-coded into the device.

Sure, there are Apple apps that I can’t remove from my iPhone, like the calculator, or the mail app, but none of those are cheap crapware that’s trying to sell me something. There are no expiring 30-day trials, Blockbuster video apps, or other such nonsense taking up space and annoying me to no end.

Android fans love to talk about the nirvana of “open” software, but these sorts of ploys to nickel and dime users out of their minds are the reality of the real world of corporate culture. There’s nothing “open” about forcing users to carry around a copy of “Avatar” everywhere they go.

As long as there is money to be made, people in suits will always try to wrangle that money out of you. And Google has no control over what Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. put on these phones, because they have nothing to offer the carriers in return for that favor.

It would be one thing if Android phones were cheaper than the iPhone, thus justifying this diversion of attention. You paid less, after all, so it makes sense that you’d be subjected to ads and other ploys to take more money from you. But they are not. All the major phones on the market are similar in price.

So if this insistence on adding cheap crapware is the reason why the iPhone is still not on Verizon, than I have to say I’m happy to wait until Apple can make that happen.

> There were two key messages from the event. The first message is that there is no iPhone 4 antenna problem. All phones suffer from this, and the iPhone is a superior phone. The second message is that even though there is no problem Apple is going to give everyone a free bumper that will make the non existent problem go away. > > Anyone not in a hypnotic daze will clearly see the conflict between the two statements. If there is no problem, no fix is needed. If a fix is needed, by definition there was a problem. Jobs never did address the disparity in the Q&A session following the presentation. There’s a very simple answer to Arrington’s so-called “conflicting” statements. And that’s that there is no conflict.

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.