Apple’s antenna calculations, iMac and Dell capacitors, and the Anandtech iPhone review

When I wrote that it's best to buy an iPhone in September, I didn't know of the antenna and proximity sensor malfunctions.

Since then we've learned that iPhone 4 has problems with its proximity sensor; it fails to turn off the screen when it's held by a caller's face, so it's easy to accidentally disconnect. We've also learned of an antenna design issue.

The antenna problem was thoroughly discussed in one of the best iPhone reviews (see also: Gruber, Pogue, Ars)

Apple's iPhone 4: Thoroughly Reviewed - AnandTech

... The main downside to the iPhone 4 is the obvious lapse in Apple's engineering judgment. The fact that Apple didn't have the foresight to coat the stainless steel antenna band with even a fraction of an ounce worth of non-conductive material either tells us that Apple doesn't care or that it simply doesn't test thoroughly enough. The latter is a message we've seen a few times before with OS X issues, the iPhone 4 simply reinforces it. At the bare minimum Apple should give away its bumper case with every iPhone 4 sold. The best scenario is for Apple to coat the antenna and replace all existing phones with a revised model.The ideal situation is very costly for Apple but it is the right thing to do. Plus it's not like Apple doesn't have the resources to take care of its customers....

The reviewer has an engineering background (the description of the camera sensor technology is the best I've seen) and he hacked a way to measure the iPhone 4's antenna performance. Turns out that the iPhone "bars" display is almost meaningless -- anything less than 4-5 bars is a very marginal signal. Apple isn't the only company to cheat this way.

More importantly, there is a real problem with Apple's antenna design. On average it's mostly better than the iPhone 3G/3GS antenna, but to get the best results you need a case, like Apple's $30 bumper covers, to keep fingers away from antenna junctions.

The Anand team speculates that Apple goofed up on design or testing, or that they don't care. I doubt it.

I am sure Apple engineers knew about this problem. Maybe it was always a known problem, or maybe there was supposed to be a coating applied that ended up being unavailable. Most likely a problem came up not far from the release date, otherwise I think Apple would have come up with a fix of some kind.

Apple's management tried the phone, looked at the analyses, and decided to launch without a mitigation strategy. Maybe they'd been studying the Dell Way. Maybe they figured most people buy a case, most of the rest are in areas with non-marginal coverage, and AT&T customers are used to dropped calls.

They might have gotten away with it, just as they got away with blown Nichicon capacitors in the G5 iMac or the loose video cable in my i5 iMac, but the problem turned out to be even worse than they'd expected. It went viral.

Apple's still trying to tough it out, following a service script ...

1. Keep all of the positioning statements in the BN handy – your tone when delivering this information is important…

2. Do not perform warranty service. Use the positioning above for any customer questions or concerns…

4. … ONLY escalate if the issue exists when the phone is not held AND you cannot resolve it.

5. We ARE NOT appeasing customers with free bumpers – DON’T promise a free bumper to customers.

The pressure is building though, so I think Apple will do something to appease us. I think they'd be fine if they offered to sell the bumpers with an iPhone for $10 instead of $30, and give a $20 App Store voucher to current i4 owners. (They may not have enough bumpers to go around though.) Really the phone should ship with the bumpers, but they don't look so good in demos.

By the time I buy in September, I expect Apple will have fixes for the antenna and proximity sensor bugs. Honestly, September is the time to buy.

Dreamhost - apparently the kickbacks work

I moved all of my web hosting services and most of my domain registrations to Dreamhost* a year ago (a few are with Google Apps hosting partners). This was a reasonably complex process that you can read about on Gordon's tech (dreamhost tag - look at the start).

I've been very pleased with them. I'm sure there must be cheaper ISPs and hosting services, but they have caused me no pain at all.

Today I went to pay a $10 registry fee -- and I discovered I had almost $200 in credits on my account. Evidently the kickback scheme works. I assume these come from a post I did a year ago ....

Gordon's Tech: Dreamhost - registrar and hosting - still like 'em:

... Last August, after years of moderate dissatisfaction with my domain registration and site hosting arrangements, I signed up with Dreamhost.

I've been quite satisfied with them as a hosting service and even happier with their registrar services; you can see this from posts over the past six months. I was disappointed with their weak implementation of webdav services, but that's been a minor problem. Of course you need some geek genes to work with them, but less so than most alternatives.

If you want to keep things simple, DreamHost is a better Google Apps partner than Google -- especially now that Google is trying to hide the free stuff.

Dreamhost offers members kickbacks to facilitate recruitment. So you need to take my recommendation with more saline than usual, but if you independently decide to sign up you can use my promo code of KATEVA (our dog) and get $50 off your 1st year fee (and I get a kickback if you pay up). Be sure to check out other promo code deals however, the one on their home page looks remarkably good....

Evidently some people used the "KATEVA" code. This link is supposed to do the same thing.

I've configured my promo code to give 50% off the first year of use. This means I get $47 for a new customer instead of $97. I think by promo code standard this is a pretty competitive deal, but do look around for better deals.

I'm a complainer at heart, so Dreamhost is doing pretty well to go unmentioned.

* Founded by Harvey Mudd grads. I went to the tech school up the road and we respected that brand. It's an employee owned company ...

--My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Facebook for teens - and an update on privacy settings

With due consideration, and for relatively good reasons, I gave my 13 yo a Facebook account. It's not something I'd recommend generally, but the circumstances are atypical.

Of course we're "following him", but that's a weak monitoring measure. More importantly, he doesn't know his password and if he does a password reset he'll lose access.. That was a condition of giving him an account. I've also configured it so email notifications are copied to my personal email.

We'll see how it goes. I'm cautiously optimistic.

That is not to say I've changed my opinion of Facebook. Jesse Stay swears they're not Evil, but check out the default privacy settings that a new user gets (the default are all that matter, click to enlarge);

The access given to Facebook "apps" is particularly impressive. I don't see any evidence that FB has "reformed".

I flipped everything to a the same very secure settings I use. As usual in the troubled world of "Parental Controls" I ran into a glitch. Some settings changes require an https connection, and OS X Parental Controls can't manage most https connections (an increasingly serious problem). So to change his settings I had to use an account with more privileges. One side-effect is he can't change his preferences, which is not entirely unwanted.

I hope to update this post as I learn more ...

Parental controls bugs in Safari 5: can't add sites to whitelist and more

I posted this to Apple's Discussion forum:

Apple - Support - Discussions - Parental controls bug with 10.6.4 and Safari 5 

When Safari is locked in Parental Controls it only opens approved sites. If a user tries to go to a non-approved site a dialog appears allowing an admin to add the site. If the admin authorizes ongoing use, the site should be added to the Safari bookmarks bar.

That's not working any more. The site is not added. THe Admin has to drag the url to the bookmarks bar and reauthenticate. If the admin does not do this the authorization will not stick.

Anyone else see this?

Might be a new 10.6.4/Safari 5 bug.

Also users are able to edit Safari 5 settings even when Parental Controls are on. I need to retest, but I think that's broken too.

Lastly, today is the first time I tried copying parental controls from a remote to a local account. I have a feeling there are bugs here as well. In the app access control I am seeing apps listed as local that I think are only on the remote account.

It's always been easy to find serious Parental Control bugs, but I think some of these are Safari 5 problems. I don't think Apple QAs OSX Parental Controls.

Update: I've submitted a bug report  on this.

Stealing your kid's iPhone upgrade

If you have an AT&T family plan you may have one or two kids with data plan free simple phones. Did you now you can steal their iPhone upgrade through the AT&&T eligibility transfer process? This has been available for a while, but AT&T has better defined the process.

The catch (you knew there was one) is that iPhone contracts come with mandatory data plans and phones that can never be unlocked (barring an Act of Congress - which is not impossible in this case).

So you'll be getting your kid a data plan whether you want to or not. It really only makes sense if you want to do that, and if you're going to give them a data plan phone (like an old iPhone). You'll also be making it harder to quite AT&T, which they are quite in favor of.

Why you should buy your iPhones and other iOS devices in September

OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was released on August 28, 2009. Version 10.6.4 came out last in June of 2010; it’s now a good upgrade for a 10.5 machine. It took Apple about 10 months to beat the OS into decent shape, which is a bit of a problem if you’re considering a new desktop machine. Unless you enjoy computer hassles, you should buy new Macs a few months before, or six months after, a major OS X update.

Apple’s iOS environments are much simpler than OS X [2], and Apple has many fewer “system apps” to test [1] – so it’s not surprising that their iOS updates have been more reliable than their OS X updates. The first couple of iOS upgrades went pretty well. Things are getting more complicated though [2], and now we’re seeing real problems …

Google Apps phone-lock issues with iOS 4

… In a strange twist with what appears to be a security issue, users of Google Apps who set up their accounts using the Microsoft Exchange settings (aka ActiveSync) may find that their iPhones have been set to auto-lock in one minute…

and

iOS 4- Updating woes with iPhone 3G

…. While we can't help much with the activation errors that some of you have had (potentially due to overloaded communications between Apple), we can help with the infamous error 3002 that many iPhone 3G owners are seeing when attempting to update their device…

Both of these bugs would have been a waste of time and energy for us. It’s summer in Minnesota, I have better ways to spend my sunny days.

These bugs will get sorted out through a combination of third party, iOS and iTunes updates over the next month or so. If you only have older phones, the smart move is to wait until August to upgrade. If you’re buying a new phone, however, you have to use the new OS [3].

Which is why you should buy a new iPhone or iPad in September. Apple seems to have very consistent phone release cycles (though not all will be major updates), so if you get a new phone and a new 2 year contract in September you’ll be in phase with the release cycle. iOS device prices tend to be stable over their life cycle, so a purchase in September gets you the best life cycle value with the least upgrade troubles.

In my own case my 3G is painfully slow [3] so I’ll probably buy in August, but I’ll aim for September for our next upgrade cycle.

--

[1] I’d like Apple to get the heck out of the apps business altogether due the very long bugfix and upgrade cycles of systems apps, but that’s another post.

[2] The complexity is increasing very quickly with the iPad and with iTunes OS X and Windows XP/Vista/7 dependencies. There are also some iPod dependencies due to a shared DRM infrastructure. For example, iTunes 9.2 sounds like bad news for older iPods. I’m waiting for 9.2.1. Since iOS4 may require iTunes 9.2 that’s another reason to delay iOS updating.

[3] At least for that device, you don’t have to update all devices you sync to the same iTunes account

[4] Apps are being developed for modern devices, so upgrades expect more RAM and more CPU – especially the former. I also sync way too many calendars, contacts sources, etc for this device – I’m basically flogging it.

July 17, 2010: Wow, I sure called it for 2010. This year it's probably a good idea to wait until November and see if Apple is going to come up with fixes for the proximity sensor and antenna design flaws, not to mention the worse than 3GS connectivity.

Netflix via Wii - works so far

I've streamed Netlfix to my iMac with acceptable results. Like all (yech) Flash based technologies it is buggy and inefficient on a Mac, but it works. I knew Netflix could also be streamed to X-Box and Roku, but I'd not realized you could stream to a Wii until I saw a notice when editing my queue.

I ordered the Netflix wii disc and tried it out. It worked well while streaming over our 802.11g WAP encrypted WiFi LAN. Some of the interface graphics are blocky and ugly, but the movie itself was fine. The control UI uses the arrow keys on a Wii wand.

The Flash stream results are at least as good as what I see on my vastly more powerful iMac, and there's no fan noise. Apparently Adobe just hates the Mac.

You need a computer, iPhone, or iPad to validate your account and manage your queue. I assume Netflix would like to remove that requirement eventually.

Activation took less than a minute. You can stream from one Netflix account on up to 6 unique devices (iMac, iPad, iPhone 4 soon, Wii, Roku, etc).

From their site today, here's a list of the streaming Netflix supports. They're clearly well on the way to eliminating DVD mailing (main problem -- too easy to rip and distribute).

• Roku Streaming Player
• Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player
• WD TV Live Plus HD Media Player
• PlayStation®3 System
• Wii™ console
• Xbox 360
• Insignia Connected Blu-Ray Player
• LG Network Blu-ray Players
• Panasonic Networking Blu-Ray Player
• Philips Netflix ready Blu-ray Player
• Samsung Network Blu-ray Players

• VIZIO Blu-ray™ Player with Wireless Internet Apps
• Sony Network Blu-ray Disc player
• LG HDTVs with NetCast Broadband
• Sony® BRAVIA® LCD HDTVs featuring BRAVIA Internet Video
• VIZIO® XVT Series HDTVs with VIZIO Internet Apps™ (VIA)
• TiVo® Digital Video Recorder
• Insignia 5.1-Ch. Home Theater System with Blu-ray Disc Player
• LG Network Blu-ray Home Theater Systems
• Panasonic Blu-Ray Home Theater In A Box
• Samsung Blu-Ray Home Theater Systems

We don't have cable at home, we get 3 DVDs a week for the kids to watch. This gives us some new options. I really don't miss cable at all (we do have free broadcast HD via a D/A converter box and some rabbit ear antennae -- works surprisingly well)).