I’m sure just about everyone reading this remembers, or has at least heard of, Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad which introduced the Macintosh. Inspired by George Orwell’s novel of the same name, the ad depicted a bleak dystopian future in which everyone’s a mindless drone taking orders from a totalitarian regime on a big screen TV, until a runner tosses a sledgehammer at the screen and frees everyone’s minds. The ad ends with a promise that the Macintosh will “show you why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”
Ironically, it sounds like Apple may have been a little too good at predicting the future, just not quite in their fever. Barely a week after the launch of their hot new iPhone 4, many Apple drones have decided they’ve had enough of the smart phone’s reception problems, and have hurled something worse than a sledgehammer in their overlord’s direction – a class-action lawsuit.
Can you hear me NOW?
This comes hot off the heels of a public letter Apple posted to their website on Friday, July 2, regarding the iPhone 4’s reception problems, which revealed that “the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.” Oops!
The letter goes on to state that, “For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.”
Hear that, Apple horde? The phone Steve Jobs touted as the biggest leap yet from the original iPhone isn’t just still not ready for prime time, it actually never was in the first place.
Lawsuits? I hope there’s an app for that…
With the news that the iPhone 4 still has the same weak signal the previous iterations struggled with, many drones have decided they’ve had enough. On June 30, law firms in Maryland and Washington DC filed a class action suit against Apple and AT&T, the sole iPhone service provider, accusing them of misrepresentation and negligence, among other offenses. The complaint alleges that Apple sold “defective” iPhone 4s to consumers, and contends that Apple should discontinue sales of the phone until the kinks have been ironed out.
You’d think that wouldn’t be too tall an order for Apple by now; after all, the company was able to move over 1 million iPhone 4s three days after its launch last week, making it the most successful launch in the company’s history. Yet before that new phone smell could even wear off, consumers everywhere were complaining that the new phone’s external antenna (all previous iPhones have an internal one) led to poor reception or dropped calls if the phone wasn’t held correctly.
Now it seems a California law firm may be looking to get in on the action as well, by asking any customer experiencing the signal loss to call in. While they’ve not confirmed whether they’ll take Apple to court as well, more than 1200 people have voiced their complaints since the firm’s inquiry was posted on Monday.
“You have [400] new complaints!” *delete*
Despite all the hubbub, analysts are predicting Apple will come out on the other side relatively unscathed. After all, this isn’t the first time the company has come under legal fire. The company settled an earlier class-action suit over the low battery life in its first and second generation iPods by compensating consumers with $50 store credit, or $25 cash.
Indeed, according to one analyst, the company prefers to lead with design, not by engineering, which typically leads to glitches. "I think Apple will work through this – they typically do – [though] this is a little tougher product launch than we've seen in the past," he said. "But a year from now, we'll probably forget it." And then it’s back to the assembly line until the next sledgehammer comes along.
