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Comment by thefool | Hacker News Reader

This is so silly. There's a feynman quote where he was talking about how at MIT they had this really fancy test facility, but it never produced any results, because the people running the tests were in another room an never saw anything happen.

Then at Princeton, where they were in the same room, the machine (which was much less fancy) produced much more information because people saw what was going on as it was running.

Seems to me that this could easily be something of the case. Fancy test facility with no grounding in anything.

Furthermore isn't it kinda more embarrassing when, instead of admitting there was a problem, they just say that the phone was tested. It seems to imply that the issue is intentional.

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The difference here is that the guys at Princeton weren't clueless linkbaiters, or folks who think that the fundamental unit of RF signal strength is "the bar". The Princeton physicists were physicists. They did science. They took actual data, made actual scientific arguments backed by that data, and published them.

The subtext of Apple's PR here is: You want to have an argument about RF engineering and the complexities and tradeoffs involved? Bring it. Apple's engineering team stands by its work. But you better be prepared to argue like an engineer, not a gossip columnist.

Of course, then Apple responded like the PR specialists they are, presenting everything in The Bar (even going as far as to directly compare different manufacturers' bars!) rather than using a proper unit and risk confusing people with scary numbers.

I was half-hoping they wouldn't, but alas.

I think you missed my point.

First off what I'm saying is that while fancy pictures of high end lab equipment might look impressive, it doesn't mean that it is the best way to design things, even when the people doing it are really good.

Secondly, while I understand that the intent of this is to tell people something along the lines of, "We didn't give you a defective device, we really did a great job testing it first, look at our facility", it can easily be spun as, "well you can't have done that good a job because even with all this fancy equipment you still released a product that has a design issue"

But what percentage of iPhone users and potential iPhone customers who might have heard "iPhone has an antenna problem" will understand that all that fancy equipment might mean nothing?

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