Dupa orice conferinta Apple exista o sesiune de intrebari si raspunsuri in care Steve Jobs si vice presedintii sai incearca sa raspunda intrebarilor jurnalistilor. Iata ce intrebari si raspunsuri au puse/oferite de catre Steve Jobs, Tim Cook si Bob Mansfield la sesiunea de astazi(le-am lasat in engleza pentru a nu le modifica intelesul prin traducere) :
Q: How’s your health, Steve? How are you doing?
A: I’m fine! I was on vacation in Hawaii, but this was important enough to come back for. I’m fine.
Q: Any changes for future antenna designs in iPhone?
A: Steve: We’re still working on this — we’re happy with the design. … we’re getting a lot of reports from customers that it’s way better than the 3GS. I don’t know what our next antenna design will be — maybe our wizards in th
Q : how does touching the corner with a single finger seem to cause this issue? It’s not just a grip, it can just happen by touching a single finger.
A from Bob: Your body is a pretty effective signal absorber. When you make contact with that phone, its performance in contact with you is less than its freespace performance. It’s a way to attenuate the signal by some amount.
Q: Did anyone warn you about this?
A Steve: I assume you’re referring to the Bloomberg article? Yeah, it’s a crock. … what’s portrayed in that article never came across my consciousness, and I talked to Reuben and he agrees it’s total bullshit.
Q: Your investors seem to want you to make an apology of some sort — would you be willing to do that?
A Steve: To our customers who are affected by the issue, we are deeply sorry, and we are going to give you a free case or a full refund. We want investors who invest in Apple for the long haul, because they believe in us. To those investors who bought the stock and are down by $5, I have no apology. If we hit a bump in the road, it’s like having kids.
Q: Do Apple customers have to choose between form and function?
A Steve: No. The Retina Display in the iPhone 4 is being widely hailed as the best display ever created. … We try to have our cake and eat it too, we try to have great design and great performance. If you look at our products, that’s what we deliver.
Q: Is there anything you could have said in the launch keynote to lower expectations?
Steve: I’ve thought about that a LOT. We didn’t fully understand if there were problems at that point. We might have set the expectation that smartphones have weak spots… but the fact is, most smartphones seem to have the same characteristic as the iPhone 4. If you grip them in a certain way they lose signal strength dramatically, especially in a low signal strength area. And one of the things we’ve learned is that as a leader in the smartphone world now, we need to educate. So what we need was data. And now we’ve got some and we’re sharing it now.
Q: After September 30th, is it because after then you expect people to buy a free case?
Steve: It’s so we can reevaluate this in September, I have no idea what solutions may come up. You could make a really big smartphone that doesn’t have this problem — some of these guys are making Hummers now — so big you can’t get your hand around it. But no one’s going to buy that. But the press around this, maybe it’s because people thought we were perfect, and they saw somewhere we aren’t, and they jumped on it. But I can tell you, we are a band of people. We are not perfect, and we are working our asses off.
Q: If you bought a 3rd party case, will you get a refund?
Steve: We’re not going to refund the 3rd party cases — it’s a very small number because we didn’t sell as many cases because we didn’t share the phone design with case manufacturers in advance of launch. But now we kind of wish there were more cases out there! [heh] It’s really simple why: when people find out about your new product, they stop buying your old products. Sometimes websites buy stolen prototypes and put ‘em on the web, and we don’t care for that. But if we give the designs to case makers, they have a history of putting them up on the web as well.
Q: Do any of you carry your iPhone 4s with the bumper?
Laughs. All three show their phones are bare. The case vendors haven’t had a history of helping us through that. It’s a conundrum. We’ll consider things on a case by case basis.
Steve: I use it in my home — and I live in a brick house. And I’ve gotten reception where I haven’t gotten it before, I’m thrilled. That doesn’t mean other people don’t have problems, but that’s been my experience.
Q: What have you learned here?
Steve: There are some things we know that we did learn here. One thing is how much we love our customers and how we are going to take care of them. We were stunned and upset and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff, and the reason we didn’t say more is because we didn’t know enough. If we’d have done this event a week and a half ago, we wouldn’t have had half the data we have today.
Q: Did you consider a recall?
Steve: When you love your customers, nothing is off the table. But we want to be data driven. We send engineers to people’s homes with test equipment and take logs…
Bob: For the record, we told them we were coming.
Steve: And we didn’t bash down any doors!
Q: Return rates at Apple stores?
Tim: Extremely small, even lower than the AT&T numbers.
Q : NY Times says this might have a software fix, is this something that can be helped with software?
Steve: We just spent the last hour going through how the iPhone 4 drops only 1 more call per hundred than the 3GS. … Go talk to the Times, because you guys talk to yourselves a lot, and they’re just making this stuff up.
Forstall : “That statement is patently false. Can we continue to tune the way the baseband interacts with the network? Yes, and we do this all the time. But that statement is untrue.”
Steve: “One many statements lately that fall into that category.”
Q: What kind of impact do you think this will have?
Tim: We’ll hold financial stuff for our Q2 results call next week.
Q: I’ve used my iPhone on a heavily congested cell in SF. I’d like to know if the handset has any role in congestion management. Does the stack play no role in congestion?
Steve: I’ll let Scott answer, but I have something that’s a higher-order bit. When AT&T wants to add a cell tower in Texas, it may only take 3 weeks. But in SF, on average, it takes 3 years. No one wants a cell tower in their back yard, but everyone wants perfect reception. AT&T is investing — they have to expand their networks. And we know, because we’re constantly asking them about SF and the Bay Area. But it takes a long time, and I think that’s the high order bit on congestion.
Q: A couple years ago you released a software fix that improved reception, can you square that with this?
Steve: To understand Apple, an insight came about 8 years ago: We didn’t want to get into any business that we didn’t own and control the primary technology. If they do, they’re going to beat you in the end — you have to build on top of them. We didn’t have to make the processors… software is the most important component.
Q about Steve’s email habits.
Steve: I get a lot of email, and my address is out there. I can’t reply to all of these emails — I have a day job. Some people post them on the web, which is kind of rude, but the most recent phenomena is people just making them up! But they’re our customers, and I want to communicate with them.
