I had a theory about today’s Apple iPhone 4 Press Extravaganza. Apple was just too eager to get all the press that cares about Apple stuff into one room at the same time on one day’s notice. They were either going to (1) get Steve Jobs to hypnotize everyone with a reality distortion field “there is no problem” and have them walk out dazed and confused but with vague warm feelings towards Apple. Or (2) they gathered all the press to one place to simply kill them. It was 50/50 in my book. Apple went with no. 1, probably based on a coin flip.
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.
We grabbed our own MG Siegler and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber when they returned to the office for a debriefing video. The uncut version is above. We did do some creative editing to get Gruber to say that the iPhone is the worst phone on the market, but he didn’t really say that, as you’ll see from the longer video above.
Siegler and Gruber struggled repeatedly to apply logic to the debate and eventually threw up their hands in despair. But still they believe that Antennagate doesn’t exist, but that it is perfectly reasonable and generous for Apple to apply a fix (free bumper) to the non existent problem.
At the end we just tried an intervention. It’s a first step towards recovery.