And so, again, we have a simple treatment: fanboys watch the video and see Jobs’ speech as heroic and responsible; the rest of the planet watches it and sees the arrogance not only of the individual, but the way he put his words together. As a linguist, I’m particularly offended by his inability to simply take responsibility, admit that he put design over function, and move on. This whole thing could have been over with long ago… but for Steve Jobs’ inability to take criticism, or to admit an error in judgment.
Instead, we get a long-winded diatribe about how everyone else’s phones have these problems — well, no, not really, in his own video showing one competitor’s phone, he points to the tiny round hole near the top of the phone (the antannae location) and says blocking that will do the same thing, as though that excuses his own design error. Well, hm, let’s think: since one doesn’t hold the phone where your hand is ON THE TOP OF THE PHONE, it’s unlikely anyone’s going to block that particular antennae. Now, let’s take Apple’s, which wraps around the frame of the phone and therefore is exactly where people NORMALLY hold the phone. One is design that avoids the problem — placing the antennae only at the top of the phone — and the other, Apple’s, is not. Mr. Jobs is completely incorrect when he asserts that his competitors also design their phones with the same antennae problems that his phone does — they all quite blatantly hire engineers (and actually listen to them, as opposed to Mr. Jobs) to design their phones to minimize human contact with the antennae.
That fact is unalterable: no one else has put forth a smart-phone with an antennae that deliberately, by design, puts the antennae precisely where the normal user puts their hand while holding the phone. Apple is the only one who would do such a thing, because the put the design (how cool) as more important than the function. And this time, it has bit them in the butt…
Anyone other than Mr. Jobs would have looked at this, realised how stupid spending 2/3 of your speech bad-mouthing other people would be, realise how dumb saying “don’t hold it that way” (what way, sir? The natural way a human being holds a phone, so they can see the screen correctly?)… and would just have held a press conference, admitted that their desire to bring a cool-looking and -sounding product to their customers got away from them, and told the world how they were going to fix it (here’s some free covers, and we’ll take the phones back if you really hate them that much). Done. End of story. But Apple has never in its history shown anything that would say they would act so sensibly and so simply — right up to and including last week’s speech.
