Mark Bernstein: “I blame a corrupt trade press. The way you get attention and make money — not much money — in this game is to start flame wars, and so “Apple ships lousy operating system! Scroll bars backwards! Apple doomed!” gets links and traffic and sells ads for off-brand iPad cases. And of course some of the financial press try to launch memes to manipulate stock prices — either because they play the market or simply to show what big lever-pullers they are.”
John Gruber: “One word: Antennagate”
Me last month: “MG was pointing out the absurdity of some report I won’t even link to where a guy says iPhone 5 will arrive in October and not September. I personally don’t care when it gets here because I still TO THIS DAY have signal issues with my iPhone. No one talks about it anymore but, every single day of my life with the iPhone 4, I have to hold it upside down with the screen facing away from me to load webpages, emails and send tweets. I hate talking on the phone because the signal drops. My iPhone signal is shit and I hate it. Thank god I have WiFi at home at work. If I didn’t, this phone would have been in the trash can and I’d be an Android user. Antenna gate should have been made to be a bigger deal. A lot of us have to hold the iPhone awkwardly to get service. Fact.” Antenna gate is real and I still suffer from it. I wish more journalists would accept that.
Sam Howat last week: “A good example of this involves iPhone and AT&T. For years, AT&T has struggled to provide good service in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas. This has led many prominent tech bloggers to chastise AT&T — via tweets and blog posts — for their horrible service. While many of these writers were careful how they framed their claims — to protect themselves legally — it’s not hard to remember the furor that they stirred up. The fact of the matter is, while AT&T’s service may not have been great in the SF area, a good portion of the United States had perfectly good service where they live.”
Exactly my point. Writers either have great service or they don’t. Their service problems become the world’s service problems. Antennagate affects everyone though. Fact.