

Inside Apple's Actual Distortion Field - bmcmanus
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/17/insider-apples-antenna-testing-facility/

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Timothee
The funny thing is that they make a joke about Apple's distortion field while
this whole post is the result of said- and moked- distortion field.

Example: "most people who work at Apple have never seen them, we were told"

Well, yeah. Doesn't Apple have about 20,000 employees? Of course, most people
haven't seen it. And of course Apple is testing their products thoroughly. And
so do their competitors.

So, "inside Apple's distortion field" indeed.

~~~
barredo
34.300 employees (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.>)

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Alex3917
"And yes, there were several things hidden under black cloaks on tables in
these rooms."

Wouldn't surprise me if there were just empty boxes under the cloaks, a la
Smartest Guys in the Room.

~~~
gry
If Apple could kick out a product in a couple months, I'd believe it.

Subscribing to Occam's Razor: they hid real products.

They have a year or two pipeline. Google/HTC/Motorola would eat them alive. I
have a hard time believing they are manufacturing a coverup to this degree
within 22 days. I write software for projects a couple orders of magnitude
less than Apple's taking on. There's no way they can fake this.

It's presented well. This is true.

~~~
devinj
Huh? To what degree? Hiding empty boxes isn't much of a coverup. It's just a
small thing that adds an air of awesome, and at the same time means that if
any reporter has the balls to quickly run over and unsheathe the boxes,
nothing sensitive will be shown.

Putting real products under there would not be a very smart move. It only
takes a minute or two to quickly hide something else instead before the
reporters arrive.

~~~
gry
Over the last ten years, Apple produced above average products. Their growth
reflects it; as does their marketing hubris.

Why lie? Why cover empty boxes? They have enough goodwill and fanboyism
without having to manufacture an aura. They curate it, no doubt. Which leads
me to the hand-picked reporters. Calculated, definitely.

The reporters a risk? Nah. If Gruber yanked a cloth, he'd gain notoriety, be
escorted out and others would glimpse something in a relatively similar form-
factor or not at all (say, the iPad a year ago).

It would suck for Apple. But can you imagine the expectation over an iPad
being revealed from a PR event went wrong? The expectation would be even
higher.

There is little risk. They can manage. It seems like more work for Apple to
lie at this juncture.

~~~
slantyyz
Damn, it would have been totally awesome if Gruber yanked off a cloth.

Even more awesome if he then yanked off a mask a la Mission Impossible to
reveal that he was really Steve Ballmer all along.

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parkan
Am I wrong in thinking that this is a completely industry-standard setup for
RF testing? Many of the passages make it seem that Apple is going above and
beyond the call of duty in their testing (like the heads filled with solution
approximating tissue), but it seems to me like these are essentially minimal
due-diligence procedure mandated by the FTC. Hell, I'm pretty sure some of the
(severely underfunded) labs back at my university had similar equipment.

Can anyone more familiar with the industry comment on what sort of facilities
other vendors use?

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Rhapso
Insinuating that Apple did not test the iPhone 4 enough was an attempt to
allow Apple to save face, it gave them a chance to go "Whoops! we made a
mistake" then politely fix it. But all this evidence that Apple went to huge
extents to test the phone but it still had problems says worse things about
Apple then just not testing enough.

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ilamont
I would have been more impressed knowing how often the engineers got out of
the foam rooms and into houses, normal office buildings, trains, cars, and
airport lounges using AT&Ts stock 3G nodes.

~~~
jarek
Often enough that one of them lost a prototype. Knowing how tight Apple is
with unreleased products, that means very often.

~~~
cookiecaper
Interestingly this prototype was wrapped in a case to make it look like the
previous version of the iPhone, and the major problem with iPhone 4 is that
when you touch the phone directly, as most end-users would touch it, you lose
signal. The phony casing probably mitigated this problem, so maybe that's what
happened there.

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sasvari
some follow-up from FastCompany: [http://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/apple-
anechoic-chamber-sc...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/apple-anechoic-
chamber-science-rf-testing)

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huhtenberg
I wonder how much this TC post cost Apple.

To downvoters: it's a genuine question. Apple is in trouble, their stock is
down almost 10% and that's after the launch of their best product to date.
They are in a full damage control mode. If they show their most secret testing
facility to the selected few, I am going to guess they will not settle for
just any coverage. They are _the_ control freaks, and it's only logical to
assume that there must've been an arrangement between them and those let into
the sacred lab. And the most obvious question is what the arrangement was.

~~~
rimantas
The backlog for iPhone 4 is what, turės weeks as Į write? A trouble indeed.

