iPhone 4 July 16, 2010 Press Conference

Here's the link to the ongoing iPhone 4 Press conference at Apple Headquarters.

MobileCrunch live coverage.

Video they showed before the start of the press conference.



Some notable quotes from Steve Jobs

"We're not perfect, phones aren't perfect."

"We want to make all of our users happy. If you don't know that about apple, you don't know us."

"We heard about this not long after we started shipping. We've been working our butts off for 22 days. 22 days. It's not like we've had our head in the sand for 3 months."

"Antennagate"

"We haven't figured out a way around the laws of physics. Yet."

"Phones aren't perfect. It's a challenge for the entire industry."

"If you read all these articles out there, you'd think: Jesus! At least half our customers must have called in angry!"

"We asked ourselves: Whats the percentage of all iPhone 4 users who have called about antenna or reception? 0.55%, One half of one percent."

"Whatever it is, no questions asked, they can return the phone. So what are the return rates? Through our largest retailer.. we're going to compare this to the iPhone 3gs, because its the best selling phone in history.. AT&T's return rate with the iPhone 3GS was 6.0%."

"What are they for the iPhone 4? 1.7%"

"And I can tell you this, because we're being totally transparent. I must tell you, that the iPhone 4 drops more calls than the iPhone 3GS. So how many more?"

"Again! Listening to antennagate, it must be dropping 50 calls per 100! or 25 per hundred! Wouldn't you expect that?"

"The iPhone drops less than 1 additional call per 100."

"Less than one. Even that's too much for us. I have my own pet theory on this: when the iPhone 3GS came out, we didn't change the design. There were a number of cases available, on day one. The iPhone 4 has a radically new design, so none of the cases fit, and we can't make enough of our bumper cases."

"We know there's a problem. It's effecting a small percentage of users, but we care about every user."

"It's been blown out of proportion. I know it's fun to have a story, but it's less fun when you're on the other side."

So here's what we're going to do:

iOS 4.0.1 fixes the bars displaying inaccurately.

People told us "The bumper solves the signal strength problem."

"Why don't you just give everyone a case?"

"Okay, great. Every iPhone 4 owners gets a free case"

"People who bought the bumper will be refunded."

"We'll send you a free case."

"We can't make enough bumpers, so we will offer a choice of cases. You can apply on our website late next week. Pick a case, zoom, we'll send it off to you."

"If you're still not happy? Return it. Full refund. Bring back an undamaged iPhone 4 within 30 days, and get a full refund."

"We want every customer to be happy, and if we can't make them happy, we'll give them their money back."

"The proximity sensor will be fixed in the next update."

"We love our users. We work our asses off for them. We make great products, and what motivates us is just to have them love them."

"When we fall short -- which we do sometimes -- we try harder."

"When we succeed, they reward us by staying our users. This is what drives us."

"If a user is having a problem, it's our problem. We've been working really.. really hard to try to understand what the real problem is, so when we solve it, we REALLY solve it. We think we've gotten to the heart of the problem here, and the heart of the problem is: smartphones... have... weak spots. We made ours incredibly visible, and we screwed up by making the reaction more visible than it needed to be."

"The data supports the fact: There is no antennagate."

"Q: Mr. Jobs: were you told about the concerns of the antenna design before?"
"A: Are you referencing the bloomberg article? Yeah? It's a total crock."

Steve on why they didn't share the iPhone 4 with case makers pre-release: "We like to keep our products quiet until they're ready -- if we don't it affects the sales of our current product. Sometimes blogs will buy a stolen prototype and put them online, and we don't particularly care for that -- but generally, we keep things quiet." Hahaha...Gizmodo reference.

"I guess it's just human nature: when some group or some organization gets successful, there's always a group of people who want to tear it down. I see it happening with Google, and I think to myself: why are they doing this? Google's a great company, and they make great companies. And now they're doing it to us. I ask myself: why? Would you rather we were a korean company, instead of an american company? Would you rather we weren't innovating right here?"