Kicking off by saying "We're not perfect. We know that, you know that. And phones aren't perfect either," Steve Jobs appeared at a hastily called press conference Friday morning to address complaints about the iPhone 4's reception issues.
However, he promised, "We want to make all of our users happy. If you don't know that about Apple, you don't know Apple. We love making our users happy."
After touting the wonders of the iPhone and sharing some statistics, he said, he'd tell everyone how Apple is going to deal with its unhappy customers. Jobs said Apple has sold more than 3 million of the devices.
Calling the iPhone 4 "perhaps the best product we've ever made at Apple," Jobs said, "It has the highest customer satisfaction rating of any iPhone and any smartphone out there."
In fact, he said, a mere 0.55 percent of customers have called Apple Care to complain about the antenna or reception problems with their iPhone 4. And AT&T's return rate so far, under its "no questions asked" policy, Jobs said, has been 1.7 percent for the iPhone 4, vs. about 6 percent for the previous iPhone 3GS.
After what Jobs dubbed "Antennagate" -- the reception glitch revealed about three weeks ago -- he promised Apple had not had its "head in the sand" and that engineers had been working on the problem. He also said the reception dropoff is "not unique to iPhone 4."
Engadget has some nice photos of Jobs demonstrating that other models of mobile phone have similar issues with reception bars dropping depending on how the device is held while in use. Other devices he mentioned include the BlackBerry Bold 9700 and the Samsung Omnia II. This proves, he said, that "smartphones have weak spots."
Jobs then went off on an in-depth discussion of testing, algorithms and other technical data sure to put all but the most dedicated Apple geek to sleep ... Meanwhile, everyone else was waiting for him to get to the fix.
WIthout giving out absolute numbers, Jobs said that although the iPhone 4 is better than the 3GS (in his opinion), it did drop less than one call more per 100 than the 3GS, according to AT&T data. (However, whether that's 10 vs. 9, or 82 vs. 81, he wasn't saying).
"Less than one. Even that's too much for us," he told the audience. "I have my own pet theory on this," which had to do with the 3Gs vs. the 3G. The newer phone didn't change its design from the old phone, so there were plenty of cases available to fit it. The iPhone 4 has a radically new design, however, so the existing cases don't fit, and Apple can't keep up with the demand for bumper cases.
Finally, the fix! Although Jobs emphasizes again that it's a small number of users who are experiencing the glitch, every iPhone 4 buyer will receive a free bumper case from Apple.
