Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [26]
Such a mob formed when members discovered that they were unable to hold a call on their new iPhone 4. As a result, they called Apple out loudly on a defect in its design. Apple was boasting about the glass-and-metal device’s innovative antenna placed along the exterior of the hardware, but the sleek, attractive design had a major flaw. When covering certain areas with a finger or palm, attenuation diminishes the phone’s cellular reception. Customers noticed on the day the product hit stores and started blogging in protest. On launch day, a customer sent Steve Jobs an e-mail, and his bizarre solution was, “Just avoid holding it in that way.” Two days later, the complaints continued, and Steve responded to another: “There is no reception issue. Stay tuned.”
A few days after that, Steve allegedly got into an argument with a difficult customer, Jason Burford, though the authenticity of the exchange was later denied by an Apple public relations representative speaking with Fortune. “No, you are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down,” Steve allegedly said in the first message in the exchange published by the blog Boy Genius Report. “You are most likely in an area with very low signal strength,” Steve said in the second. “You may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on it.”
Apple did not address the problem publicly, not counting the e-mails, until a couple of weeks after the phone’s debut was marred by the incident and while reports had been steadily rolling in. About three weeks after the iPhone 4 launch and prompted by a less-than-stellar review from Consumer Reports, Steve arranged a news conference where the message was that there was no antenna issue but that Apple would give free cases to customers anyway in order to prevent users from attenuating the antenna with their fingers.
Steve’s presentation, which was later broadcasted on Apple’s website, contained some patronizing remarks aimed at the media, but it wasn’t until the question-and-answer session that Steve’s statements began dripping with condescension. It’s no mystery why Apple’s public relations team decided to omit that portion of the news conference from its online posting. Steve said his team was “stunned and upset by the Consumer Reports stuff,” referring to the nonprofit publication’s determination that the iPhone 4 contained a serious design flaw. He portrayed himself as the victim, saying it is human nature for people to want to tear down those who are successful. Steve complained that the news media relentlessly beats down high-profile companies in the quest for controversy and readers’ attention. “I wish we could have done this in the first 48 hours, but then you wouldn’t have had so much to write about,” Steve concluded. He noted that for some customers e-mailing him about troubles, Steve had forwarded the messages onto Apple’s antenna engineers and in some cases, sent engineers to the people’s homes.
As Apple’s market value increased, so did criticisms that it was growing on the backs of Chinese workers. Apple employs the services of the Foxconn Technology Group, a subsidiary of Taiwan’s manufacturing juggernaut Hon Hai group, to build many of its products. Foxconn employs almost 1 million workers in South and Central America, Eastern Europe and Asia with about a third of them based in factory campuses designed to live and work in Shenzhen, China. Like with many factories in industrializing countries, Foxconn’s work environment is not particularly pleasant: long hours, cramped conditions and monotony. Many of the workers are young and inexperienced, unaccustomed to living away from home in a corporate campus.
A year earlier, Foxconn logistics worker Sun Danyong made international headlines when the 25-year-old man who worked at Foxconn in Shenzhen, China, jumped to his death. During the summer of 2009, Sun was among thousands of workers busy