Most probably know John Gruber thinks this is going to be something big, and according to his blog he flew out there last night. Funny to fly across country on a hunch. Wouldn't it be funny if Steve didn't talk about the antenna and just announced a deal with Verizon or something.
I'm tired of hearing about this issue(I know, then I shouldn't have started a discussion on it), I can't believe people are making such a fuss over something that is flying off the shelves. I can't think of anything like this happening before.
I guess it shows how badly Apple blew it PR wise. Why not just throw the stinking bumper in the package with the phone instead of charging $30 for it, if they knew it was going to be an issue.
As Gruber points out, Consumer Reports looks pretty stupid over the whole thing as well. Duct tape?

I wrote this a few days ago. I didn't post it because, well, it makes me seem like a fanboi. but I'm not. I'm not getting a iPhone 4 anytime soon. and my next computer very likely won't be a Mac. maybe I was making fun of some specific outlet. you know, the ones that do shows that react to the news. whatever... here. I'm not sorry about the over use of that word. get over that already if you are offended.

"ZOMG! the SKY is falling!!!"

here's the press doing what the press does best. for the past two decades "the press" has been calling for Apple to "just pack it in. you guys and your 3-7% market share will never amount to anything." and they go on and on about this. but it's not just Apple that's under their thumb about products. they do this with every single thing. never mind that somebody slaved away for 12-18 months making the thing. the press will chew it up and spit it out in 18 minutes. it's very hard to argue with success of how this sell papers (and [inhale sound] hits).

every single thing ever made as a flaw. sometimes these flaws are fatal. but just because a thing as a flaw of any kind doesn't mean it's a steaming pile of poo. but the press would like you to think of things like that. the fatal flaw of the 5150 guitar amp was after you plugged in you still couldn't play eruption. the fatal flaw of the PR40 microphone was that it did not make your voice automatically radio like. the fatal flaw of wearing a gay shirt is that it doesn't always attract the ladies. the fatal flaw of that thing from the press point of view has historically been:

iPhone 2 no removable battery!
iPhone 3G no removable battery!
iPhone 3GS no removable battery!
iPhone 4 wait [editor: don't say no removable battery. don't fucking say that. we've used that rant for 3 years. give me something new that we can run in 127 point type you monkeys] has a bad antenna.

"oh yeah. fuck yeah. the iFucking Phone is flawed. we're gonna get hits! fuck, fucking yeah! and it's BAD because you can SEE that it's a fucking turd of a phone. just move your fingers to a specific place exactly right there oh yeah baby you can see the fall of the bars just like you can see the fall of Apple. hell fucking yeah! so here's how we get 400K new hits to our crappy dead tree magazine we'll proclaim that it SUCKS so you all of you will come read our lies and made up factoids that we kinda sorta did in our "lab" which is Bob's office down the hall because Bob has the thing.

oh. never mind. they have a better lab. fuck.

What gets me is that the issue is replicatable on other phones with internal antennas (I have a Nexus one at my office that I can drop the bars on at will). Why in God's name is Apple taking this level of beating and the other companies catching NOTHING?

I'm not saying there should be equal beatings, but Samsung, Nokia, and HTC seem to be getting of scott free while walking around with the same problems!!

John's right.

As usual :-)

The Zune, for me, was one of those things... It had its upsides, but it also had its downsides. I never thought it was as bad as people said it was, but I also thought it was emblematic of how out of touch Microsoft was with what the world wanted. The Zune HD, had it been closer to the beginning of the Zune's life cycle, would've been a killer device everyone would want. The Zune? Not so much. The sharing was cool, but it tacked its own DRM onto stuff whether you had it there or not. It was too big. It had a circular control pad that looked just like the iPod's, but you couldn't swirl it. The rubberized coating was nice, but brown? I never met anyone who liked the brown at all unless they were hardcore Microsoft fans.

That's not to say it didn't have redeeming qualities. The album-art centric browsing was nice (something Apple has been trying and failing at for a long time), the menu system is clean and high-end looking, and from what I've been told by people with better ears, the sound quality is better than its competition.

The Zune wasn't a terrible device, it was a mediocre device that entered a mature market at a bad time. Had Creative come out with it, I think it would've been better-received.

Of course they are.

It's amazing how everyone acts like the iPhone is the first ever smart phone and AT&T and Apple are the first companies to ever have exclusivity.

It's more and more infuriating by the day.

I recently got into in an argument with someone over a similar issue, I had the gall to commit heresy and say something good about Windows ME. Sure it was a stupid product, sure there was very little reason to upgrade, yes some of the secondary features added to it sucked and were not ready for prime time. But a few people in the tech press decided it was the worst product ever created so now everyone thinks it was this horrible mess of a product. At the time I was stuck using a massively out of date system, guess what ME ran better than 98 on lower end systems. No one knows this though because people who never even saw a system with ME installed let alone used a system with it claim it is the worst product ever in history. I've even heard many people - Leo included- years after the fact admit that ME was no where near as bad as they painted it to be during the negative hype bandwagon gangbang.

As others pointed out the exact same thing happened with the Zune, It happened to a lesser extent with Vista, and I had friends trying to bad mouth Windows 7 six months before it was out of beta telling me stuff they had "heard" about it. They would back down and shut up very quickly when I would tell them I was beta testing it, and I could tell them things from actual experience and not stuff I had "heard".

Vincenzosi:I honestly never hated ME. In fact, I was one of the few folks who bought it on day one and enjoyed using it until I made the move up to Win2k and later XP.

ME introduced a lot of enhancements to Windows and gave Explorer a much-needed sprucing up (although not a complete facelift). The photos stuff was great (WIA, in particular), built in previewer, and so on, were HUGE for me as I was just starting to dabble in digital photos. And come on... System Restore? How could you not find it useful?

Oh yeah, and don't forget USB support that didn't suck.

I agree; people that bagged on ME were just bandwagon jumping. It wasn't a huge leap from 98SE, but it did set a lot of the tone for Windows XP.

Same experience I had with it. I remember my bootup time was dramatically cut by at least 50%. The main problem with it was it really should have been a service pack. Look at what SP2 did for XP, that's what ME should have been. It came out during what was probably the strangest period ever in Microsofts product cycle, and people bashed it more for that then anything else.

johnfoster:ME was a pain for me. I was developing full time on NT4 (or was it Win2K I forget) and was really liking everything about my day because things worked there. but the memory leaks that I found when playing video in Windows 98 were not fixed (and were in fact worse) continued to cause problems with stability of my product. short of automatically rebooting the box once a day there was nothing I could do to fix the leaks.

the second problem with ME was once again Microsoft under shot the actual requirements for hardware. sure, ME could run on an anemic processor with not much RAM but would you really like the experience compared to 98SE? it was like history repeated itself because they did the same thing with Window 95 or later on with Vista.

johnfoster:ME was a pain for me. I was developing full time on NT4 (or was it Win2K I forget) and was really liking everything about my day because things worked there. but the memory leaks that I found when playing video in Windows 98 were not fixed (and were in fact worse) continued to cause problems with stability of my product. short of automatically rebooting the box once a day there was nothing I could do to fix the leaks.

the second problem with ME was once again Microsoft under shot the actual requirements for hardware. sure, ME could run on an anemic processor with not much RAM but would you really like the experience compared to 98SE? it was like history repeated itself because they did the same thing with Window 95 or later on with Vista.

Yes I would on my massively underpowered machine ME ran way better than 98SE, were not talking a little bit better it was noticeably much better.

My experience with Windows ME was that upgrades were hit or miss performance-wise. Clean installs or systems that came with it pre-installed generally had little to no problems.
In the end though, I feel like it was a last minute moneygrab by Microsoft before XP came out.

funny, this reminds me that I lived with the same "Gateway 2000" running 95 until I got a Dell xp machine.

My hd was huge compared to yours-2.5 gb. I still remember the rep on the phone telling me "that will be all that you ever need."

I remember buying the parts to make a 9G scary RAID. it was full about 2 weeks later.

RAID is a fine idea as long as you know what RAID your are getting into.

remember the nicknames:
RAID 0 aka scary RAID. there is a zero percept change of recovering data if you lose one of the drives.
RAID 1 aka Redundant Redundant RAID. there is a 50% chance of recovering if one of the drives fails. there is a 100% chance that the second drive will fail soon after.
RAID 5 aka not so scary RAID if you lose a drive you won't lose any data. but it takes as long as a day for the dataset to rebuild.

good point. I've never promoted RAID of any kind as a primary backup device. remember if there is only one copy of something it might as well not exist. the data on my RAID'd drives is there temporarily like video or it's in some data center, it's getting snapped daily. the extra drive is there with the idea that the down time could be minutes not hours. we don't count on it but it's better to be saved than sorry. that said, I don't like having data that has a high availability requirement spinning on a single spindle.

yeah, same here. I think some people just think we had a vision and can suddenly figure this stuff out.

Yeah. Windows 7 is a major leap over XP and a pretty good improvement on Vista (which I didn't hate) but I'm still a Mac guy at heart. I just <3 my Macs ;-)