The “Antennagate” scandal of 2010 spooked iPhone users and marred the early image of the iPhone 4. While Apple fought hard in the press to brush off the reception issues, if the iPhone 5 features either an Internal Antenna and/or metal back, will it be a tacit admission that the iPhone 4 was flawed?
We’ve talked in the press about a panoply of possible new features for the iPhone 5. However, the discussion of either a return to the internal antenna or a metal back (or both) is seldom mentioned in iPhone rumor roundups. The primary reason for this is that the appearance of either or both of these features on the iPhone 5 would not in fact constitute “new features,” but rather would be “fixes” to the contentious Antennagate issue that gripped the tech world in the summer and fall of 2010.
Regardless of where you might be on the antenna issue for the iPhone 4, few current or prospective iPhone users seem to be against the iPhone 5 design returning to earlier, more reliable reception technology. In their March 17th posting, 9 To 5 Mac aptly stated the high probability of the reemergence of the metal back feature. Referencing a reliable source from Foxconn, writer Mark Gurman reported that “Apple has decided to move away from the back-glass enclosure found on the fourth-generation device and move to something similar to the back of the first-generation iPhone from 2007.”
Gurman went on to explain that “if Apple keeps the same antenna design (which was not mentioned by sources) as the iPhone 4 and adds the flat aluminum back, this back should not cause any reception issues.” International Business Times seconds this rumor, and also adds that the iPhone 5 will indeed revert back to the internal antenna seen on the iPhone 4. In this way, Apple is essentially doubling up on fixing the antenna issue.
However, should these two fixes show up on the iPhone 5, how is Apple going to handle it from a PR perspective?
After all, Steve Jobs and the rest of Apple’s marketing and PR mechanism worked overtime last summer to squelch the escalating criticism about the purported faulty antenna and “death grip.” Their approach to dealing with the problem turned out to be complex at best: while on one hand they brushed off the criticism as “overblown,” affirming that the iPhone 4 had the same level of reception quality as its competitors, Apple also responded by distributing free bumpers for the iPhone 4, which was seen by many to be a work-around for an obvious design flaw in the antenna.
This time around, with the iPhone 5, Apple will have to address the decision to return to previous designs when it comes to reception. By utilizing either the internal antenna or metal black, it will be a de facto admission that the iPhone 4 was indeed flawed to some extent. With the metal back, Apple will have some plausible deniability — they can always claim that the decision was entirely aesthetically motivated, especially if they go with a Liquid Metal over Aluminum.
But a return to the internal antenna on the iPhone 5 will be harder to spin.
Apple has always prided itself as a product leader when it comes to quality, performance, and innovation of personal computers and mobile computing devices. And for the most part, the company has managed to live up to the reputation that it espouses. And while the iPhone 4 was indeed an advancement of the iPhone technology as a whole, it is more likely to go down in history as the first hiccup in the iPhone lineage. Let us hope that the hiccup ends with the iPhone 5.
What do you think? Was “antennagate” just a witch hunt by the press, or was it a big enough problem to be newsworthy? And will a return to the internal antenna and/or metal back on the iPhone 5 convince you that the iPhone 4 antenna design was indeed faulty?
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