John Gruber Is Brilliant

If you are a huge nerd like me, you undoubtedly already heard, but Apple issued a letter on their website this morning addressed to “iPhone 4 Users”. Surprising no one, the letter concerns the widely-reported “reception issue” with the new iPhone 4. The letter effectively confirms what AnandTech reported after their extensive testing earlier this week: That, just like basically every other competing smartphone, that the iPhone 4 reception does suffer a bit when you hold it in a certain way, but that the overall reception of the iPhone 4 (even when held wrong) is dramatically improved over the previous generations of iPhones. However, they admit:

Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

Which is effectively what AnandTech explained with this chart:

I took this chart, and converted it into a pie chart showing the distribution of the available dynamic range per-bar. When you look at it this way, it is quite clear that the scale used by Apple in the iOS software is completely compressed and distorted. This was done, obviously, to make the phone more likely to report 5 bars. As you can see, the dynamic range of the third bar is almost nothing (comprising only from -103 to -101 dB), compared to the ranges for the fourth and fifth bars.

With their forthcoming iOS patch, Apple is going to “fix” this, to be more in line with “AT&T’s recommendations.” Now, until today, there were no standards in the industry for how cell phone reception bar graphs are constructed. It has generally been up to each individual phone vendor to design their own system, which has led to situations just like what we have illustrated above. There is, of course, a real motivation for phone vendors to skew their reception graphs just like Apple did above, because consumers would compare different phones to each other using these graphs (and the one that shows five bars more often is obviously better, even if it isn’t). Apple has now apparently put pressure on AT&T to come up with some sort of standard. We’ll have to see if it is actually a more fair representation of the available range, but it almost certainly can’t get any worse.

So, you might be wondering, why is John Gruber brilliant? Well, for many reasons, but today he put up a hilarious “translation” of the Apple letter on his site. Check it out. It’s funny because it’s true.