Welcome to our weekly “Apple Breakfast” piece, which provides a quick overview of all the Apple news you missed the previous week. Although it’s cool if you want to read it at lunch or dinner as well, we call it Apple Breakfast because we think it pairs nicely with a cup of coffee or tea on a Monday morning.
Admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Another iPhone launch means another set of prominent issues. It’s true that the media, including this particular reporter in this story, loves to discuss Apple’s flaws. But on sometimes, the business is a little too cooperative with the media.
Three things made this year’s “-gate” suffix candidates: the new FineWoven covers’ propensity to scuff and stain; the 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max models’ frightening tendency to overheat; and a video that someone made in which they attempted to snap one of the new phones and, well, mostly succeeded. None of these are particularly comforting, but the overheating issue is proving to be the most newsworthy for the obvious reason that a high temperature is always a concern.
The media attention that #hotphoneouchgate is receiving is unjustified. This is not a manufactured scandal: “Piping hot” is a descriptor that belongs to soup, not phones, and even Apple admits that this goes much beyond the minor temperature increases that are normal for newly configured gadgets. Also disturbing is that no one at Cupertino reportedly considered putting a FineWoven case in a pocket with a set of keys, and that such a big problem didn’t surface during internal testing. Apple’s renowned attention to detail seems to have been compromised at some point.
However, another modification to the business’ strategy is far more welcome to observe. Antennagate, which occurred in 2010 when the iPhone 4’s new design caused reception to drop out when it was handled in a specific way, remains the first and most enduring iPhone launch scandal. Let’s be clear: that is a phone’s comically basic and disqualifying flaw. But when a client complained, Steve Jobs, who was in charge of the business at the time, was rudely dismissive. Just don’t hold it that way,” he added, typing with the appearance of giggling and rolling his eyes.
A few years later, it was revealed that Jobs wasn’t at all dismissive, which is kind of funny. He supposedly cried out in tears because he was so upset by it. The business’s official public response, however, was to downplay the problem’s significance and express the hope that it would go away—which, obviously, it did not.
Possibly as a result, things altered. Since the company’s response has been rather outstanding, it is difficult to ignore how concerning #toohottohandlegate may be in what it implies about quality control at Cupertino these days. It acknowledged the existence of the issue and offered information on the hardware and software components that were and weren’t connected, as well as the third-party apps that users should avoid using until patches could be released (which put pressure on those app developers to release upgrades). Apple has released an upgrade for iOS 17 that completely fixed the issue.