Apple’s Plan to Resolve The Antenna Issue (Updated)

During Apple’s press conference this morning, CEO Steve Jobs detailed exactly what the manufacturer would do to resolve the longstanding reception issues plaguing the iPhone 4.

As rumored by many in the media, Apple will be offering customers a free bumper case and refunding customers who had previously purchased bumper cases.  The program will begin next week and continue until September 30th for all customers and new purchases going forward as well as offering a 30 day return period if unhappy with the iPhone 4 for any reason.

Jobs also mentioned that the White iPhone will launch at the end of the month as well as another round of international launches in 17 additional countries and that the proximity sensor will be fixed in the next iOS update.

Update: During the Q&A session, Jobs mentioned that AT&T will be giving refunds and letting people out of agreements as a part of the iPhone 4 guarantee announced earlier.  He also clarified the purchased bumper refund by stating that only those purchased from Apple will qualify and that third-party bumper purchases are not covered under the program.  Jobs had this to say:

“I think we’ve learned how much we care about our customers. We were stunned. We were upset. We were embarrassed by the consumer report thing that came out this week — but we didn’t need that. The reason we didn’t say anything for a week? Because we didn’t know anything yet. All of this hard data, we got that 3 days ago.

In a few more weeks, we’ll have even more data that’ll help us hone in on this problem.” “Some people want us to run a little faster, I don’t think we could. I’ve seen cars in the parking lot all night; we’ve got cots in the engineering building. I don’t think we could be working any harder to get to the root cause of the issue.

I guess it’s just human nature: when some group or some organization gets successful, there’s always a group of people who want to tear it down. I see it happening with Google, and I think to myself: why are they doing this? Google’s a great company, and they make great companies. And now they’re doing it to us. I ask myself: why? Would you rather we were a Korean company, instead of an American company? Would you rather we weren’t innovating right here?  Just to get eyeballs for these websites, people don’t care what they leave in their wake.

I look at this whole Antennagate thing, and I say: Wow. Apple has been around for 30+ years; haven’t we earned the credibility and trust from the press to give us the benefit of the doubt? I think we have that trust from our users, but I didn’t see it from the press.  I’m not saying we’re not at fault — we didn’t educate ourselves, we didn’t understand that people don’t know that smartphones have weaknesses. We didn’t know we were painting a bullseye on our phone with the lines. We were not just innocents — but the reaction, based on the data we have, has been so overblown.”

Regarding the possibility of a recall:
“When you love your customers as much as we do, nothing is off the table — but the way we work is data driven. We wanted to find out why customers were experience what they are; we sent people all over the country to figure this out. We get emails from all over, I dispatch these emails, and we send teams. Literally, two days after their email, they get a knock at the door from a bunch of Apple engineers. “Can we plug this in? Can we test your phone? Can we log this?”