Given Garmin’s long, long history as a manufacturer of (often very small) GPS devices, I personally wouldn’t be.
(I also know for a fact they do mapping better. This summer I was in the South of Italy and only Garmin accurately distinguished between small public roads and long private driveways while both Google and Apple royally messed this up.)
BTW the Fitbit Ionic GPS stopped working and now (if it didn't expire) I will go for the health (battery) recall: https://help.fitbit.com/en_US/ionic.htm and give them to another person. This will be the second replacement since this model stopped working after 1 yr of use and Fitbit sent me a new one.
The author said their watch worked fine in the past. It also works fine after a warm up period, which suggests it’s not getting a GPS lock at the start of the workout.
It’s a new issue of either a software regression, hardware degradation, or RF interference near their start point.
I think the Ultra watches now have an option to wait for a fix before starting (which is what always happens on the Garmin's).
After "you're holding it wrong", anything seems possible. But yeah that does seem more likely to be software, it's a surprisingly difficult and fuzzily-defined problem.
They gave everyone free bumpers, because sweaty fingers would close the antenna gaps. The statement was true, the gaps were placed where they were expected to least affect the grip.
What exactly would you expect in this case?
The messaging worked. If your iPhone 4 was having signal issue, consider readjusting your hand.
Apple sent out free cases to compensate for the issue.
This is not the nightmare scenario that non-iPhone users made it out to be. Apple haters, like any group of haters are a silly bunch.
> This is not the nightmare scenario that non-iPhone users made it out to be. Apple haters, like any group of haters are a silly bunch.
What nightmare scenario did I imply? I think you're being a little overenthusiastic here. It was just a funny example to show that Apple isn't above screwing up hardware stuff/radios from time to time.
I saw the original video the user that reported it created. That guy was a deceptive idiot. It was obvious that he used trial and error to find a strange, finger-spread death grip that duplicated the issue in the most severe way. What is bazaar is someone that was obsessive enough to develop a grip that produced the issue with the most effect, and used it for personal benefit to gain notoriety.
Not being an antenna engineer, I had also noticed the exact same issue on my Motorola v551 years before, but not that it had anything to do with the grip, merely touching the device anywhere on it caused signal degradation. Apparently, this was a known issue that existed for decades, long before cell phones became ordinary, and the issue can be reproduced on every cell phone from every manufacturer, as well as ordinary radios, and anything that uses an antenna. But I didn't remotely think to try to attack Motorola for personal benefit. I just set the phone down when signal was weak and used bluetooth for data or calls, eliminating the issue, which wasn't Apple's fault and is apparently due to the limitations of antennas.
Singling out Apple was ignorant and deceptive, and fundamentally, Steve Jobs was correct about what that guy was doing, intentionally holding it in an unnatural way in order to produce the effect. That entire affair was nothing but a hatchet job that had nothing to do with user satisfaction and everything to do with negative and toxic personalities that irrationally believe they can gain personal satisfaction by causing misery. The most insidious types of mental illness are those where the mentally ill individual themselves do not suffer, instead they are compelled to make others suffer, which is how narcissism is generationally sustained.
That'd be compelling, except it started as wide-spread intemittent reports that the signal strength was just awful, but only for some people. This came up before anyone had any explanation yet, so couldn't possibly have been caused by a youtube video with a particular grip.
Turns out you just have to bridge a gap in the exposed antenna, there's no insane death grip required. It happens way more for left-handed people.
If it happens for every phone and every manufacturer equally, why/how did Apple fix it with a case?
But I really think the problem had to do with bridging that space in the antenna with a conductive material, such as the skin on fingers. The case merely provided a few mm of room for the signal to be able to squeeze through, plus it insulated conductive skin to prevent electrical bridging and deattenuation of the antenna.
Having owned an iPhone 4, I personally never experienced the problem beyond the same exact issue I experienced with a Motorola v551, which is that when placed on a table untouched, the signal strength increased, but then touching or holding it, the signal strength decreased. This can be reliably reproduced over and over again with any cell phone in an area of weak signal. Something about the conductivity of human skin interferes with attenuation of embedded antennas, and this has been true from the first cell phones with embedded antennas and is true of all modern cell phones, that in an area of weak cell signal, any skin contact will reduce signal strength and show one or more fewer bars of signal strength until skin contact is removed.
Apple conceded to a flaw in the design and settled a class action lawsuit, but apparently a few are still needy enough to require Apple be punished forever. The complainers had nothing to compare it to, so they were all, all of them, merely mistaken, the flaw exists in all cell phones with embedded antenna. Instead of proving them all wrong, which would have been academic, Apple laid down. What more would you like them to do?
So, in summary: they fucked up and had a really stupid response, right? I'm failing to see what part of that isn't fair.
> What more would you like them to do?
Nothing. It's just funny. They should probably avoid being ridiculous if they don't want memes about them to exist?
Straw man fallacy. Not everything is so simple. Even though all cell embedded antenna suffer from the same or similar flaw of deattenuating signal when held as opposed to being placed on a grounded surface in conditions of poor cell signal, perhaps the tactic applied was to avoid consumer resentment. Perhaps the legal costs of proving innocence and the common flaw among all similar devices was vastly more than paying the settlement. In fact, I am sure that was the case. Apple took the more equitable high road.
>> What more would you like them to do?
> Nothing. It's just funny. They should probably avoid being ridiculous if they don't want memes about them to exist?
This is merely schadenfreude. Do not believe that it is so that you will find happiness in the misery of others. To do so denies that Karma is never broken, or if you prefer, denies the validity of Newton's 3rd Law of Motion.
Self-esteem has a negative relationship with the frequency and intensity of schadenfreude experienced by an individual; individuals with less self-esteem tend to experience schadenfreude more frequently and intensely.[1]
> What exactly would you expect in this case?
Not pretending it's the user's fault they built the phone wrong. That's just extreme arrogance on their side.
You're welcome to patronize whoever you want as a customer, but from a business perspective this is the sort of behavior that will be heavily scrutinized during antitrust hearings.
So, you admin Apple isn’t the only one. I think you can find examples from any company, especially the publicly traded ones.
Similarly, you’ll never hear a CEO say their new product is decent while the previous one was so-so. The new one always is better, and the old one doesn’t get mentioned, but is implied to be good.
> this is the sort of behavior that will be heavily scrutinized during antitrust hearings.
I doubt it. Even if Apple were exceptional in making this kind of statements, what’s anti-competitive in making them, or in making bad products?
I wonder if the dual-band GPS on the Apple Watch Ultra is an attempt to fix these problems? I would guess that it’s software, with the author, if for no other reason than I’d be surprised if Garmin were all that much better at putting GPS in a tiny housing than Apple.