Former Apple Employee Blogs About Apple Internals (Again)
Posted by Aviv on August 18, 2008 at 1:50 pm PST
Former Apple Emlpoyee, Chuq von Rospach has blogged about Apple’s internals before. Having worked on Apple’s email lists for many years, Rospach understand certain aspects of the company, and lucky for us, he blogs about them too.
Blogging in response to the on-going 3G Network issues people are having with the iPhone 3G, Rospach had lunch with someone inside (or who has been inside) Apple: What I was told was that 90% of the disconnects are initiated inside the phone, which would exonerate AT&T. Most of the disconnects are being generated by crashes in the driver code for the 3G chip, which comes from the chip vendor, not something Apple written and outside of Apple’s direct control. Complicating this — even though Apple is handing over “here is the bug, here is the fix, update the driver”, the turnaround from the vendor on driver updates is on the order of 2-3 months. Said, um, lack of urgency not exactly making people inside the projects happy.
The best aspect of this rumor (if true) is that the hardware is fine; once they can get the drivers fixed (or replaced), the units should be fine. Thinking “recall” is unecessary and overkill, the real question seems to be how quickly Apple can beat the fixes out of the vendor.
Rospach goes on to explain that “these rumors found him,” — “he wasn’t looking.”
Neither Apple nor AT&T have made a public statement about any of these issues yet. Infineon has also made no comment in regard to accusations that an immature 3G chipset of theirs, is the culprit causing poor reception issues. One way or another, the wave of bad reception has garnered a fair amount of attention in the last week or so. Apple certainly knows of these issue (they’re probably experiencing them in Cupertino), and they are clearly working to solve the problems. Only time will tell if a software update fix will cure us of the One Bar Blues that we’ve been singing since July 9th.
