I would not trust any coverage of supposed issues with Apple hardware. There is a huge incentive for negative coverage. Remember Antenna-gate with the iPhone 4? They continued selling the iPhone 4, completely unmodified, for years after that whole debacle. That's how widespread the supposed issue was.
A more relevant example would be the Dell XPS 15 where owners and a few reviewers have reported extreme thermal throttling with i7 models.
>As mentioned in our detailed review, the XPS 15 9560 with the Core i7-7700HQ processor is prone to two types of throttling:
Thermal throttling of the CPU or GPU (generally the CPU) when temperatures get too high
Voltage Regulator Module (VRM) throttling caused by it getting too hot and being unable to deliver enough power
I'd say that a similarly priced high end laptop that cannot adequately cool a four core i7 is a bigger deal, especially given that this is their second year to ship devices with the same issue.
>The service manual for the Dell XPS 15 9570 is now available and it reveals something that we wished would improve in this generation — that the XPS 15 9570 carries over the same 2-pipe heatsink assembly from the previous generation. Not just that, there is also no indication of improved thermal dissipation from the Voltage Regulator Modules (VRMs) implying that we could be in for some serious throttling issues.
The Dell XPS 15 while earning accolades for being a very capable multimedia laptop that can also game, has also earned the reputation for throttling heavily under load. Both the earlier XPS 15s suffered from both thermal and power-limit throttling. The only way to fix this was to repaste and undervolt the CPU and also apply thermal pads on the VRMs to drive away all the excess heat.
Unfortunately, it looks like Dell has chosen to retain the existing heatsink design for the XPS 15 9570. Compounding throttling fears is the availability of a Core i9-8950HK variant.
You would think that after two years with the same issue, the mainstream tech press would pick up on it if the issue is throttling and not just chasing clickbait stories.
Apple settled a fairly large lawsuit related to Antennagate and was forced to send out a bumper case to affected users so they could hold the phone the "Jobs" way and get reception rather than the way you would normally hold...literally any other phone before, during, or since Antennagate, including newer iPhone models.
They settled for $15/phone or a free case (they had already offered a free case to customers of their own accord). They kept the iPhone 4 around for 2 years after it was no longer their marquee model. Surely if Antennagate was actually a problem for a significant portion of customers they would have stopped selling it as soon as possible (aka, upon release of the 4S). But they didn't.
I think you severely underestimate the difficulty in retooling supply chains for relatively minor issues. It wasn't worth the cost of doing what you suggest when the issue could easily be fixed with a free bumper or by getting people to hold the phone in a non-ergonomic manner.
> It wasn't worth the cost of doing what you suggest when the issue could easily be fixed with a free bumper or by getting people to hold the phone in a non-ergonomic manner.
Exactly. It wasn't that big of a deal.
I mean, we haven't even gotten into how a bunch of other phones which were on sale at the time exhibited the exact same behavior.
TBH, the "Jobs" way was the normal way that most people held a phone. It was the people who smothered the whole handset in some kind of crazy death grip that had attenuation problems.
I got my bumper in the mail, but never needed or used it.
Most of the people I know who had iPhones had issues with the iphone 4 antenna, and only one or two of them are death-grippers. The problem was Apple's poor design, which Apple itself acknowledged by settling the case, offering free bumpers, and redesigning the antenna in future models.
