Apple’s Secrecy is Why They Botched the iPhone 4 Antenna Issue.

Die hard Apple fans are downplaying it, Apple haters are pounding on it, but regardless of the extreme views on it, the iPhone 4 antenna issue is a real problem for both Apple and it’s customers.

There have been questions raised as to how Apple missed such an obvious flaw in product testing.

From my perspective, I can see how Apple would have missed this issue. Apple has a culture of secrecy surrounding their new products. I have never quite understood the reasoning for this, but I can say that it may be an advantage when it comes to boosting the stock price, or saving them from embarrassment should this miss production dead lines. Even within Apple, we have the impression that those employees who work on new products do so under strict contractual instructions not to talk about these projects with other Apple employees.

When the iPhone 4 prototype turned up in a bar, presumably “lost” by an Apple engineer, one of the published media reports said that the phone was in a case that gave the impression that the unit was an iPhone 3GS. Given the iPhone 4′s radical exterior visual changes, it would make sense that engineers doing field and internal testing would cloak their phone. There in lies why Apple missed the antenna issue.

Given the level of secrecy both outside and inside Apple HQ, it’s unlikely that engineers would have removed the testing iPhones 4 from the cases. Even inside Apple HQ, walking down the halls or in the common areas, a metal banded iPhone 4 would have stood out.

It’s unlikely that there would have been a lot of testing of the iPhone 4 naked. Add to this that Apple almost certainly has their own internal GSM base-station radios to test with, even if some small amount of case-less testing had happened in a lab, there was probably perfect signal strength to make up for the bad antenna design. If case-less testing was done outside of Apple HQ, it’s also unlikely that it was “real-world” testing.

I would not be surprised if there were contractual obligations that required Apple engineers to keep the iPhone 4 in a case.