1. When you ask for iced tea, you get sweet tea, which is pretty much like drinking sugar through a straw.
2. Grease. Every single food item has two primary components. One is grease, the other is butter. While delicious, you will definitely feel it 30 min after eating.
3. People are courteous. And I don’t mean polite, I mean genuinely courteous. Everyone says “Good Morning” to people they pass in the morning, everyone says “Hello” when you pass them in the afternoon. They all watch where they walk, yielding when appropriate and holding doors for each other and thanking those that do so. Very nice change of pace from the West Coast.
4. Every woman raised in the South calls everyone “Sweetie”, “Sugar”, or “Honey” regardless of their age, gender, race or any other determining factor.
5. 87% humidity + 98 degrees F + overgrown deciduous forest = holy crap. You know those older cartoons where characters wipe their foreheads and then fling what at the time seems to be a copious and ridiculous amount of water from their hand? That shit ain’t made up, that really happens.
6. Spiders get huge. Like so huge that you are torn between being utterly fascinated and wanting to run the hell away.
7. 

   Sorry about the focus, silly phone. But that thing is a little bigger than my fist.

   Unless you want to hear a very fun, albeit long, diatribe don’t mention the Civil War. Also, under no circumstances should you ever, ever mention the name William Tecumseh Sherman.

8. Country music isn’t as prevalent as you think it would be. Granted, it’s NC and not Tennessee. The fact that I was in a university district also may have had something to do with that.
9. You may not think that you have an vocal accent, but to everyone else you do.
10. No one gets Canada jokes.
11. What the hell is with all the traffic circles?

Within days of the launch, users report that their calls get dropped and their data connections slowed to a crawl if you held the phone in such a manner that the bottom left corner of the phone is covered. Now, if you are right handed (and a fairly decent portion of the world is) then this is the way you would hold the phone. As a matter of fact, this is the way all Apple’s commercials and PR shots hold the phone as well, gripped in your left hand, with the meat of your thumb on the bottom left of the phone.  Well, it seems given the amounts of fancy hardware the managed to cram into the newest Apple offering, it seems they ran out of room for the antenna. These days most phone designers put the antenna at the bottom of the phone, this is to meet FCC regulations on the amount of RF energy the brain and surrounding tissue absorbs. That’s when the Apple engineers decided to get clever. They decided to use the metal band that runs around the phone as an antenna.  The metal band has a few plastic spacers in it to separate the antenna from the rest of the case. You can see them in the photo I blatenetly stole from Apple’s website.

Check out the lines at the bottom separating the antenna from the case.

When your big meaty thumb or hand or other conductive parts touch both the antenna and the case, your antenna’s performance drops like a rock. Some more tech savvy users are reporting anywhere from 3 to 5 dB loss in signal gain. For those of you who don’t recall your logarithmic scale, that’s a reduction of signal from 50 to 70%.  When the average received cell phone signal is in the -95 dBm range (316 pico-Watts), you can’t afford to lose 50% because someone is holding the phone.

Now some people (cough, this guy, cough) would like to point the finger at the FCC, saying that the test you have to pass to get your device certified for public use only takes into account the head and the device, not the hand.  Then he decides to drop this little gem:

So, naturally, the design evolved to meet requirements – and efficient transmission and reception while being held by a human hand are simply not design requirements!

What the hell do you think the Apple engineers were designing? A clock radio? I could see why hand issues wouldn’t be a problem here. But for a phone? How can you justify not taking the user’s hand into account? I don’t care that the FCC doesn’t require it. This is what happens when you get clever. You get all excited about how smart you think you were instead of actually being smart. What makes this technical snafu even better is Apple (and Steve Jobs) response to the problem:  “You’re holding it wrong.” “Buy a case.” Gee, thanks.  I know you’ve been king of the mobile device market with your fancy iMusicPlayer and iSuperPhone, but guess what, your shit is still broken.

I guess the real reason I started writing was to convey the following: Engineering is more that getting something to work. You have to anticipate environment, users, worst cases. You have to think about the why you are doing something, not just the what and how. And most importantly, what are the ramifications, both good and bad, of doing x?

Oh, and those clever engineers? Looks like three of these antenna engineering positions just opened at Apple. Ouch.