But, Apple also claimed the antenna problem on earlier iPhones was a display problem...it just did not show the right signal strength.
Multiple articles were written that people were holding their phones incorrectly.
Articles were written that the antenna problem did not exist or existed on other phones also.
Then, after months of complaints, Apple acknowledged the problem.
There was never anything wrong with the iPhone 4 antenna, Erik. The iPhone 4 had the longest continuous run of any iPhone model in history and the antenna design was NEVER CHANGED. The only area of the world where there was any controversy was in the United States, where a concerted FUD campaign was mounted orchestrated by Google and Samsung to push the release of their new Android phones over Apple's phones and AT&T's abysmal handling of the iPhone 4’s rollout and their network's inability to handle the sudden influx of around two million new customers in a couple of weeks in urban centers overwhelmed their cell towers caused numerous dropped calls.
Steve Jobs made a joke saying "you're holding it wrong" as part of an email to a customer explaining that attenuation occurs on every phone. That out of context joke was picked up and repeated, and repeated, and repeated, always without the context, which has now been lost in the flurry of deliberate FUD. The recipient of the original email tried to set the record straight but got tired of being attacked by the FUD spreaders as a liar.
Compounding the issue was the Consumers Report article in which they decided to "test" cellular phones for signal strengths for the first time and used the on-screen signal strength "bar graphs" as being "accurate" instead of using certified laboratory equipment and reported that the iPhones 4 got weaker signals and dropped signal strength faster than other phones based on the displayed bar graphs. The iPhone could easily have been switched to display a numeric signal strength in settings. CU testers literally did not know what they were doing.
Other labs who did know how to accurately measure signal strengths, such as Anandtech and technical cellular testing labs, found that the iPhone 4’s signal reception and transmitting was actually superior to other phones tested and could often pick up signals better in fringe areas where other phones could not. In response to CU's incompetence and the confusion it caused, Apple changed the algorithm that determined when the bars dropped lower in response to a lower signal strength to better reflect the exterior antenna's greater sensitivity and ability to receive weaker signals than the older phones.
Blogs and and Google leaped on the negative, the FUD, ignoring the accurate data, and "Antennagate" was born out of this confluence of events and kept it going. Googled articles on the actual facts were deliberately buried several pages deep after pages and pages of FUD articles. The facts were there, but you had to dig to find them, or use a different search engine to find them.
In the rollout in the rest of the world, no dropped calls occurred. . . and users were questioning what all the negative press was about. They simply did not experience what was happening in the US with AT&T's network. When AT&T got its network up to capacity, the problem went away. When the iPhone 4 began to be sold on Verizon, the FUD started disappearing, because Verizon iPhone customers simply did not have the problem at all. By a month later, Antennagate was over. The FUD just stopped. In fact, someone started spreading a rumor that Apple was "coating" new their iPhone 4 with a special compound that "fixed" the problem. Apple stopped giving away bands.
The iPhone 4 had the longest lifespan of any iPhone ever produced, spanning close to 4 years - it was still available in some developing countries until early 2014.. . .Something close to 50 million iPhone 4's were sold during those four years without changing the antenna at all, which is absolute proof that Antennagate was a totally created marketing effort to push another agenda. Antennagate occurred as Google was pushing Android to the other cellphone makers. . . and Samsung was spending large amounts pushing their cellular Android products as was Google with its release of Nexus. Follow the advertising money.. . . Despite the negative media attention regarding the antenna issues, 72% of iPhone 4 users say that they are "very satisfied" with their iPhone 4 according to an August 2010 survey by ChangeWave Research.[96] The iPhone 4 model continued to be sold unchanged up until September 2013.—Wikipedia article on iPhone 4
Apple, in order to stem the Antennagate FUD Storm, gave away the band cases in the US, but none anywhere else in the world, although they really did nothing to improve the antennas except in the publics' perception. Steve Jobs even demonstrated, using a field strength meter, that every other competitors' phone attenuated exactly the same way if a users' hand shielded the location of the phone's antenna. . . It is just the nature of cellular phone signals. . . Just as this bending issue is the nature of larger phones and the application of excessive force.