Mine's up... but if I move my thumb a bit it drops right back down

OK, so technically *I'm* not an iPhone4 owner, but since my wife is, and since I've spent about as much time messing around with her shiny new slab of Jobsian almost-goodness as I have with my own non-fruity phone, I figure that if you think actually owning said phone is a requirement to pass comment on it, then I pretty much qualify.

Anyhoo, as I've said before, I suspect one of the reasons so many non-customers of Apple feel the need to pass comment on the company or its products is because of the way Apple behaves, and in some respects the behaviour of said commenters is no different to the behaviour of Apple. Time and time again Apple have passed comment on the devices or technologies developed by other companies, writing them off as not much cop, only to then do a complete about-face a few months later and release their own version of the exact same thing and claiming (with the aid of all their friends in the media) that it's something terribly exciting and new and oh wow we should all be super-thrilled that our lives can now be blessed with the addition of this fantastic new thing, all hail Jobs our saviour yada yada...

And you know what. A lot of us are downright sick and tired of it all. About as sick and tired of Apple/Apple-flavoured media bleating on incessantly about how crap other devices/technologies are, as you seem to be of people bleating on about how crap Apple/their products are. You know what would really make me sit up and respect Apple these days, in the same way I used to respect them back in the 80's? If they quit all the other-product bashing and the self-reverential "we'll only give our users something when we can make it perfect" type comments, and just got on with designing, testing and releasing genuinely well engineered products that, by the way they operate - NOT by the way they're marketed - actually do make people think that Apple are a company who only give their users stuff once it's perfect.

Sadly, the ongoing saga of the iPhone4 suggests to me that the Apple of 2010 doesn't seem to care quite so much about getting it right as the Apple of years gone by. Perhaps they're getting too big for their boots and no longer think they need to compete on quality, perhaps they've been rattled by the rapid growth in Android and felt pressured into getting the new handset out before it was really ready, perhaps it was just a genuine mistake. Who knows. All I do know is that their engineering team dropped the ball, and their PR team has done the square root of f'all to pick it up again. Glib "oh, you're holding it wrong" comments from the guy at the top just compound the sensation that the company really doesn't care about its customers who are genuinely affected by this problem - even if Apple didn't realise the true cause of the problem at the time, it's not exactly good customer relations to suggest it's user error given that no other product of this type suffers this same problem when used in the same way.

"Captain! the gauge says we're nearly out of air! *gasp*"

"Quick! Make the numbers on the gauge bigger!"

"Ah- that's better!"