Reading view

Mark Stephens (Robert X. Cringely), RIP

16 October 2026 at 20:58

Mary Alyce Stephens (Hacker News, Reddit, TidBITS Talk):

Mark Stephens, known to much of the world as Robert X. Cringely, passed away on October 3, 2026. He was 73.

Mark was a gifted writer, journalist, storyteller, husband, father, brother, and friend. To millions of readers and viewers, he was Robert X. Cringely, the witty and sometimes irreverent observer of the technology world. But to those of us fortunate enough to love him, he was simply Mark-and losing him leaves an emptiness that is difficult to put into words.

[…]

Writing as Robert X. Cringely, Mark became a distinctive voice in technology journalism. He had an unusual ability to understand not only technology but also the human beings behind it-the dreamers, inventors, entrepreneurs, eccentrics, and risk-takers who were changing the world. He could take a complicated subject and make it understandable, entertaining, funny, and deeply human.

Steven Sinofsky (via John Gruber):

Bob wrote “Accidental Empires” that chronicled SV and the tech industry of the PC era, 1970s-90s. It led to the highly regarded PBS series “Triumph of the Nerds” a definitive series of interviews of the era. Through that time he authored the “gossip” column” in InfoWorld on the latest goings on at OG PC companies. Everyone read it in print religiously.

Antennagate Q&A

Michael Tsai

By: Michael Tsai

25 September 2026 at 20:26

Hartley Charlton:

A 47-minute video of the Q&A session from Apple’s 2010 iPhone 4 “antennagate” press conference has surfaced on YouTube, showing Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and Bob Mansfield answering reporters’ questions.

[…]

Jobs used his prepared presentation to announce free cases for eligible customers and a 30-day return option. Apple later posted video of that presentation, but left out the Q&A, which was documented at the time through written reports and photographs.

John Gruber:

The Q&A was on the record (which is the entire point of a Q&A), and was reported widely, but I don’t think there’s ever been video of it. Here’s a report by Jeff Carlson at TidBITS, published the day the event was held, which states, “The video omits a long and interesting Q&A at the end.”

Then, yesterday, video of the Q&A hit YouTube. I don’t know what truck it fell off the back of, why it took 16 years, or how it came into the hands of “Sir Mix-A-Lot Rare Music”, but I’m sure glad it did. There are parts of this Q&A that I remembered, and parts I didn’t. Carlson was exactly right: it was long and it was interesting.

My main takeaway is still that there were two stories here, but most of the media missed one of them, and Apple was happy to focus on the other.

The first story was that holding iPhone 4 in the wrong way would reduce the signal strength. Apple pointed out that other phones had the same problem, to varying degrees, and offered cases as a solution.

The second was that, even with a case, iPhone 4 had worse reception than previous iPhones. I saw this directly myself: testing my iPhone 3GS and my father’s iPhone 4 in some areas that had poor signal, and finding that one worked reliably and the other was completely unusable. Apple examined my father’s iPhone 4 and assured us it wasn’t a lemon, so there was no choice but to return it. AnandTech did some more precise testing and published some graphs that were consistent with what we saw. I think it was the only bad iPhone Apple made.

In the Q&A, the first question was about Jobs’s health. The second was about whether Apple was going to make any changes to the antenna. Jobs responded that the iPhone 4 antenna was better in almost every way than previous designs. But Apple did end up redesigning the antenna with the iPhone 4s, and it worked just fine in my same test areas. It’s possible that the cell towers had changed in the interim, but the 4s worked well for me everywhere that it could be expected to and ended up being one of my favorites.

Nick Heer:

Sam Henri Gold decided to pick apart the changes between iOS 4.0 and iOS 4.0.1, which changed the number of bars shown in moderate-to-low reception areas[…]

Previously: