“Apple’s condescending iPhone 4 press conference”

"The iPhone 4 drops less than one additional call per 100 than the 3GS," he said. As Jobs sees it, that’s not a big rise in dropped calls. Yet that’s not an obvious conclusion. Last year, an AT&T spokesman told me that AT&T’s average iPhone dropped-call rate is 1 percent—in other words, the old iPhone dropped one call out of 100. If the iPhone 4 drops nearly one additional call out of 100, that could be close to a 2 percent dropped-call rate—or double the dropped-call rate of the old iPhone. That sounds a lot more serious, doesn’t it?

That’s probably true. When I read about that awfully convoluted statistic in the transcript, I figured they must have been avoiding percentages at all costs because those would look bad. And a 100% increase in dropped calls would indeed look bad.

(When you stop to think about it, I feel that 1% of dropped calls, in and of itself, also looks bad, but for all I know those are normal numbers.)