15 years ago 2010 passed and Apple had already begun to majorly revamp its iPhone after three generations. While it’s true that these three years don’t feel like generations because the first iPhone wasn’t available in many parts of the world, we’re in 2025 and it’s easier than ever to look back now. This year was complicated for Apple, despite the launch of a new product category like the iPad just a year after Steve Jobs’ death. iPhone 4 was called “Antennagate” because mobile signal decreased Just by turning on the mobile phone normally when receiving a call. In the midst of all these debates, a software engineer discovered what really happened and that it’s all about software.

Apple tried everything to fix the problem but ended up paying a high price

Steve Jobs stated at the time that users bought the iPhone 4 incorrectly, but it turned out that this was not true.. Apple released a new lawsuit to try and fix things, but that didn’t help at all as they were facing a lawsuit. Later They stated that they made a mistake in the sample formula for signal intensity bar graphs..

There are 2 more bars in the examples, when you see 4 there are actually 2. This shows that “high bars are never real” when mixed with a location where the signal strength is not good. Apple justified itself this way, but 15 years later, an engineer explains it powerfully.

In 4.0.1 they changed these values ​​to be much smoother. pic.twitter.com/CVZs1XR0uY

— sam henri gold (@samhenrigold) October 7, 2025

Everything depended on a framework using binary code called “CommCenter”.. According to research conducted directly on software, the formula that Apple advocated in the past was found. There is no problem calculating the signal intensity to the chart bars, on the contrary It has direct relevance to the lookup table. If represented by a graph as we will show later, it can be seen that Most of the time the bars were as high as 4 to 5, but then you notice a drastic drop from 4 or 5 to only 2 bars. In version 4.0.1 they changed the values ​​in such a way that decreasing them requires much more variation. Specifically, there are 20 bytes, which is the difference between showing many or few signal bars.

Apple cheated by making the bars bigger

In one of the proofs shown, It can also be noted that Apple took advantage of the design of the sticks and made them longer.. This means that the initial signal bars don’t look that small. Psychologically speaking, the iPhone’s signal was never low because the first few bars were high. Having the last bars was a matter of being in a better signal location, or in this case a bug fixed by Apple but this brought him a lot of criticism, controversy and demands.

also in 4.0.1 they changed the height of the bottom bars to be taller lmao pic.twitter.com/sxzF4YJ1Bc

— sam henri gold (@samhenrigold) October 7, 2025

Have you suffered from this “Antennagate”? Have you ever really noticed whether you’re getting a lot or little signal at certain times of the day? In my personal experience, I had an iPhone 4, albeit from generations ago, and I never noticed this lack of signal when holding the iPhone a certain way. It’s possible that the firmware is already stable enough to fail years later.

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