Last week, Apple outed itself as a bunch of liars when they released an open letter to iPhone 4 owners stating, in effect, that holding the phone wrong wasn’t causing the signal to go down, but that the signal was always reported incorrectly. Oops.

The open letter was, in my opinion, a MASSIVE blunder by Apple. Here’s why…

Apple has basically admitted to two huge lies with their open letter. First is the lie about the “holding the phone wrong” thing. Apple has simply screwed up. I don’t know if nobody there ever tried to hold the phone “wrong” or if they simply wrote it off as more bad reception issues, but let’s face it, they screwed up.

Worse, though, is that Apple’s explanation that by “holding the phone wrong”, you’re actually getting the correct signal strength reading as opposed to the b.s. one they’ve been giving us all along is, in itself, yet another lie.

For that to be true, there would need to be a sensor in the phone to determine how you’re holding the phone AND something in the software that would basically say “If the user is holding the phone this way, display the correct signal strength instead of the fake +2 strength we usually report”.

Do you really think that both of those elements are in the iPhone 4 and that, somehow, Apple “missed” the fact that somebody had written in a routine to check how the phone was being held and change how the signal strength was displayed? Of course not.

This is just one more example of Apple feeding lie after lie to its customers in order to attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility for bad decision-making at the highest level. And in this case, poor quality control and testing, too.