Until a day or so ago, I can truthfully say I had never heard of Mark Papermaster.

You too ?  I thought so.

The Papermaster had been an employee of IBM for over 26 years.  He was first a circuit designer then a chip designer with parentage of the PowerPC chip.  It is said that it took two years of negotiations and a lot of anti-competitive legal agreement wrangling for Steve Jobs to wrest him from the bosom of Big Blue to take charge of the division building the new Apple iPhone.

If you read the technology section of the press or the web – or heaven forbid, if you have purchased a new iPhone version 4, you will know that this latest incarnation of a piece of previously legendary technology is a bit of a lemon.  Well, a really big bit.  The whole citrus shebang, really.

The problem is apparently that the aerial design is crook and that when you hold the thing it loses between a half and a third of its ability to engage with the signal.  Not good for a hand held device that chews data transmission capacity at a prodigious rate.  This was well known and Twitted incessantly well before the beast hit the streets in Australia.

Yet …. And this I find truly bizarre, people actually queued overnight outside Apple stores the night before its release to part with hundreds of dollars of their hard-earned – to be the first to buy a defective product with less utility to that of the model it was slated to replace.  Truly amazing.  Baa, Baa, Baa.

But we DO that sort of thing really a lot of the time, don’t we ?  Of course we do !  Sucked in by nice external appearance, I decided to try before buying the cheapest version of the “Ultimate Driving Machine” – a BMW 318i.  I had owned two of the bikes when I was younger and appreciated beautiful and excellent German engineering.  But (forgive me here 318i owners), I made the mistake of taking a rented one across the Blue Mountains – that pathetic excuse for a chain of hills running down the East Coast.  I had to wring its neck to keep up with ordinary cars costing a third as much as the cheapest Beemer.  Gutless.  Marketing hype with maintenance and service costs greater than the Tasmanian GDP.

Apple products look beautifully designed too and like Volvo’s legendary safety credentials, Apple’s boxes are the gold standard for ease of use.

When they work.

They may be so often gutless like the little Beemer, but they ARE easy to use in a modest kind of self-conscious way. However this little Apple’s modesty extended right into being too shy to connect well to to the G3 network.

But true to its marketing hype, Apple stepped up to their responsibility to do the right thing, not by redesigning the crook bit and undertaking a product recall, but by handing out free bandaids – rubber cases to reduce, but not fix the defect.

And they acted decisively by scapegoating and sacking Mark Papermaster – disproving the old aphorism that the papermate was mightier than the sword.

Well done, Steve Jobs.  Sweet as.  I’m off to check out the HTC and Samsung competitor products (whom I gather Apple is suing for alleged product patent infringements….). or I’ll wait until iPhone 4.5 or so comes out and a bunch of tech heads tell me that this one works.