Apple is a company of amazing design and engineering. They've made numerous videos of Jonathan Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc., and other top players showing off their ability to revolutionize the tech industry. We've been shown today that Apple really does take it seriously. Just the testing facility for iPhones is worth multi-millions with more than a dozen-and-a-half testing chambers.
Apple's design and test lab has over $100 million invested, with 17 anechoic testing chambers, and Apple employs 18 PhD scientists and engineers. An anechoic chamber is a room designed to stop reflections of either sound or electromagnetic waves. These different chambers test all kinds of wireless variables. The chambers are connected to very sophisticated equipment designed to simulate realistic performance variables for cellular base stations, Wi-Fi devices, Bluetooth devices, and even GPS satellites.
The iPhone is tested in free space, with materials simulating human tissue, and even with humans handling the device. While experts log thousands of hours of lab test time, the iPhone is also put through thousands of hours of testing in numerous U.S. and worldwide cities. Conditions include urban and rural areas, highway use, low and good coverage locations, in fast and slow paced moving situations, indoor and outdoor, and all during peak and off-peak usage times. Apple also makes sure to test in numerous markets with any combination of wireless and cellular transceiver equipment.
You have to build these rooms or you don't get accurate results. This is a state of the art facility. We've invested over $100 million on this. We have 17 anechoic chambers.
Now we do a lot of testing, this is an actual device we test in. And here's our biggest room right here.
The iPhone 4 went through all of these tests. We knew that if you held it in a certain way, the bars would go down.
Apple posted a page with a quick video tour of what the facility and chambers look like.
Is this enough to satisfy you that Apple did all they could?
[via Engadget, images also via Apple]
