Steve Jobs is slowly losing his mind

That’s the only explanation for his increasingly poor decision making at Apple. The iPhone 4 has a very serious — almost to the point of crippling — design flaw in the phone’s antenna that Apple engineers knew about long before the release of the product. Jobs liked the design too much to make any alterations that would address the design flaw. His decision put a sub-par high-end product on the market where it will face increasing criticism. And now he’s doubling down by possibly not issuing a recall for the faulty device. This move should cost Apple customers and a serious hit on the stock value.

From the link:

Apple engineers were aware of the risks associated with the new antenna design as early as a year ago, but Chief Executive Steve Jobs liked the design so much that Apple went ahead with its development, said another person familiar with the matter.

The electronics giant kept such a shroud of secrecy over the iPhone 4’s development that the device didn’t get the kind of real-world testing that would have exposed such problems in phones by other manufacturers, said people familiar with the matter.

And:

Apple first suggested people buy a case or hold the phone differently. A week later, it said that the problem lay in a software glitch that has been making signal reception look stronger than it is in all of its phones since the original iPhone three years ago.

The explanations, however, have only fueled the discontent, particularly after product-quality watchdog Consumer Reports challenged those assertions, saying there was a hardware problem. Since the iPhone 4 launched, Apple’s stock price has fallen more than 7%.