Talk about ironies. Today Apple CEO Steve Jobs  addressed the issue of the new iPhone 4 dropping calls due to antenna problems. But the press conference was closed to television cameras. For a company that’s dedicated to making its users happy, holding a closed press conference seems wrongheaded.

Everyone knows Steve Jobs is a control freak, but today’s news conference takes that to a whole new level of absurdity. Apple notoriously doesn’t allow their news conferences to be broadcast live, but today should have been different. After Consumer Reports earlier this week passed on giving the new iPhone their blessing, the company’s stock took a nosedive. The company with the second highest market capitalization in the world lost nearly $6 billion in shareholder value within hours of the report hitting the web. So today’s press conference should have not only reassured customers that Apple will be taking care of the technical problems, it should have reassured investors that the company was going to do the right thing.

Yet if you were watching the news today, the spectacle of Apple’s news conference offered neither assurance. Since news outlets didn’t have the option to broadcast Steve Jobs’ comments in real-time, they were left reporting bits and pieces over an hour based upon text messages and rapid-fire blog postings that were leaked from the event wirelessly. Just watching the coverage from our break room television – see the CBNC photo below – showed how Apple missed the mark with their press conference.

In a world of instant access to information – supposedly one of the key benefits of a smartphone like an iPhone – viewers were left with a screenful of talking heads guessing at what Steve Jobs was saying, and interpreting texts and tweets for investors who probably just tuned out.

“We Suck Less” Strategy

When details of the press conference did emerge, once again Jobs missed the mark for a company owning up to a problem with its product. He launched the conference by essentially saying, “We’re not perfect,” and then quickly added that neither are any of the other smartphone manufacturers out there. He noted that less than 1% of iPhone consumers called Apple to complain about the problem, of more than 3 million people who bought the new iPhone. So the magnitude of the problem is small, and it’s really no different than other phones.

In other words: our smartphones suck, just like theirs do; ours just suck less.

Alas, the “everyone’s got problems with their products” approach to handling the issue is really quite beneath Apple’s usual performance. For a company that prides itself on the intelligence of its users, this strategy really insults it. Maybe Apple isn’t addressing its loyal users, most of whom will stick with them through this technical glitch (and would buy anything they offered anyway). But Apple is competing to attract other smartphone users, and they also have to contend with investors trying to figure out if this was a one-time issue or a systemic glitch. To claim “we’re not perfect,” after claiming for decades how much “more perfect” their products were compared to others seems disingenuous.

Apple is working to solve the problem. They are offering a free case for anyone who has purchased an iPhone 4, which should mitigate the antenna short-circuit issue, entirely at Apple’s cost. That’s arguably a good start – as they work on manufacturing changes to ultimately eliminate the problem. Whether investors are convinced – the stock is up about $1 as I write this – is yet to be seen. But from a customer relations standpoint, maybe Apple should reconsider their approach to dealing with problems. This might be the first, but it won’t be the last they have to deal with. Putting control-freak Jobs on the stage, and keeping the cameras from broadcasting live, is just too old-school for a company as forward-thinking as Apple.

It seems unexplainable that – on a product capable of doing real-time video conferencing – Apple’s own press conference wasn’t available on their iPhone. Or even on television.