When he and design director Jony Ive became creative coconspirators back in 1997, they tended to view the qualms expressed by  as evidence of a can’t-do attitude that needed to be overcome. Their faith that awesome design could force superhuman feats of engineering was reinforced by the success of the iMac and iPod. When engineers said something couldn’t be done, Ive and Jobs pushed them to try, and usually they succeeded. There were occasional small problems. The iPod Nano, for example, was prone to getting scratched because Ive believed that a clear coating would lessen the purity of his design. But that was not a crisis.

When it came to designing the iPhone, Ive’s design desires bumped into a fundamental law of physics that could not be changed even by a reality distortion field. Metal is not a great material to put near an antenna. As Michael Faraday showed, electromagnetic waves flow around the surface of metal, not through it. So a metal enclosure around a phone can create what is known as a Faraday cage, diminishing the signals that get in or out. The original iPhone started with a plastic band at the bottom, but Ive thought that would wreck the design integrity and asked that there be an aluminum rim all around. After that ended up working out, Ive designed the iPhone 4 with a steel rim. The steel would be the structural support, look really sleek, and serve as part of the phone’s antenna.

In order to serve as an antenna, the steel rim had to have a tiny gap. But if a person covered that gap with a finger or sweaty palm, there could be some signal loss. The engineers suggested a clear coating over the metal to help prevent this, but again Ive felt that this would detract from the brushed-metal look. The issue was presented to Jobs at various meetings, but he thought the engineers were crying wolf. You can make this work, he said. And so they did.

And it worked, almost perfectly. But not totally perfectly. When the iPhone 4 was released in June 2010, it looked , but a problem soon became evident: If you held the phone a certain way, especially using your left hand so your palm covered the tiny gap, you could lose your connection. It occurred with perhaps one in a hundred calls. Because Jobs insisted on keeping his unreleased products secret (even the phone that Gizmodo scored in a bar had a fake case around it), the iPhone 4 did not go through the live testing that most electronic devices get. So the flaw was not caught before the massive rush to buy it began. “The question is whether the twin policies of putting design in front of engineering and having a policy of supersecrecy surrounding unreleased products helped Apple,” Tony Fadell said later. “On the whole, yes, but unchecked power is a bad thing, and that’s what happened.”

Had it not been the Apple iPhone 4, a product that had everyone transfixed, the issue of a few extra  calls not have made news. But it became known as “Antennagate,” and it boiled to a head in early July, when Consumer Reports did some rigorous tests and said that it could not recommend the iPhone 4 because of the antenna problem.