Buyer’s regret? Owners of iPhones XS and XS Max report signal glitches

Bad news for the latest iPhones’ early adopters: WiFi connectivity and cell signal glitches are being reported by some consumers who purchased the iPhone XS and XS Max models, which were released last month.

Many of these customers owned earlier models of the iPhone, and are saying that they experienced better signal strength with the iPhone 7 and X. Others reported that they are unimpressed with the WiFi speed of the new models.

iPhone XS owners: Have you experienced any of the reported problems (beautygate, not charging, bad wireless) with your phone? Let us know in our poll & leave a comment. We’ll discuss the results during the Macworld Podcast on Wed Oct 3 at 10am Pacific, live on Twitter.

— Macworld (@macworld) October 2, 2018

Users report on threads on aggregate site Reddit that it’s not telcos or carriers who have the problem. And new owners have even taken to the support forums of Apple and on MacRumors concerning this problem.

WiWavelength, a wireless technology blog, published a report that attested to these findings, showing that the new phones’ signal strength is measurably weaker than the iPhone 8 and iPhone X models that were released in 2017.

Since the new iPhones have an additional antenna band on the bottom edge of the phone, news that the phone has a weaker signal and WiFi connectivity is surprising indeed.

A similar problem was reported two years ago with the iPhone 7, which Apple was able to address with a software update. New users are hoping that this glitch is relatively minor, and just as easy to fix when enough user data about the issue is gathered.

Apple announced on October 3 that it would be investigating LTE connectivity issues, and have reached out to affected customers.

@reneritchie Apple just reached out to me to see if I could answer some questions about my Xs Max reception issues they’re doing an outreach to some affected users and are asking to install a baseband logger to track my connection to the tower

— Devin Meredith (@Devmer11) October 3, 2018