Photos From Inside Apple's Super Secret iPhone Testing Facility

TechPhotos iPhone by Joey Paur

Here's a very interesting and cool inside look at Apple's $100 million dollar iPhone testing facility. They're not really super secret though because Apple actually released these images today along with some information about these facilities and how they conduct their testing.

Apple never releases a product without thoroughly testing it first. To do this, we built our multimillion-dollar antenna design and test labs. These labs feature 17 different antenna characterization chambers (or anechoic chambers) designed to accurately measure antenna and wireless performance.

Our anechoic chambers are connected to sophisticated equipment that simulates cellular base stations, Wi-Fi networks, Bluetooth devices — even GPS satellites. These chambers measure performance in free space, in the presence of materials simulating human tissue (“phantom” heads and hands, for example), and in use by human subjects. Over a one- to two-year development cycle, Apple engineers spend thousands of hours performing antenna and wireless testing in the lab.

Apple engineers tested iPhone 4 in a variety of scenarios, environments, and conditions in order to gauge performance. They spent thousands of hours in cities in the U.S. and throughout the world testing iPhone 4 call quality, dropped-call performance, call origination and termination, and in-service time. They tested iPhone 4 while stationary, at high and low speeds, and in urban, dense urban, and highway environments. In low-coverage areas and good-coverage areas, during peak and off-peak hours — iPhone 4 was field-tested in nearly every possible coverage scenario across different vendor and carrier equipment all over the world.

You would think with all of this testing Apple conducted on the iPhone 4 they would have discovered the current problem that they are trying to fix. This testing lab looks like it comes right out of a sci-fi movie! Check out the images and tell us what ya think!

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