Some phrases and memes stick with the iPhone. Fourteen years ago, Steve Jobs handed us one for the ages: “You’re holding it wrong.”

This is Day 9 of 30 Days of iPhone, a look at the moments that shaped the smartphone era .

Why The iPhone 4 Would Drop Calls

After the iPhone 4’s retail release, users reported that holding the phone in their left hand caused signal dropouts and dropped calls. The iPhone 4’s new antenna design - which used stainless steel wrapped around the outside of the smartphone - would lose its efficiency when the antenna band gap was bridged by a user’s hand, with the left hand causing the most issues.

Jobs’ brusque public dismissal did little to calm consumers. Neither did Apple’s release of data showing that competing smartphones suffered from similar issues.

“They had to do something,” Van Baker, research vice president at Gartner, told BBC News at the time . “The buzz kept getting louder and louder and louder and the evidence kept mounting more and more and more. They just couldn’t ignore it.”

Apple Humbled Into Expensive iPhone 4 Apology

A hastily arranged press conference saw Jobs lay out his explanation before making an offer to resolve the issue: “We’re not perfect, phones aren’t perfect. But we want to make all our users happy,”

He then offered every iPhone 4 buyer a free silicone Bumper Case that would wrap around the frame and insulate the steel band. Apple also tweaked how iOS reported signal strength in the signal bar and offered refunds to customers still dissatisfied. The cost to Apple? $175 million dollars was deferred to cover the Bumpers given away,

“Anntengate” was an expensive lesson in how the faster reactions of social media could pounce and create a long-lasting meme out of a single offhand sentence. The controversy’s real-time nature showed that Apple’s aura didn’t make the company bulletproof.

This is Day 10 of 30 Days of iPhone. Yesterday we looked at the introduction of the Retina Display on the iPhone 4 .