It’s a shame that Steve Jobs isn’t fit to be a role model.

Jobs is one of the most accomplished marketers, industrial designers, and corporate turnaround masters of the past quarter-century.

He’s also a jerk.

Nothing has changed on either score since Jobs cofounded Apple Inc. in 1976.

We’ve seen both sides of the Silicon Valley icon in recent weeks.

On Tuesday, Apple “blew the doors off,” as they say on Wall Street, with its latest quarterly results, surpassing analysts’ expectations with a stunning 78 per cent jump in profits and 64 per cent surge in revenues.

That was on the strength of booming sales of Apple’s latest smartphone, the iPhone 4; the iPad, Apple’s just-released tablet computer; and its venerable Macintosh computer line-up.

Most of the astonishing 8.4 million smartphones Apple sold in the last three days of its most recent quarter were iPhone 4’s, first released on June 24. Which would rank the iPhone 4 up there with fire and desalinated water among the greatest new-product launches of all time.

But we’ve also lately seen the arrogant Jobs, whose hand is guided by Divine Providence.

Jobs finally last Friday confronted “Antennagate.” The iPhone 4 suffers a design flaw that causes dropped calls in regions with low signal strength. And also when the device is held in a certain way, with one’s hand touching the phone’s lower left-hand corner.

Yet instead of a mea culpa last Friday, Jobs conducted a marketing event. He trashed-talked the competition. His most relevant assertions were based on flimsy or non-existent evidence. Jobs insisted, falsely, that Apple has been preoccupied 24/7 with addressing the iPhone 4’s lost-signal problem since the first customer complaint soon after the device’s launch.

Jobs ripped into a media that he believes has exaggerated the iPhone’s reception failures.

“I guess it’s just human nature,” Jobs said, descending to Nixon-grade bathos. “When you see someone get successful you just want to tear it down.”

All of which is Grade A poo.

Apple’s competition tends to avoid the iPhone 4’s external antenna - which wraps around the handset - in order to avoid reception problems. Jobs made a bet, wanting more room inside his newest phone to bulk up its functionality. And he lost.

Jobs’s video presentations Friday of BlackBerrys and other rival smartphones similarly dropping calls were based on testing procedures entirely of Apple’s devising. No supporting methodology was offered. Neither were data on the “minimal” number of dropped calls reported to Apple and its carriers.

Far from responding promptly to customer complaints, Apple was preoccupied with knocking down reported iPhone 4 complaints in Gizmodo and other tech blogs. Jobs confronted Antennagate 22 days after the iPhone 4 launch, only after Consumer Reports four days earlier said it could not recommend the iPhone 4, triggering a sudden drop in Apple’s share price.

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An alert mainstream media would have picked up on the risks Jobs was taking with his latest iPhone.

Jobs chose to source the iPhone 4’s radio from Infineon, whose hardware is widely used in Europe. But Infineon gear is not popular in North America. In Canada and the U.S., cell towers are placed further apart than Infineon hardware can as reliably handle.

Jobs also insisted, over the objections of exclusive distributor AT&T, on unlimited Web surfing functionality. Sure enough, AT&T couldn’t build out its network fast enough to accommodate the resulting voracious bandwidth demand, causing an unholy traffic jam.

When a reporter at Apple’s non-apology apology event last Friday said he was unable to replicate the iPhone 4’s dropped-call problem with his BlackBerry, Jobs heatedly claimed that only about one in 200 iPhone 4 buyers had contacted Apple with complaints.

Putting aside that buyers of stale Cheerios usually don’t complain to General Mills Inc. but to a supermarket manager, even Jobs’ understatement of dissatisfaction works out to 42,000 complaints – or two-thirds the population of Venice.

Jobs probably will get a pass on “Antennagate,” as he has on outsourcing to a Chinese factory, Foxconn, where stressed-out workers have been committing suicide. And on sourcing the “blood metals” tantalum, tin and tungsten essential to wired devices from places like Congo, where a civil war over ore deposits is killing about 45,000 people a month.

Consumer Reports is hardly proud about making Jobs blink. CR is mightily impressed with the iPhone 4, apart from how under ordinary conditions it often doesn’t work.

Kevin McKean, CR’s editorial director, wants to put the issue in perspective. “No one has ever died from a dropped cellphone call.”

Hmm. I vaguely recall when telephones were an essential service.

But Apple fans are indeed forgiving. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, surprisingly few enterprises have lost money insulting the intelligence of the buying public.