Whenever Apple publishes an iPhone update that purports to fix something, one of the first things that appears is a story that says nothing’s changed. That’s because in a complex technology, variable factors are never the same for everyone, as Apple Insider pointed out on Thursday.

Mobile phones are small, but they’re complicated. Worse, journalists who’ve been working with PCs and Macs for many years are new to mobile phone technology in an Apple context. Worst of all, Apple plays it very close to the vest when it comes to explaining the fixes it makes to the iPhone OS. As a result, there’s been a lot of confusion about the recent performance issues of the iPhone 3G.

For that reason, I really liked the Apple Insider story on Thursday about what really’s going on inside the OS X iPhone 2.0.2 software. While we’ll never know for sure if this is the true story because AT&T and Apple don’t like to spill the beans to their competitors, the article had good credibility because the author, writing under a pseudonym, has a lot of technical experience.

It just goes to show that whenever there’s a hot technical issue with Macs or iPhones, it’s a good idea to look around for articles that dig into the deeper facts and stay away from those stories, written by authors on a deadline, that claim Apple’s fix has changed nothing for them. And so, Apple, by implication, must have screwed up.

Modern technology is too complex for that kind of thinking.