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Iphone Apple

A Design Defect Is Plaguing Many iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Units (iphonehacks.com) 222

Posted by msmash from the defected-design dept.
Evan Selleck, writing for iPhoneHacks (edited and condensed): For many iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners out there in the wild, a design defect is apparently causing some huge issues. Gadget repair firm iFixit has reported about a flaw dubbed "Touch Disease", which it claims is cropping up. With it, owners of the phones are experiencing, to start, a gray bar that appears at the very top of their display. And, for many others, the display itself becomes unresponsive to touch, or less responsive overall. In the blog post, iFixit says the problem stems from issues with the touchscreen controller chip, which is soldered onto the logic board. Interestingly enough, iFixit posits that the same internal design decisions that led to "Endgate" might be causing the issue leading to Touch Disease, too: "In both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the Touch IC chips connect to the logic board via an array of itty-bitty solder balls -- "like a plate resting on marbles," Jessa explains. Over time, as the phone flexes or twists slightly during normal use, those solder balls crack and start to lose contact with the board. "At first, there may be no defect at all. Later you might notice that the screen is sometimes unresponsive, but it is quick to come back with a hard reset," Jessa explains. "As the crack deepens into a full separation of the chip-board bond, the periods of no touch function become more frequent."
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A Design Defect Is Plaguing Many iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Units More

A Design Defect Is Plaguing Many iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Units

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  • You're (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @10:42AM (#52762063)

    bending it wrong.

  • Defective by Design (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So that you buy the iPhone 7.

    • Glad that I skipped the iPhone 6 altogether. Actually, I had bought the 5s before the 6 was released 2 years ago, and my contract expires next month. I'll just upgrade it to the 7. Only reason - Apple Pay, and also, I want a storage upgrade to 64GB. I do have a Moto-X and a Lumia 550 as well, so I know what the competition is. FaceTime is the only reason I use an iPhone

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 )

        Only reason - Apple Pay, and also, I want a storage upgrade to 64GB. ... FaceTime is the only reason I use an iPhone

        I'm not sure you understand what "only" means.

        • FaceTime is the only reason I use an iPhone. The Apple Pay and 64GB is the reason I'm planning to go from 5s to 7, although from what's been described above, SE might be a good deal as well. The latter 2 are not reasons I picked iPhone over either Android or Lumia.

  • Not a design flaw (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @10:45AM (#52762087)

    The owners are holding it wrong

  • Sounds like apple could use some mechanical engineers to stiffen up the case by design.

    • Or just make the phone thicker so it has more rigidity... the HORROR.

      • There are multiple ways to solve the problem. Making the phone thicker also results in more material use. Additionally depending on the materials you're still might not get the bending moment of inertia you need.

        Plus you miss the marketing opportunity of "Now with a titanium backbone" marketing.

        • Making the phone thicker also results in more material use.

          Which I'm sure is a great concern to a company which used to mill a laptop case out of a solid aluminium block.

        • Re:I-Beams (Score:4, Interesting)

          by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @12:55PM (#52762921) Journal

          Making a phone thicker adds minimal structural material. Only around the edges. More volume internally, but actual structural material increase is negligible. Stiffness of the phone increases with the cube of thickness, so a small increase in thickness = more volume = infinitesimal increase in structural material = massive increase in stiffness. And you can put more battery in that extra volume, too...

          Going from an 8mm thick phone to a 10mm thick phone may increase structural materials by 5%, but you gain 73% more stiffness and 25% more internal volume.

      • The board flexes because it warms and cools during operation. The Apple 3 had the same problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        But how will I chop onions?

  • YouTube video showing BGA damage under microscope (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @10:46AM (#52762103)
    Skip to 13:00:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      The price of these phones is 550 to 650 US. I love the video and this kind of work, but how economically feasible is it for an owner? A shop equipped like that probably charges 75 to 150 per hour. Full disassembly, reassembly and microsoldering I would assume is at least 3 hours. That is 1/4 to 1/2 the device price for a repair that may not last.

      I love performing electronic repairs, although I do not have practice (and wonder how good I would be) on devices this small. However I do not see the economi

      • I agree, on a direct replacement vs labor cost comp these types of repairs are uneconomical. However when one considers the total systemic cost including dispoal/landfill/recycling/PCB pollution I think repair becomes a more feasible solution. Unfortunately manufacturers are mostly not required to incur/consider these tangential costs and so replacement is the most economically expedient solution.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by plover ( 150551 )

          The average iPhone user is not going to evaluate the repair on anything but the replacement cost. Disposal of the old phone is a negative cost - after all, there is a large market for broken iPhones. So sell the year-old broken phone for $100, get the "newest" phone with all the new features for $100 down payment, and the cell company just charges an extra $50 a month for a few more years.

          To people who don't understand the costs of buying on credit (which are most of them) it's a new phone for free.

          To the

    • Re:YouTube video showing BGA damage under microsco (Score:5, Informative)

      by Wargames ( 91725 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @12:08PM (#52762561) Journal

      FYI: BGA = Ball Grid Array,
      "Ball Grid Array rework is one of the most challenging procedures performed at assembly facilities and repair depots around the world. " ---
      http://www.circuitrework.com/f... [circuitrework.com]

      • Lead free solder to blame??? (Score:4, Informative)

        by labnet ( 457441 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @04:21PM (#52764293)

        Yep. BGAs are difficult to rework, but perhaps the real blame for this can be aimed at the EU when they forced the electronics industry to transition to lead free solder 15 years ago, while not touching other industries, like car batteries.
        Solder used to be 60%tin 40% lead. Lead was a great modifier to give ductility to solder joints. By going to almost 100% tin, solder joints are now more brittle, thus micro BGAs suffer more from thermal expansion fractures and shear fractures from physical drops.
        The crazy thing, is the transition, which cost the industry Billions, was based on unproven science that tin/lead solder leached in ground fill rubbish dumps. It doesn't unless you have acid. But here we are today, stuck with a EU mandated change that increases energy to manufacturer and decreases reliability (see tin asker problem as well).

        • FYI 60/40 solder was not immune to stress cracking, just less prone to it than lead-free solder. I used to help my dad out in his electronics repair business by performing the menial task of wearing a monicle to identify, desolder and resolder cracked joints. This was usually a first step done on inbound equipment before even breaking out diagnostics and things would often be fully functional before without going any further. Most problems occured around heat-generating components in power supplies and flyb

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Kneo24 ( 688412 )

          Some of the motor controllers I have to repair at work are made in the EU and cold solder is a huge issue with those due to the lead free solder. I do sometimes see cracked solder joints too. A lot of these controllers are 10+ years old. The whole process to get a board ready for testing takes about 40 minutes. Disassembly, rework, and reassembly for testing. The design is kind of shit, but they're otherwise a solid product functionally if it wasn't for the lead free solder.

          As far as BGA's go, fuck that. Th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plover ( 150551 )

      Thanks for that video, it's completely amazing to watch!

  • Considering the huge price of these things (love my iPhone 6+ anyway) let's hope Apple will offer some solution. Depends upon the number of affected devices I guess. Mine has been slightly bent regularly in my jeans pocket and is still working fine (no "touch disease yet"). Too old for a fix?

    • Re:Apple to fix it? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @11:01AM (#52762193)

      Considering the huge price of these things (love my iPhone 6+ anyway) let's hope Apple will offer some solution.

      Presumably they will offer a solution, along the lines of "bend over and buy an iPhone 7, peasant!"

      • Re:Apple to fix it? (Score:5, Informative)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @11:27AM (#52762321) Homepage Journal

        Reminder to EU residents, all electronics must come with a minimum 2 year guarantee under EU rules. Each country implements it a little differently, but you have at least a 2 year warranty.

        Reminder to UK residents, in the UK the Sale of Goods Act applies. An expensive, high end phone should last 6 years. If it dies after 3 years then Apple can either repair it or offer you a 50% refund, excluding any damage you did and fair wear and tear.

        If they argue, mention the Sale of Goods Act (loudly, in their store) and if that fails Small Claims Court.

        • Where do you get the "50% refund..." figure from? Could you cite a source?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            The Sale of Goods Act. Goods must last a reasonable length of time, typically 6 years for electronics. If it doesn't, you get a refund. The retailer can argue that you had 50% life's use out of it, and courts generally use that to calculate the refund.

            • "typically 6 years for electronics"

              I suspect that time range was for a toaster or a TV. Items that are not portable, subject to weather, extreme heat/cold conditions, dropped regularly, and on 24/7.

              6 years ago, you could have gotten a brand new iPhone 4 or a discounted 3GS. How many of those are still operational?

        • Reminder to AU residents you also have a Sales of Goods Act that applies and puts in previsions for expected performance including longevity.

          That's why Microsoft had to replace Xbox360s out of warranty.

    • Don't count on it... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @11:12AM (#52762241) Homepage

      I've personally had 3 iPhone 4 & 4S's get the dreaded "wifi grayed out" issue where your wifi, bluetooth and gps stop working. It was so common that dozens of forum threads involved long discussions about it (you can still find them easily - and also on ebay devices with the problem) and even Apple had a page about it where they offered as a solution to "reset your network settings". Obviously this did nothing, as it was discovered the problem was the temperature sensor was malfunctioning and disabling the wireless module (which took down BT, GPS as well) and once your one year warranty was over you were out of luck with Apple. What's crazy is that the temperature sensor was not enabled with the shipping iOS of the iPhone 4 (possibly the iPhone 4S as well), but Apple enabled it from either iOS 5 or iOS 6 (I forget - but people not upgrading never had the problem), so they could disable it again if they wanted to. But they did not want to, my company purchased 3 iPhones for me because they were all failing the same way (after being used only in the office, sitting on a desk, occasionally debugging iOS apps), so it was good money for Apple.
      Apple won't fix a widespread problem even if it is just a firmware update for them, so don't count on a solution (other than offering you the newest iPhone perhaps with a "generous 10% discount" if you are "lucky").

  • I would like to hear what Apple fan boys especially in the media have to say about this. There's one particular Apple zealot who wrote this [businessinsider.com], praising Apple's design as still the best. I will wait for his take.

    • Re:So much for Apple's "better design" (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @10:55AM (#52762159)

      "you're soldering it wrong"

      isn't that what nvidia said?

      these bga's really scare me. so fragile and so unworkable from a tech POV. I can rework square flat packs but I can't do bga's. I hate them since they are just not really repair-friendly, not to mention its not inspection-friendly.

      flat packs with leads flex and bend. bga's are a fucking abortion, especially if they are at all big, in chip size.

      • > its not inspection-friendly.

        That what JTAG boundary scan is for.

        • That what JTAG boundary scan is for.

          Seldom used, I have no idea what Apple does, but most places I work with do not use JTAG for factory test of consumer devices. The other issue is that if this was an issue that came from board flex or a bad solder joint, JTAG would not have caught it...at the time of manufacture the part was still making contact!

          The only things I know of that can reliably catch weak joints are "bed of nails" probes, which are not frequently done on devices like cell phones where every p

          • I didn't say whether JTAG BS was good or bad. I said that's what it's for. It can perform continuity checks on otherwise inaccessible pins. Done right boundary scan can and is used for periodic self test, but no so much in consumer gear. It's widely supported in silicon.

            BGAs can be fine if done properly, but 'done properly' can be hard to achieve when they keep shrinking the grid and ball sizes so no one knows what 'done properly' entails.

            I agree, the flex cause seems unfounded. Poor solder joint integrity

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The Nvidia issue was a bit different. Due to repeated heating/cooling cycles eventually the solder joints would fail as the PCB and chip expanded and contracted. In the iPhone's case the movement is not due to heat but rather flexing of the entire phone (TFA typos "bendgate" as "endgate", repeated in the summary).

        The iPhone 6/6+ are kinda bendy phones. Tests showed that they were significantly weaker than other phones in the market, requiring much less force to deform. Repeated flexing and poor mechanical d

        • Planned obsolescence is good for business if done right. It's like the recall formula from Fight Club.

          If X phones need replacing before Y years have passed, and most users can be easily convinced to buy a new phone after Y years (Y is probably about 2), and the cost of replacing X phones is less than waiting Z years for people to buy a new phone, (Z = number of years it take people to replace a phone that has no real issues, so Z probably close to 4 or 5), then the "broken" phones are profitable to the com

        • Firstly, you're correct. Nvidia was thermal expansion/contraction, while this is due to physical bending.

          However, if you look at Louis Rossman's videos, the Nvidia issue was due to internal points WITHIN the chip, not due to the BGA points themselves. This means that simply reflowing the chip (or even resurfacing and resoldering the BGA) won't solve the issue. You NEED a new chip.

          Heating the chip might slightly reflow the internal connections which may make the device work for a few days or even we

      • Inspection friendly is a matter of opinion.

        Inspection for who? For you and me, they are not inspection friendly. For the QA parts of production they are just as inspection friendly as every other system. A bit of x-ray and some electrical tests are similar for all packages.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sshir ( 623215 )
        Yes, the common root of these failures is the same - it is mechanical stress.

        Although Nvidia's (customers) problem was somewhat different - NV decided to save few pennies on BGAs by telling their foundry not to bother putting stress relieving layers on their wafers. Great writeup is here [theinquirer.net]

        BGAs in general are fine. Overtime, mechanical stress will kill anything not properly designed for it.

      • We, the hardware design community, have been working with BGAs now for well over a decade. A lot of time and energy has gone in to investigating how to design them in and get good results on a reasonably consistent basis. Still shit happens both in manufacturing and product integration.

        The absolute worst description for BGAs I have ever read is this:
        the Touch IC chips connect to the logic board via an array of itty-bitty solder balls -- "like a plate resting on marbles,"

        I understand that hobbyists do not

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jeremyp ( 130771 )

      This is the first time I've heard of this problem.

      I have an iPhone 6 and many people I know have the 6 or 6s and nobody has reported it that I am aware of. This, to me, suggests that the "many" spoken of in TFS is actually quite a small percentage of iPhone 6/6s owners.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Space cowboy ( 13680 )

        Yep, in an nutshell.

        You sell 215 million (how many phones Apple sold in the last 12 months) of *anything*, and there's going to be a tiny percentage of them that go wrong in some pattern-like way. Even 0.001% of 215 million is 2150 people with a problem, and although a failure rate of 0.001% is pretty damn good with such a complex device, that's still enough for "many" people to come up with a common problem and someone to get some ad-revenue from the click-bait headline.

        (Also own an iPhone, a 6+, and haven

      • I have a 6 Plus and have not had this problem nor heard about it until yesterday, when I saw the story elsewhere. However anecdotal evidence does not necessarily invalidate the claims being made.

        What I'd be curious about, though, is the results of a survey attempting to correlate the various problems people have reported with the 6 or 6 Plus (or any large phone, for that matter) with how those same people carry their phones. I see a fair number of people keeping their cell phones in their pant's back pocket

      • The plural of 'small sample size anecdote' is not 'data'.

      • Ah yes the anecdote of one person...modded up. The "hasn't happened to me" approach is like a reverse ad hominem -- "You can't attack Apple, because I say there is no problem."

        This page [mendonipadrehab.com], that Google returned as the first link [google.com], is rather extensive.

        Clearly this is a massive problem, both in how many are affected, and the cost to rectify things.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 )

        Well, I'll be the counter-anecdote, then. When I bought my iPhone6+, after about two weeks it started to compulsively touch itself. For example, I could be looking at a Google Map (not doing anything, just looking at the phone while it sat on the table), and suddenly the map would spontaneously scroll from my location in LA to somewhere in Utah, all on its own; as if it had received a touch event somewhere way off the edge of the screen. Similar strange spontaneous behaviors would occur in all other apps

  • Something like this poses an interesting challenge. When you have to build a product that is not quite cheap enough to easily replace, but expensive enough to make it painful to do so, and has a shelf life of about 3 years, what design corners do you cut?

    Back when computers of any kind were thousands of dollars, the answer was easy - engineer them to the max since people were paying good money for them and wanted them to last. This is how we get things like the IBM PC case made out of solid steel. Now the e

    • My friend just gave up on his iPhone -- and Apple's BS -- in favor of a cheap but totally adequate prepaid Android phone. The phone cost less than $20 on sale (normally $30). $20 vs. $500+. He did the math.

  • When they made the 6 and 6+, Apple broke one of the most critical tenets of engineering: Form Follows Function, not the other way 'round. Thinner isn't always better. They made the 6 and 6+ trendy, hip and skinny -- and that broke the Function part of engineering.

    I'm glad I still have my 5S, and when the time comes that it goes to cellphone heaven, I'll replace it with a new small phone. I'm so glad Apple is making one again. Fatter, shorter phones don't bend as much as a thin huge phone.

    • In this case, form is function--part of the function of a mobile phone is to be portable. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have been more careful with it--supposedly the 6s is less bendable, which means they could design it to be strong AND skinny, if they want--but part of what I want in my phone is for it to be as invisible to me as possible when I'm not actually carrying it.

      Whether or not that meets your goal for 'function' is another question. I can easily see other people wanting a phone that's consi

  • I had a dead 12" white g4 powerbook. This happened to the cpu. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I took out the mother board, wrapped all of it bu the cpu with aluminum foil. I put a tea light on the chip (it was about the same size) I fired it up figuring it would be a prayer to the computer gods, or part of a wake ceremony. Once everything cooled off the laptop worked, still does. I wonder if a little heated press could be made to heat up and re-seat the chip without letting it slide at all. Sounds

  • Maybe I'm doing it wrong? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ausekilis ( 1513635 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @11:51AM (#52762465)
    When I try a hard reset [imgur.com] the screen only gets worse.

  • Ugh (Score:3)

    by whipslash ( 4433507 ) Works for Slashdot on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @12:40PM (#52762809) Journal
    This happened to my iPhone 6 Plus

  • I'm pretty sure (Score:3)

    by Cute Fuzzy Bunny ( 2234232 ) on Wednesday August 24, 2016 @01:23PM (#52763079)

    Tom Brady was responsible. He breaks every cell phone he can find.

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