Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend (vice.com) 130
In 2014, multiple users reported that their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets were bending under pressure, such as when they were kept in a pocket. As a byproduct of this issue, the touchscreen's internal hardware was also susceptible to losing its connection to the phone's logic board. It turns out, Apple was aware that this could happen. Motherboard: Apple's internal tests found that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are significantly more likely to bend than the iPhone 5S, according to information made public in a recent court filing obtained by Motherboard. Publicly, Apple has never said that the phones have a bending problem, and maintains that position, despite these models commonly being plagued with "touch disease," a flaw that causes the touchscreen to work intermittently that the repair community say is a result of bending associated with normal use. The information is contained in internal Apple documents filed under seal in a class-action lawsuit that alleges Apple misled customers about touch disease. The documents remain under seal, but US District Court judge Lucy Koh made some of the information from them public in a recent opinion in the case. The company found that the iPhone 6 is 3.3 times more likely to bend than the iPhone 5s, and the iPhone 6 Plus is 7.2 times more likely to bend than the iPhone 5s, according to the documents. Koh wrote that "one of the major concerns Apple identified prior to launching the iPhones was that they were 'likely to bend more easily when compared to previous generations.'"
I had a bent iPhone 6 (Score:1)
The weird thing was Apple replaced the whole screen and it was still bent. It went haywire after that and hit a full refurb phone. Great phone the iPhone 6.
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So no need to replace the phone. Just repair it by installing a new, working, pre-bent screen into your bent phone.
Apple innovative thinking at work. And it's by design. The new design is in fashion. Soon all new phones will be bent. Don't believe me? Just look at how many Android phones are copying that horrible abomination called "the notch", now that Apple is getting rid of it.
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From guys wearing nut hugger jeans and women putting the phone in their back pocket
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People that fat can just store their phones in a fold. Sucks when they forget which fold and lose it though.
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Some of us wear a belt.
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Are you retarded?
Wear pants.
Sit down.
Look at there the opening to the pocket is.
Imagine a large phone in that pocket.
How high does the phone sit? Does it even fit all the way in the pocket? (If you wear women's clothing, such as women's clothing or skinny jeans, it will not.)
How much tension is the phone placed under when sitting or leaning forward? (If you wear regular men's jeans, it's still quite a bit.)
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Or not wearing cargo pants with knee-length pockets.
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Ummm ... because that's where your fucking hip joint is located?
You must have some seriously defective pants or your body does not conform to normal human standards. I've never had a pair of pants where anything sitting in a front pocket is located over my hips and not further down my leg (almost halfway to my knee).
The waist of your jeans aren't supposed to be hanging midway down your thighs.
The pockets aren't on the waistline though are they?
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It's a non-issue [consumerreports.org].
That Consumer Reports test was flawed, because they tested pressure in the middle when the phones were clearly being bent at a particular point higher up.
It was a design flaw [imgur.com]: "under a particular type of flexing, the phone is prone to bend mainly because a metal insert meant to reinforce instead spins in an axis too close to the critical point"
But that must be Fake News, since Snopes still cites the Consumer Reports test, right? https://www.snopes.com/news/20... [snopes.com]
Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Informative)
Overall, what Consumer Reports found was that while all of the phones they tested would eventually bend or break with the application of enough force, âoeit took significant force to do this kind of damage to all these phonesâ and every model tested (including the iPhone 6) should hold up fine under ordinary, everyday use.
Turns out you can break any phone if you try hard enough. Who knew!
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Overall, what Consumer Reports found
The first sentence of my post: "That Consumer Reports test was flawed, because they tested pressure in the middle when the phones were clearly being bent at a particular point higher up."
Turns out you can break any phone if you try hard enough. Who knew!
Jobs is dead, but the reality distortion field lives on!
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The first sentence of my post: "That Consumer Reports test was flawed, because they tested pressure in the middle when the phones were clearly being bent at a particular point higher up."
Claim: The iPhone 6 Plus will bend easily if placed in a pocket.
MOSTLY FALSE
I really don't care about your analysis over Consumer Reports or Snopes.
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I really don't care about your analysis over Consumer Reports or Snopes.
It's not my analysis, it's the analysis of an engineer. Of course, a bit of common sense also goes a long way, as the videos demonstrating the bend and the bends found in actual usage show the same weak spot. But congratulations on your sheepish following to Apple, Consumer Reports, and Snopes. Jobs would be proud.
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7.2 times more likely is more like 1:1000 vs. 1:140. Not a minor difference.
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7.2 times more likely is more like 1:1000 vs. 1:140. Not a minor difference.
And if it was 20x more likely? My laptop is probably 20x easier to bend than a Panasonic Toughbook. Is my laptop brittle? Who determines what's adequate? Was the 5s just over-engineered? Considering that the other phones Consumer Reports tested bent as easy, or easier, than the iPhone 6 Plus, is that bad? Sounds like the 5s was just so far beyond everything else it was unnecessarily over-engineered.
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(where the front pockets are)
I know you are on /. so you probably don't hang around a lot of women, but have you seriously not noticed that nearly every woman wearing pants puts them in their BACK pocets?
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Could make the same kind of snark; front pants pockets are almost vestigial at this point. They're designed for maybe holding a tube of chap-stick, not something practical like a phone.
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I went to Wal-Mart the other day. I needed a belt in short order and it was the only place around. When I finally found the belts specifically designed for y-chromosome possessing hominids I was shocked to learn that my waist size (32 inches) was considered a child's size. It was the smallest belt they had in the building. The next closest size was 38 inches. Sizes progressed from there in 2" increments up to over 50".
It was shocking to extrapolate the algorithm used for stocking belts at Wal-Mart has
Re: Meaningless (Score:1)
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Thank you for pointing out the information I left out. I am 6 foot tall and weigh in at somewhere between 158 and 165. Broad shoulders, tapered waist, no "love handles" anymore (three years since I stopped drinking and they are completely gone!), slim build with lean muscle, and a distinctly unflabby torso.
I previously weighed as much as 200 pounds and was unhealthy due to poor diet and over-consumption of alcohol.
"significantly more" means nada (Score:4, Insightful)
You are significantly more likely to be hit by lightning than win the lottery. But that doesn't mean lightning is a significant worry. It just means the effect is measurable.
But did they know it would blend? (Score:1)
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god dammit AC. stop wasting your insight.
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Well they knew the iphone 5 would blend. So the question is would it blend "significantly more"?
Not a suprise (Score:3)
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See? Clearly there is no bending problem - they're bending just fine and generating additional revenue in the process!
If the problem is actually just losing the connection between touch screen and logic board, rather than damaging one of them internally, you'd have to wonder why they didn't just use a more flexible connector. 1/4" of ribbon cable would easily handle any bends that didn't damage the rest of the phone, while adding minimal cost. It's enough to make a cynic suspect nefarious intent.
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Am I supposed to be outraged? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just a phone, I don't feel much outrage.
I mean, if we're talking about cars and people dying from a design defect, and the car company making a cold calculation that settling lawsuits from dead customers' relatives would be cheaper than recalling and fixing the entire fleet of cars (see the movie "Fight Club" for example), then yes I can see myself feeling some level of outrage.
But like I said, it's just a damn phone. So Apple calculated that .03 % of iphone 6's will bend, cost of settling would be X, and cost of recalling the entire year's worth of iphone 6 will be Y, and Y turned out to be much greater than X, so they went with option X. Sounds pretty logical to me.
Re:Am I supposed to be outraged? (Score:4, Informative)
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What upsets me is that I honestly don't think it would have happened when Steve Jobs was at the helm. After he passed away the company applied the standard strategy of charging as much as possible and reducing the cost of manufacturing the product.
They forget that it was that level of quality that many of us were willing to pay for. They've been losing credibility from me for years with buggy releases and crappy hardware. Eventually, the momentum will run out and some other company that is run by somebody w
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_Were_ you supposed to be outraged? (Score:2)
Which is why consumers with a clue should have taken precautionary measures to prevent the entire product segment from degenerating into a walled-garden duopoly.
Because holding all four railroads or both utilities is massive bean-sniffer power up. Ensconced on a fantasy island of Florin/Guilder (also kno
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Or the mice with the missing button.
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Exactly. In fact, things would probably be worse right now if Jobs were still around, as he was notorious for pushing products out of the door before they were ready.
The whole "first adopters" dilemma originated with Apple products during Job's second coming. The "first adopters" concept was one of the very few things that Apple actually invented. Before that, most electronics were thoroughly field tested. Apple under Jobs threw all field testing out the window, and experienced many design/engineering b
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What's the alternative to the aluminum chassis that gets a dent or a nick? A light impact caused the chassis of my magnesium laptop chassis (inside of a backpack that was dropped a foot onto a tiled floor) to simply shatter like glass. Meanwhile, I've dropped a macbook from a similar height onto tile with no protection at all and suffered from a cosmetic gouge that didn't impact the functionality of the laptop at all.
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It was a Toshiba Portégé R700, what was then considered a thin-and-light. They advertised it as being a magnesium alloy chassis, but the chassis walls were incredibly thin, and when the drop happened, the area that took the impact and a bunch around it just shattered into chunks: none of the pieces (on the laptop or what came off) were bent in any way, it was just a bunch of shards.
There were a lot of other problems with that laptop, and Toshiba really screwed me over when I tried to get the thing
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LG produces some decent phones. They were one of the last holdouts with removable batteries, and still have a memory card slot and headphone jack on their flagship phones. But they don't seem to be overtaking anyone...
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What upsets me is that I honestly don't think it would have happened when Steve Jobs was at the helm.
You mean Steve "You're holding it wrong" Jobs?
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Yes this is exactly what happened to me. I got the iphone 6+ when it came out (buying it full price) thinking this will last me 3-4 years. Then 1 year later, I get the problem and the phone is unusable and I have to buy a new iphone 7+ and have to put it on monthly plan.
I keep this one out of my back pocket and am careful to not bend it now.
But it is clearly a defect and the bend was not that much.
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They replaced it at a discount, at least. It happened to my iPhone 6 out-of-warranty, and they replaced the entire phone for the cost of just the replacement screen. Of course, that was still a few hundred dollars.
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They have a few journalists a free replacement, but individuals were SOL.
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and longer phone is more likely to bend than shorter one in a pocket. This is a shocking revelation.
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actually, steel deflects under any load too. The deflection caused by a fly on an i-beam has been measured.
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nah, no one i know has damaged their iphone 6 - 9 this way.
maybe a certain tiny percentage of customers are careless people and put their phone in their silly skin-tight clothes and bend over hard. A longer phone will do worse in that situation, surprise surprise.
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I'd also add that (having bent ever so slightly my 4S) that I would always remove my phone from my back pocket before sitting down.
Remarkably that prevented any future bends in phones.
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It wouldn't be so bad if they were not being dicks about replacing bent phones. They knew it was a problem and replaced some journalists phones immediately, but normal customers were left with expensive bricks.
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It's just a phone
Careful. You may not be outraged, but you certainly will outrage others with that attitude.
Same (Score:2)
multiple users reported that their iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets were bending under pressure, such as when they were kept in a pocket.
I would imagine God is pretty scared right about now over minor chronic misuse leading to certain body parts bending.
The only part about this that I find surprising (Score:3)
The only part about this that I find surprising is that Apple's solution to this wasn't to sell iPants with no pockets.
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The only part about this that I find surprising is that Apple's solution to this wasn't to sell iPants with no pockets.
Given the girth of the average Apple fan** here in the UK... I wouldn't want to see any of them in pants*.
* For the uninitiated, in the UK pants == underwear. What you call pants we call trousers.
** Apple are missing out on a huge opportunity, the iPie. Buy a £0.50 frozen pie from ASDA, add a apple logo made from pastry to the top and sell them for £5 a piece. Apple fans would live off them.
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** Apple are missing out on a huge opportunity, the iPie. Buy a £0.50 frozen pie from ASDA, add a apple logo made from pastry to the top and sell them for £5 a piece. Apple fans would live off them.
This wouldn't work. An Apple fan wouldn't pay less than £10 for that pie.
What's this "Thin Smartphone" shtick anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't get it. The pinnacle of this nonsense was the newer Moto Z. What is this bullshit? Give me a friggin Phone that doesn't feel like I'm holding a thin small slice of plywood with some fragile crystal glued on. And Oooph the battery while your at it. Point in case: I added a UAG case to my Moto G5 and it finally feels like a phone and not some piece of junk from a vending machine that will break when I sneeze at it. How awesome would it be if that extra heft would be like +2000mAmps of power. ... OnePlus, Nokia, Motorola ... all are into this nonsense. I seriously don't get it.
There definitely is a market for solid phones the thickness of the iPhone SE or thicker that have a solid battery and a case that doesn't fall apart. Or bend.
If I had the resoures I'd build it.
My 2 cents.
Re: What's this "Thin Smartphone" shtick anyway? (Score:1)
The market is okay with buying products designed to break. Why would the producers make anything else? They're not interested in what you want, nor how long it shall last - only if you'll keep givingthem cash.
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Re: What's this "Thin Smartphone" shtick anyway? (Score:2)
Yes. Those are somewhere around the specs I had in mind. Make it a case that has screws and can be replaced + a variety of different colored cases and up the repairability and you've got yourselves a new hot contender for "smartphone of the year" I would say.
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Now if you could get together 50million like minded friends we would have a market.
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Don't need 50MM people - 10K people would do it... Yes, i have those connections, and we've been seriously talking about this approach.
errr. no, you're delusional if you think 10000 people is a market that would even come close to breaking even, let alone be profitable for an expensive to develop high tech gadget. The Essential phone sold close to 10x that last year, and the result was ... $50m in the red and the company effectively folded 2 days ago.
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Re: What's this "Thin Smartphone" shtick anyway? (Score:1)
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Ok lets go through it.
It's millions if you develop everything brand-new from the ground up.
Essential phone tried this. Investment was in the hundreds of millions range.
Use an already existing cell-phone platform and screen,
Your fundamental requirement was the existing platform didn't suit your needs. You are literally back to ground up development of the hardware. The result is still a development cost in the 10s of millions.
I do believe it can be done - and profitable - at 10,000 units...
Well we're going to have to agree to disagree since you won't even look at the Essential example as evidence that it can't. Your $10000 shipments won't even cover development, let alone retooling, production
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Okay so you have no clue really about mobile phones at all. Let me break it down for you:
All displays are off the shelf unless you're LG or Samsung. There's no development cost there. ... Yeah you clearly have no idea. Every mainboard in every model of phone is custom. Not only that the very specs you quoted would nece
Every version of the Android is effectively custom software unless you're duplicating someone else's phone which effectively makes the entire scenario pointless.
As for off the shelf mainboard.
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Nope. But it's a simple use case kind of issue. I'm sure you will find people who want that kind of thing, but it's not for me. We can go down the list:
$600 - Yes in my price range.
18mm thick - No I prefer thin phones. 10mm would be about my limit.
5" 1920x1080 screen - No, need a higher res phone because I enjoy playing with VR.
6000 mAh battery - Yes, but it won't fit in that package. I'm happy to accept an external battery pack if needed but not necessary. This would be far more interesting to my girlfrien
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* https://sonimtech.com/xp8/
* https://www.kyoceramobile.com/duraforce-pro/
They both come w/ dedicated PTT buttons too.
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If the phone were more substantial, you wouldn't need the case. I've bought otter box cases for every phone I've had for the past 10+ years because of how flimsy the damned things are. I dropped one phone from a height of 2.5 feet onto tile and having the screen shatter and case bend, then I decided I needed hard plastic cases for *every* phone.
Some delicate snowflakes baby their phone for years. Wipe it down every night and likely tuck it in while charging and singing some lullaby's before bed. I am not on
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Does it come with free spyware?
And did they know... (Score:1)
Some dying to know what Apple thinks of us (Score:2)
And do they care?
Sure they knew. (Score:2)
Any 5 year knows that it's a bad idea to put something with one side made of glass in your ass-pocket and sit down.
Why somebody would do such a stupid thing is beyond me.
Misread the title... (Score:2)
Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Blend
https://youtu.be/KWqw5SpITg8 [youtu.be]
Ob (Score:2)
It's been known for a long time that Apple customers are a load of benders [oxforddictionaries.com].
The 5s was the last decent iPhone. (Score:1)
The 4s was great. The 5s was the last decent iPhone. The 6 onwards were just too big. The 7 had no headphone jack.
RIP iPhone.
Oh, hey, like I said... (Score:2)
So sad, how far they've fallen. One wonders how long it will take their money to catch up... or if they might correct course before that happens.
Re: Oh, hey, like I said... (Score:2)
Skinny jeans (Score:1)
I think that's been my favorite title for an iPhone news story.
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