This is a serious problem when making devices thinner: they become more flexible, but the joints are not flexible, so after a while you get a crack all the way across a joint and it either becomes intermittent or capacitively coupled.
A decade ago I had a white plastic-bodied Macbook which developed a similar fault in the graphics. But it's not just Apple, the famous "red ring of death" was a similar problem induced by thermal cycling rather than physical bending.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071021235338/http://www.forbru...
It happened to my computer. Apple delayed and denied and charged me, but wouldn't fix the problem. Eventually I gave up, but I've never bought an Apple device since that failure.
Is this class of issues correctable (to a degree) with a change in the design of those components -- for example, proactively splitting the board at the point that the fissure is likely to appear and coupling it in a flexible way -- or is this a materials science concern where we need to find new methods to build the components' substrates so they are innately flexible?
(To see the problem, place a coin on a credit card and bend the card - note that the coin no longer touches across its whole surface)
The normal solution is to make the PCB stiffer (thicker, or invent something better than FR4), or to make the overall casing stiffer. Either by changing materials or changing the aspect ratio. Fundamentally a long flat thin object is going to be bendy or brittle. The older iPhones that were smaller with glass front and back were an extremely good design from this point of view.
It seems people hate these ball bonds and want to move away from them. One alternative is wirebonds, which have their own problems. They are pretty fragile and time consuming to set. I've also learned today that they start to vibrate and break if nearby wires carry a signal at their resonance frequency, which is pretty crazy.
The golden alternative would be to build everything (sensor + electronics) from one monolithic wafer. Instead of making a silicon sensor, some silicon ASICs, and joining them with a PCB, you'd directly put the electronics in the sensor and make it one big CMOS circuit. However it will take a couple of years until we can do that.
My 20 month old (i.e. out of warranty and with no Applecare policy) iphone 6+ started showing the symptoms a week and a half ago. The "Genius" at the Apple Store immediately recognised the symptoms and processed a free replacement (refurbished) phone without any prompting or negotiation on my part.
So while it's true that they are staying very quiet about it in public, it does seem that knowledge of the problem and a free replacement policy has been communicated within the company.
Most people I know who got RROD ended up just throwing their 360 out.
Also, operational heat (from SoC, battery, whatevs...) can repetitively flex boards ever so slightly as it heats up and cools down, and on the long term will cause BGA chips to lose contact over time. That's what famously happened on the Xbox 360, but it more silently happened on numerous other devices too.
BGA is a necessity nowadays due to pin density, but it's a tech that's incredibly easy to ruin at the slightest design or manufacturing mistake.
Ultimately, I had to pay $329.00 for a refurbished phone after they swapped out a few screens which didn't make the problem go away.
There is a class action lawsuit forming: http://mccunewright.com/iphone-6-touchscreen-defect/
edit: Rossmann's video is already in the article, so enjoy this other great Rossman rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45rRLkjdgrU
I speculate that I was bending the phone in my pocket. I had gained 20 pounds in six months due to job stress and suddenly my pants were tight and my phone was stressed in my pants pocket. I bought looser pants and then lost those 20 pounds and haven't had it happen again
Thank god they are rumoured to be making phones even slimmer then, _and_ getting rid of the headphone jack as well!
Apple seems to be putting form ahead of function these days.
Apple likes to bleat on about how environmentally sound they are but glueing everything together and making it disposable piece of electro-garbage just makes that whole spiel ridiculous to me.
But they'll probably come out with one about the same size, with ~10% more battery life due to software and hardware changes - and call it a great increase.
They even realize the battery thing is a problem, so Apple, the manufacturer of the hardware and the design geniuses, come out with a monstrous, hideous battery case, instead of just improving the underlying hardware. http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGQL2LL/A/iphone-6s-smart-...
There are plenty of cases that have a battery at the expense of thickness. Why not use that?
I don't want to start a flame war here but I would be interested in the numbers of broken screens. I make it a habit to ask friends with shattered iPhone screens how often they dripped it w/o breaking and most tell me they never dropped it before
The 7 will probably just have a different set of problems to deal with.
Oh, I am so glad we have laws in my country to prevent asshole companies from doing things like this. Goods that is "expected to last long" has a five year mandatory warranty here and mobiles are included. The rest has two years. It doesn't matter if they recognize it as an issue, the phone is broken period.
And they were correct. Mercedes Benz and BMW did eventually catch up to the Americans. Nowadays, many people would argue that Mercedes Benz and BMW represent a level of quality that is much higher than what you can get from American automobiles.
If Europe hasn't yet caught up to the USA in consumer electronics, perhaps that is because Europe hasn't yet made the concerted effort to catch up.
Damn straight - American TV's sure are the coolest of all!
I have no idea about apple prices in general, but a "Apple iPhone 6s Plus 128GB Sølv (Silver)" is approx 1257 USD including 25% VAT. That is about 1/3 of an average monthly salary here, maybe a bit less.
Edit: country is Norway
We're not talking 15 years here. 2 years.
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hous...
Warranties (sections 3.24 to 3.27) are mentioned as one of many factors.
"Yes, the phone developed a fault under typical use within the warranty period and yes, a lot of other customers are having the same problem, but" ...?
Apple devices are luxury goods sold at a high premium. You expect that stuff to withstand at least the same everyday handling as their competitors' products in the same market segment.
http://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/consumer-rights-guarantees/...
If you take off the chip, you could theoretically re-ball it and put the same one back on, but that requires even more specialized equipment.
I was amused to see in that interview with the Laura the repair person, the new chip was put on slightly crooked. It will still likely work, but isn't optimal.
I don't tend to face these sorts of problems myself, because my phone is always in a case in a holster, so that it doesn't get bent or whatever under normal conditions.
Luckily, we had insurance on it, but it was still a $99 deductible. It's very frustrating to learn that this problem is quite a lot more common than they let on.
I'm so glad this is blatantly illegal in various countries. They sold you a faulty brand new product, so they must give you a brand new replacement if they can't fix the defect on the device they sold you.
This is akin to telling the waiter there's a hair in your soup and getting a new soup that was returned by another customer but has since been re-heated and de-haired.
Uh...
This isn't the first product where Apple has had this problem. It's embarrassing, or ought to be.
(I don't have this problem; I own a Cat phone (yes, Caterpillar Tractor) which can be run over by a truck [2][3] and still work.)
[1] http://www.tendtronic.com/Flexible-PCB [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xaq3pduPv4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVPku-xItv8
Apple clearly have to work on their ability to defeat the laws of Physics before their devices become fully magical.
I would also argue that all of these issues are more isolated than reports make it seem. No doubt, they are all grounds for a good extended warranty program at the very least but they aren't dangerous, recall-worthy or a case where all devices are affected. Just a significant enough number that if it occurs, it should be a free repair or replacement.
For a quick glance at all the recent acknowledged design flaws Apple has copped to, this page is a useful resource: https://www.apple.com/ca/support/exchange_repair/
I love my iPhone, just trying to answer your question.
I don't flex or twist my phone, I wonder what is "normal use"...
Those who expect to use their iPhones more than 12 months are getting shafted
I constantly see girls sticking an iphone into the back pocket of their pants that are so tight you wonder how they even got it in there. Then they sit down with the damn phone still in there. I am surprised it doesn't snap in half.
I typically carry my phone or keep it in my front pocket removing it before I sit down in fear of bending it.
It's not a wallet, it's a delicate piece of electronics that requires care in handling.
@dang - is worth looking into whether there is a pattern to the flagging of this post (i.e., IP addresses from a certain company in Cupertino, pattern of other negative Apple PR being flagged by the same users, etc.)?
I'm posting this on a 60 euros android i bought 2 years ago.
I mean the technologies inside it are the same, the specs are higher, sure, but I don't think it's worth that much. That goes for the price of the latest, top notch CPU or GPUs. 1 year or 2 years later, the price has dropped significantly. So either it's cutting edge patents, or that there are many people ready to pay for a phone that won't the latest one in 6 months.
The point I'm trying to make? Like for everything, top of the line products exist, and just like you said, those are not shielded from defects, despite their price. Price is not synonym of quality, performance of durability. 90% of the stuff you find in an expensive phone are the same.
My point is that despite the price of the iPhone, it's not really worth its price.
I got a free swap to a 6S+.
But let's look at some numbers; the article mentions that all of these repairers see "several a week." Let's round up and say that's 4 a week, or 208 per year per repair shop. They only mention a few repair shops in the article, but lets say as part of the research they actually talked to 100 repair shops. That brings us to 20,800 iPhones having this problem per year. But of course, not everyone takes their phone to a repair shop when it has a problem like this. Let's be pessimistic and say that only 20% of people who have this problem get it repaired, and 80% throw it away. That's 104,000 iPhones having this problem per year.
It's unclear to me from the article if this is affecting only iPhone 6 or also 6S, I'll assume both. Apple sold over 13 million iPhone 6S and 6S Plus in its opening weekend alone. Just from opening weekend numbers 104,000 phones with this problem is less than 1%, let alone whatever the total number of units sold over the last two years has been.
I have no doubt this is an annoying and frustrating problem for the people that encounter it, but try to have some perspective.
20% of people taking their phone to a third-party repair shop sounds very high. I'd say a vast majority would take their phone to Apple, who say it can't be fixed and to buy a new phone.
The point is, it doesn't appear to be a widely occurring problem based only on what this iFixit report contains. Maybe there's more data out there that indicates it is more widespread? If so this article should have had that data.
How many would then try a 3rd party repair place?
If you want to take the view that if Apple sells you a faulty device they should repair it for free regardless of whether you're the only person in the world who has the issue; I would agree as long as the device is still under warranty. My guess is these aren't or the people wouldn't be taking them to third party repair shops.
Criticizing the article via guesstimation works better if you read it first.
But also we should take into context how many iPhone 6 and 6+s have been sold. The first article on a Google search comes up with Wired who is discussing numbers from Oct-Dec of last year and in that time Apple sold 75 MILLION iPhones.
And I think the iPhone 6 model has only been out for a year or two, right? So even if we quadrupled the defect number per year, we'd still fall quite short of even the recent Samsung recall.
Please keep in mind I'm not saying it's not a problem, just trying to help put numbers into perspective.
Link to article: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/apple-sold-a-record-number-of-i...
Number of google results for a keyword doesn't really give a good indication of how many stores there are for that thing in the world. 473,000 repair shops would be 1,000 for every Apple Store. I'm sure there's a lot but that seems a bit high.
Regardless, I didn't attempt to draw the line through number of iPhone repair shops in the world because we have no evidence whether all repair shops in the world are seeing this problem, only the ones the author of the article talked to.
