A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
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Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#2It's (speculated to be) flexing PCBs under BGA chips again.
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.
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#3Remember "bendgate"? It turns out that while the bending may not be big enough to be permanent or visible it may still be enough to cause a chip to loosen from the PCB. Louis Rossmann has a great video on the subject
edit: Rossmann's video is already in the article, so enjoy this other great Rossman rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45rRLkjdgrU
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#4It's (speculated to be) flexing PCBs under BGA chips again. 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, t…
Presuming that manufacturers aren't about to stop trying to make thinner and thinner devices...
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?
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#5Remember "bendgate"? It turns out that while the bending may not be big enough to be permanent or visible it may still be enough to cause a chip to loosen from the PCB. Louis Rossmann has a great video on the subject edit: Rossmann's video is already in the article, so enjoy this other great Rossman rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45rRLkjdgrU
i had this happen to my 6+ a year while under warranty. The Apple Genius Bar I took it to had seen this problem before and knew to twist it to get it working. He made sure it was backed up to iCloud and then gave me a replacement. This new phone also got the gray bar of death after 3 weeks.
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
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#6Remember "bendgate"? It turns out that while the bending may not be big enough to be permanent or visible it may still be enough to cause a chip to loosen from the PCB. Louis Rossmann has a great video on the subject edit: Rossmann's video is already in the article, so enjoy this other great Rossman rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45rRLkjdgrU
i had this happen to my 6+ a year while under warranty. The Apple Genius Bar I took it to had seen this problem before and knew to twist it to get it working. He made sure it was backed up to iCloud and then gave me a replacement. This new phone also got the gray bar of death after 3 weeks. 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 pa…
According to Rossmann this can also happen if you drop the phone. In which case Apple is known to replace the screen but not fix the touch IC.
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#7This is pretty breathless reporting for iFixit. We can all draw whatever conclusions we want based on anecdotes. For example, I know a lot of people who have iPhone 6 and 6S phones and none of them have had this problem.
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.
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#8>“But the fact remains—compared to earlier iPhone models, the iPhone 6/6+ is kind of a ‘bendy’ phone. Its slim form factor and larger surface area subject the logic board within the phone to mechanical flexion pressure that no other iPhone has had to deal with[...]”
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.
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#9I actually had this issue show up on an iPhone6 right after the warranty period expired. I had phone support multiple times and took it in two different Apple Stores and they acted like they'd never seen the issue before. They eventually gave up (after a myriad of other fixes they had us try that didn't work) and said we'd have to get a new phone.
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.
Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
#10This is pretty breathless reporting for iFixit. We can all draw whatever conclusions we want based on anecdotes. For example, I know a lot of people who have iPhone 6 and 6S phones and none of them have had this problem. 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…
Have another look at your numbers, you have assumed that there are only 100 repair shops in the word. I would imagine this number is much higher (a google search for 'iphone micro soldering repair shop' gives 473k results)