A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses • Hacker News Board

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#21

Post by jschwartzi » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:36 PM UTC

akgoel wrote: post #5

pawadu wrote: post #3

Remember "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…

"Apple advises customers to lose at least 20 pounds before reporting any issues."

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#22

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:36 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #17

pjc50 wrote: post #2

It'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…

except with the RROD Microsoft admitted the issue and provided a replacement or repair service. Apple are just ignoring the issue and leaving the customer suck up the cost and hassle.

.. admitted the issue eventually. There were a lot of people home-reflowing their xboxes, with varying degrees of success.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#23

Post by ebbv » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:38 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #13

ebbv wrote: post #7

This 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…

> Let's be pessimistic and say that only 20% of people who have this problem get it repaired 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.

I'd say 80% is already a vast majority? But ok if you think 20% is too high we can go crazy and say half a million phones have this problem each year. That's still less than 4% of the 6S/6S Plus sold opening weekend. Let alone whatever the total 6, 6 Plus, 6S and 6S Plus sold over the last two years is (which I couldn't find a figure for from a quick search.)

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.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#24

Post by lukeholder » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:38 PM UTC

I had this same issue with my iPhone 6 Plus screen not responding to touch as this article explains. Took it into Apple in Perth City (Western Australia) and they replaced the iPhone on the spot with a brand new refurbished. This article leads with a story about apple denying it to a customer, but I had my issue resolved within 25 minutes including running a last minute icloud backup. Apples legendary support is real.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#25

Post by nibnib » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:39 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #13

ebbv wrote: post #7

This 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…

> Let's be pessimistic and say that only 20% of people who have this problem get it repaired 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.

>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.

How many would then try a 3rd party repair place?

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#26

Post by tyfon » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:42 PM UTC

"but said Apple doesn’t recognize it as an issue"

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.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#27

Post by robg » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:42 PM UTC

lukeholder wrote: post #24

I had this same issue with my iPhone 6 Plus screen not responding to touch as this article explains. Took it into Apple in Perth City (Western Australia) and they replaced the iPhone on the spot with a brand new refurbished. This article leads with a story about apple denying it to a customer, but I had my issue resolved within 25 minutes including running a last minute icloud backup. Apples legendary support is real…

Me too, relatively quick swap if under one year warranty. And then I had it happen again with the replacement device within days. The second swap was even faster as I explained I had the problem with the last phone too. The Apple store reps clearly knew what was up, tried to run tests the first time, the second time they just trusted me as I knew all the symptoms and the phone was only days used.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#28

Post by marksweston » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:43 PM UTC

celticninja wrote: post #17

pjc50 wrote: post #2

It'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…

except with the RROD Microsoft admitted the issue and provided a replacement or repair service. Apple are just ignoring the issue and leaving the customer suck up the cost and hassle.

Are they?

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.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#29

Post by ebbv » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:43 PM UTC

phelm wrote: post #10

ebbv wrote: post #7

This 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)

Read my comment again, I was positing perhaps the author of the article talked to 100 repair shops. Yes, there are certainly more repair shops than that worldwide. I was just drawing a line from what data the article has to what we could guess from it reasonably, each step trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the problem being as widespread as we can infer from the article.

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.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#30

Post by pjc50 » Tue, Sep 06, 2016, 12:44 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #16

pjc50 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't split the board, it's the solder joints on the surface that are the problem. So far as I know there is no flexible soldering technology, and creating one would be pretty extreme materials science. (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 be…

> Fundamentally a long flat thin object is going to be bendy or brittle I think GPs idea was to make the PCB no longer long, but have two smaller PCBs with flat flex between them. Then when the phone bends, the PCBs wont bend but let the flat flex take the stress instead. > (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) Now cut the…

Doable, and might even be a good idea for long thin PCBs, but it messes with both your routing and placement and therefore consumes PCB area. Also upsets your controlled-impedance traces. And adds an extra assembly step. To estimate doing this, take the PCB image and Paint and try to clear a 3mm gap in it. How many components do you have to move? Do you have to make the whole thing 3mm longer? Aren't most of them decoupling capacitors that must be kept right next to their corresponding IC?

(Look at the smallest .04 x .02 resistors on there!)

More cynically, the PCB only needs to be made as bend-resistant as the display: you don't care about your BGAs if you've cracked the screen.

The article does mention a fix the repairers have been applying, involving the "sticker shield" - not shown in the hero image, it's the metal casing that's been removed and you can see the edges of. That's a few mils off the surface of the PCB and evidently stiffens it enough (on the I-beam principle of operation) to avert the problem.