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A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

ifixit.org

41–50 of 209 posts

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#41
post #26

"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.

There's no free lunch. What are the trade-offs? Do you pay more for the same devices than in other countries?

This extended warranty thing is common throughout the EU (in the UK it's 6 years for example). In the UK we pay more than the US for most things but it's hard to pin down the exact reasons and price differences.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#42
post #31
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even under your hypotheses, I'd say 100,000 faulty devices is already a very significant amount. In terms of retail price, we're looking at more than 60 million USD, and 100,000 customers who were sold a (possibly) flawed device. I'm not sure what perspective should be taken into account, but I'm pretty sure we should not be simply looking at whether the rate of failures is above or below 1% given the volumes involve…

The point of the article seemed to be that this is a very widespread problem, and I was refuting that point. If you look at it from the percentage of devices sold, it doesn't seem to be widespread at all. 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…

Given the numbers we have and the hypotheses (75M devices sold, 100k defective devices), that would be 0.1% of the total volume sold, which does not sound that small (1 out of 1000 devices, what would we say if it was, e.g. 1 out of 1000 cars of a brand to be defective ? or 1 out of 1000 medical pills ?)

As for the warranty, if it's a design flaw and a widespread issue (and for that, even 0.1% of the whole volume should be significant enough) that pops up after 1 year of usage (because of thermal/physical wear under normal usage conditions), isn't it something that manufacturers should repair even out of warranty ?

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#43
post #26

"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.

There's no free lunch. What are the trade-offs? Do you pay more for the same devices than in other countries?

No, they seem to about comparable i think. Electronics is generally ok priced here.

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

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But you'd have to make the hundreds of broken connections between the boards you split. So isn't that a really delicate ribbon cable?

Not really, you do the split according to functionality, not just a straight split. CPU/memory on one side, WiFi/BT/Baseband on the other.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#47
post #44

Note that in Europe, whatever Apple says, you have a 2 years warranty for this kind of problem. Also, do the chip really need a replacement, or a simple reflow would work?

In Australia, under the Australian Consumer Law (2011), goods must be fit for purpose and there aren't limits on warranties

http://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/consumer-rights-guarantees/...

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#48

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…

Wait. The device was within warranty and they gave you a "refurbished" (i.e. not new) iPhone as replacement?

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.

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#49
post #26

"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.

What country do you live?

Re: A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses

#50
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…

> " Rami Odeh, a repair tech from New Orleans, sees up to 100 iPhone 6 and 6 Pluses a month that don’t respond well to touch."

Criticizing the article via guesstimation works better if you read it first.

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