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Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

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11–20 of 91 posts

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#11
post #3

Duh, its been the same way with all of their hardware manufacturing errors. The standard template is: Numerous social media posts about the same problem. Denials and costly fixes for them. To the point of specialized third party accessories. Remember the iPhone antenna “bands”? Apple acknowledges the issue. Class action lawsuit filed. Leaks about Apple knowing about the issue months before any corrective action.

For all that people keep mentioning antennagate, I personally never noticed this being an issue while owning the iPhone 4, nor did any of the other people I knew with an iPhone 4. It just wasn't something that ever came up in practice. And (seemingly as always), the iPhone 4 managed to beat out every other device of its time in consumer satisfaction surveys.

Does Apple make missteps? Sure. The new MacBook Pro keyboards are genuinely a disaster. But 95% of the complaints people actually bring up seem to be dramatically overblown.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#12
post #11
post #3

Duh, its been the same way with all of their hardware manufacturing errors. The standard template is: Numerous social media posts about the same problem. Denials and costly fixes for them. To the point of specialized third party accessories. Remember the iPhone antenna “bands”? Apple acknowledges the issue. Class action lawsuit filed. Leaks about Apple knowing about the issue months before any corrective action.

For all that people keep mentioning antennagate, I personally never noticed this being an issue while owning the iPhone 4, nor did any of the other people I knew with an iPhone 4. It just wasn't something that ever came up in practice. And (seemingly as always), the iPhone 4 managed to beat out every other device of its time in consumer satisfaction surveys. Does Apple make missteps? Sure. The new MacBook Pro keyboar…

Apple have positioned themselves as a luxury brand, so they'll be held to a higher standard. They sell enormous volumes of a very small number of SKUs, so a design defect will affect an unusually large number of customers. It clearly isn't doing too much damage to Apple's bottom line.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#13
post #11
post #3

Duh, its been the same way with all of their hardware manufacturing errors. The standard template is: Numerous social media posts about the same problem. Denials and costly fixes for them. To the point of specialized third party accessories. Remember the iPhone antenna “bands”? Apple acknowledges the issue. Class action lawsuit filed. Leaks about Apple knowing about the issue months before any corrective action.

For all that people keep mentioning antennagate, I personally never noticed this being an issue while owning the iPhone 4, nor did any of the other people I knew with an iPhone 4. It just wasn't something that ever came up in practice. And (seemingly as always), the iPhone 4 managed to beat out every other device of its time in consumer satisfaction surveys. Does Apple make missteps? Sure. The new MacBook Pro keyboar…

Interestingly I view the new Apple keyboards as overall reasonably good, although obviously with a few problems. A disaster for me would be the 2011 Macbook Pros that died over and over again just outside the warranty period. Worse, Apple‘s fix was to swap out to a working motherboard with the same latent flaw.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#14
post #6

This is Apple's modus operandi. The same thing happened with the early 2011 MBPros, which GPUs kept failing systematically, even after costly repairs. It took a class action lawsuit for them to start refunding repairs and provide an actual solution, but by then it was far too late.

That also happened to my mid-2012 rMBPro, but, upon further research, I'd discovered that Apple had similar laptop GPU problems going back as far as 2007. There were also similar class action lawsuits to address the problem earlier.

What pissed me off the most was the fact that they kept shipping MBs with similar flaws year after year and when MB users complained, their strategy was to look away and pretend that it was users' fault. I initially had to pay $300+ to replace the logic board and eventually got all of it refunded.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#15
I understand this is a problem and the phones shouldn't be susceptible to problems like this from normal use. Apple will probably just have to eat this one. The thing that annoys me a little is that if any other phone had a similar bending problem, nobody would give a hoot. In fact it looks like the HTC One had pretty much the same bend-ability[1]. That doesn't make what happened to these people's phones acceptable, but I think it's useful perspective.

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/09/consumer-re...

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#16
post #15

I understand this is a problem and the phones shouldn't be susceptible to problems like this from normal use. Apple will probably just have to eat this one. The thing that annoys me a little is that if any other phone had a similar bending problem, nobody would give a hoot. In fact it looks like the HTC One had pretty much the same bend-ability[1]. That doesn't make what happened to these people's phones acceptable,…

Live by the sword, die by the sword. In this case, the 'sword' is the perception that Apple is a leader in quality.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#17
post #6

This is Apple's modus operandi. The same thing happened with the early 2011 MBPros, which GPUs kept failing systematically, even after costly repairs. It took a class action lawsuit for them to start refunding repairs and provide an actual solution, but by then it was far too late.

Couldn't agree more after watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8 with detailed schematics and explanations.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#18
post #15

I understand this is a problem and the phones shouldn't be susceptible to problems like this from normal use. Apple will probably just have to eat this one. The thing that annoys me a little is that if any other phone had a similar bending problem, nobody would give a hoot. In fact it looks like the HTC One had pretty much the same bend-ability[1]. That doesn't make what happened to these people's phones acceptable,…

Totally agree, e.g. if Samsung hat problems with their batteries, nobody would give a hoot. Just because everyone is out to get Apple.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#19
post #6

This is Apple's modus operandi. The same thing happened with the early 2011 MBPros, which GPUs kept failing systematically, even after costly repairs. It took a class action lawsuit for them to start refunding repairs and provide an actual solution, but by then it was far too late.

> but by then it was far too late

My 2011 MBP had been collecting dust for a year when the repairs came and I had already bought a new MBP. Afterwards nobody wanted to buy the repaired 2011 MBP. I ended up gifting that machine to a junior dev on the team.

In Mexico, Apple asked for about $1200 USD to replace the logic board on the 2011 MBP, and it made no sense to me to invest that kind of money on an old computer without knowing if Apple would start a repair program later.

I've learned my lesson. Never buy an Apple product without Apple Care. It sucks but thankfully I can afford it. I'd rather pay more than suffer Windows and I can't use Linux because I use Adobe apps.

Re: Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

#20
post #6

This is Apple's modus operandi. The same thing happened with the early 2011 MBPros, which GPUs kept failing systematically, even after costly repairs. It took a class action lawsuit for them to start refunding repairs and provide an actual solution, but by then it was far too late.

My wife has a MacBook Air where the touch pad doesn't work, the screen has bright and darker spots and Wifi doesn't get any connection.

It made me buy a Dell XPS13 after 15y of Apple.

Then Dell proved they could do worse.

Sorry for the rant. I just hate myself for spending $3500 on garbage.

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