A Design Defect Is Breaking iPhone 6 Pluses
ifixit.org
ifixit.org
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.
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.
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 card in half and connect it with half a cm of tape and bend it - the two halves will be flat and you'll get a V shape instead. Put the coin on one side and no problem.
I guess it depends on how much open space is in the phone or if the whole PCB is completely flush with the bent casing.
https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/DSCkX6EfcARJYOHa.h...
The proposal is just to do a little more of that.
(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.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/12/9315471/iphone-6s-new-alum...
This is not going to be as flat as possible, but it let's you play with some flex vs thin and completely stiff.
There are already polymer glue solder alternatives. They are nowhere near as good as solder, however.
The normal solution is to make the PCB stiffer... Fundamentally a long flat thin object is going to be bendy or brittle
What about changing the layout, such that you can introduce many, many voids in the circuit board? If you can divide up the board into many separate "compartments" then each individual segment can be proportionally stiffer and less flexy. (Long, thin things are "bendy" because the material can act as a lever against itself, so many short stubby things can be very stiff locally.)
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.
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.
There was recently a lawsuit in the Netherlands where someone sued Apple after receiving a refurbished phone after replacement under warranty [1]. She won the case:
https://www.iphoned.nl/nieuws/rechtszaak-apple-garantie/
The judge based his verdict on a verdict of the European Court of Justice [2], so it's likely that the outcome would be the same in other EU countries.
[1] 20 months would still fall under warranty in the EU.
[2] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&num=C-404...
On refurb, many (but absolutely not all point of contact for chips to PCB) are tested, but require lower tolerances
Perhaps a timely reminder than the plural of anecdote is not data.
Also never had an issue with the Oneplus, it has taken a battering and I have successfully changed the screen 3 times, survived a full submersion while turned on and numerous drops. It is currently missing the on\off button due to my carelessness but it is still going strong.
Most people I know who got RROD ended up just throwing their 360 out.
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.
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.
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
(of course the preferences above and below that age aren't universal, but I think that's a reasonable dividing line.)
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.
The 7 will probably just have a different set of problems to deal with.
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.
The reality is, if you aren't the kind of person who can spend a few minutes researching and procuring the correct set of screwdrivers, you really should not be opening the case anyway. If you've ever opened up an iPhone and for example replaced the battery I think you would agree, the pentalobe screws are just the appropriate level of deterrent. Crucially, there's no DRM on the battery preventing me from swapping it out myself.
Replacing the front glass required you to disassemble every 0.something mm screw in the thing and pull all of the parts out. It took me over an hour, partially because I had to carefully document each and every screw to make sure they go back in the right place (I didn't want to swap a 0.7mm and a 0.8mm screw somewhere).
My definition of 'superior' doesn't involve having to hold a phone a particular way for it to make a call.
I think I've gotten replacements because I've been able to show the electrical arcing that takes place (for anyone reading this who doesn't know what electrical arcing is, look it up). Between the nice spark, the sound and especially the smell, employees are pretty damn quick to replace the part. (I did have an employee initially try to just replace part of it, and when I showed him how the problem remained, I just walked over and grabbed a new one off the shelf and told him "I'll just take this." He scanned it and off I went.)
FWIW, the problem I'm talking about is the little 2-prong AC adapter that slides on to the main power "brick". On an 85W model at least, all that weight is borne and supported by the connection, and the torque (or maybe I should be using a term like "lever" or "moment", I don't recall my physics very well) is too much over time.
Last comment - generally I just take Shoe Goo and goop it over the weak strain relief where the cord emerges from the brick. Sure, I don't look cool, but that part of the power supply doesn't fail.
For instance, cords. There's never been a load coil on their cords, because they look clunky. So they are noisy as heck. Their cords have no strain relief - again because it looks clunky. So their cords are the #1 replacement item due to breaking all the time right at the connector.
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-...
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
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.
Note it's the retailer rather than manufacturer who is liable, so we have much more confidence that what we buy is "of merchantable quality", safe and legal to sell. Quite a number of HN threads have made this advantage clear.
Generally it's down to VAT @ 20% and import duties, with some exchange rate padding.
Example:
Apple iPhone SE is £359 in the UK and $399 in the US.
As of 15:00 on 06/09, the $399 is ~£298. Add 20% VAT and you have ~£358.
EDIT: Exchange rates play a big part.
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
Mandatory warranty in Germany is 2 years, where in the first six months the manufacturer has to prove that it wasn't defective when they sold it to you if they want to dispute your claim. After six months, there's a reversal in the burden of proof, but claims are usually accepted without dispute. I'm not aware of anything that requires more than two years of warranty here, even for durable goods expected to last longer than that.
> the manufacturer has to prove
Just nitpicking: the mandatory warranty ("Gewährleistung") is supplied by the seller, not the manufacturer. As a consumer you don't need to deal with the latter no matter what the former is trying to tell you. In the same line, the burden of proof after six month is on the seller not the manufacturer.
A manufacturer often has an additional voluntary warranty ("Garantie") distinct from that.
That is the case (including the role of the seller) across the whole EU by Directive 1999/44/EC (although member states can go beyond that and often do by e.g. extending the time).
The five or two year warranty is called "Reklamasjonsrett" in Norwegian which covers design and manufacturing flaws. It also states that the seller can try to fix it three times, after that it needs to give you something equivalent (i.e. a new phone of at least the price of the old) and that they can't charge the customer for any ting relating to the repair.
But we also have the "Garanti" from the manufacturer like you do.
Directly financed? I wouldn't call it a subsidy otherwise: https://www.google.com/search?q=subsidy&oq=subsidy
Weren't both of them funding some of their research projects via direct government (DARPA, etc) grants?
AT&T was a government monopoly. They had no meaningful competition that required rapidly innovating AT&T's core products, and they had lots of profit due to their monopoly status. They could afford to dump money into research (in addition to whatever gov't research grants they were getting) and still have plenty of profit left over. That's not quite government funding of research, but many economists will say that given its monopoly status, what it did was de facto government action.
PARC did some great things but they didn't have as broad a range of research as Bell Labs, did they? Xerox never had a monopoly like AT&T did, although I'm fairly sure they got plenty of government research grants.
There were also a lot of open fields in hardware and software that were just starting to be explored back then. Tech companies were investing plenty of brainpower and money into R&D, given little pushes by government grant availability. I think the difference in AT&T's case was the breadth of research due to how much profit they had... again, due to monopoly status.
Bell Labs was independent, but there are similar indirect links - lots of freshly minted PhDs cutting their teeth on government funded research, then moving into industry.
Government seed funding was directly responsible for the Whirlwind and TX series projects, for IBM's SAGE system, for the work of important consultancies like Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, and the various ACs (Illiac, Multivac, etc) all of which laid the foundations of modern computing.
IBM, DEC, and eventually Apple and MS productised that work, but it simply wouldn't have happened without government support.
Damn straight - American TV's sure are the coolest of all!
Just bought a 50" 4K TV from them. It only supported Dolby's HDR out of the box. Firmware update added HDR10 support. The last time Sony, Samsung, etc decided to put the customer first in a stupid format war was... when exactly?
You might have missed this headline from July: "Vizio acquired by Chinese tech company LeEco for $2 billion"[1]
1. http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/26/12286756/leeco-buys-vizio-...
Yeah, I missed that.
Yes. I thought the sarcasm was self-apparent as the "all American TV manufacturers are shuttered" trope is well-worn and well-known (apparently not). A quick test would have been trying to think of one cool American TV model.
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.
That said, they were and are made to a different design ethos - American cars have never been designed for balanced performance like German cars have, they instead have been designed for comfort and trouble-free operation (meaning next to no maintenance). America long made the only car in the world that could go 100,000 miles with nothing but fluid changes, and other wear items. No European car can really do that, all of the German makes have a pretty aggressive preventative maintenance schedule.
Japan to an extent does build cars to the american ethos - they build to the American ethos, but localized to the Japanese market to a greater or lesser extent -but then again they were taught car building by the Americans after WWII - which is I think why Japanese cars have been so successful in the American market.
Europe caught up, but the USA didn't stop, and now Europe is behind again.
We're not talking 15 years here. 2 years.
As a perfect example, they're likely on the hook for many millions of dollars of repairs with this issue in the article in the EU. In the US, only the people that had the problem early on or bought the extended warranty are covered. There ain't no free lunch.
They come to Europe to sell phones and we demand that they compete on the same terms as anyone else here.
Edit:
> they're likely on the hook for many millions of dollars of repairs with this issue in the article in the EU.
They can expect no mercy ;-)
They are big enough that they should know about key concepts like QA, continuous improvement and insurance.
Additionally letting Apple (and other big companies)[0] clean up their own mess creates a perfectly aligned incentive to avoid messing with consumers again.
Edit: clarify
[0]: I actually like big companies. It's mostly just when they, -in spite of massive profits, do stupid things e.g: like whining against basic worker or consumer protection etc that they annoy me.
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hous...
Warranties (sections 3.24 to 3.27) are mentioned as one of many factors.
http://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/consumer-rights-guarantees/...
"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.
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 love my iPhone, just trying to answer your question.
Don't know how I missed that one, maybe because it's not as serious, but I'd say it still counts.
I like my iPhone too, but I am curious what other problems are out there. Seems like they've been pretty solid for the most part, but I say that out of potential cluelessness, not defensiveness.
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 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.
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.
I don't know, it depends on how many the author actually spoke to and how he came by them. If he found them because he saw them all talking about this problem, that's not a statistically reliable means of sampling repair shops. His selection was biased and driven by the issue.
> It's definitely not reasonable to assume that the only iPhones that are failing are the ones served by that handful of repair shops.
I didn't. Read my comment again.
how about a google for "iphone repair shop" (with double quotes) gives 155k results. Eyeballing a few pages of results seems like the vast majority of results are for real iPhone repair shops. From this I would confidently estimate that there are > 15k and < 1.5m iPhone repair shows worldwide.
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.
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 ?
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?
Criticizing the article via guesstimation works better if you read it first.