Apple Uses Tiny QR Codes to Track Display Manufacturing Failures and Cut Costs

macrumors.com

11 points·impish9208··9 comments

How does it reduce the defect rate? If a supplier was throwing away 3/10 earlier, how does stamping it change it to 1/10?

My guess, based on reading a few different copies of the article from different venues (since the information is a massive paywalled publication I do not want to pay 50 bucks a month for) is that the two companies were falsifying reports of defected glass to Apple to inflate costs to the company. They are responsible for shaping the raw glass from Corning into usable components. Once Apple started serializing the glass itself, this number suddenly dropped.

Another theory is that they were stating the glass was faulty, when it wasn’t, and selling the glass to the gray market for 3rd party repairs. If they have to report serial numbers for faulty glass now, that makes it a whole lot easier to trace back to the specific vendor defrauding apple.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/29/every-iphone-scre...

Well it allows you to see exactly which glass failed, and trace the failure. This leads to actually knowing why things fail, which leads to bugfixes, so to speak (the general term in engineering is "process improvements"), which leads to better success rates.

The title and the first paragraph mention QR Code but the rest of the essay says barcode. Which is/are etched on the phones?

What is a QR code if not a 2D barcode?

barcodes use vertical bars

2D barcodes are covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcode

Sort of like how one might say 2D arrays.

> A matrix code, also termed a 2D barcode (although not using bars as such) or simply a 2D code,

barcode is not the preferred term because they don't use bars. A QR code is called a matrix code.

So confidently incorrect.

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