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Comment by emersive | Hacker News Reader

All nine reports of the 10,000,000+ who have iPhone 6s. I really think this whole thing has been blown way way out of proportion. If this were any other phone maker we wouldn't be talking about it.

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I know my phone will shatter if I drop it. But I'm not going to drop it to prove this point.

All 10,000,000 won't dare to test the bending and would try to avoid conditions (don't keep in pockets, buy thicker cases etc) that will lead to bending..

First off, we don't know how many phones have been bent nor do we know how common that bending is. The fact that there are any reports at all within the first few days of the phone being available is troubling. What matters is the overall rate of bending under "normal" phone handling conditions. Even if that rate is fairly low (say one per million per day) that still results in a huge number of people with bent phones over their expected use lifetime (nearly 1 in 1000 over the standard 2 year upgrade window).

Moreover, the rate of things like phone bending is probably non-linear, because it will happen during the highest amount of applied bending force over the period of use, which probably doesn't happen every day. If the iPhone 6 plus is just enough weaker than other phones such that it bends more commonly under fairly common handling conditions for any phone then the result could be a LOT of bent phones.

I've seen several videos of people bending these phones and to be honest it looks like Apple has a problem. The phone seems to be much weaker than any device designed for that use environment should be.

Considering that Jobs went to great efforts to ensure that the original iPhone was rugged under normal but inadvised handling conditions (i.e. putting it in the same pocket as keys, thus the use of gorrila glass), I can't help but see this bendiness as a decided step backwards in the design philosophy of the iPhone line.

Why would you believe a company that said about the antenna issue on the iPhone 4: "You're holding it wrong". There are way more complaints and pictures to be found on this issue than the ones that Apple reports.

IIRC, that wasn't a official response but an off-the-cuff answer from one man, who is now dead.

You mean the then CEO, Steve Jobs?

Who else would I mean?

Steve Jobs was a jerk, yes. It does not follow from this that Apple as a whole will necessarily lie about damage reports.

> * a company that said about the antenna issue on the iPhone 4: "You're holding it wrong"*

Yes and... that was correct? Every other phone suffers from the same antenna attenuation if you enclose it completely in your hands. But because it's Apple, some news outlets saw a chance to make some pageviews by creating another scandal.

The "antennagate" crap was roughly equivalent to people complaining that a TV won't show any image at all if you set it up facing the wall, and writing lots of grandiose articles about how Apple TV doesn't deliver on its promise in all sorts of common circumstances, etc.

Actually the iPhone 4 suffered the most from this because of its metal casing (most phones were , and still are, made from plastic). Because this created a sort of faraday cage for the cell signals, part of the design (the metal border) served as an antenna. In fact, as two antennas (seen here (http://jim93277.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/iphone3_1_610x37...). One for WiFi and other cool stuff, the other for Cell tower stuff.

But if you held it with your left hand, you could create a contact between the two antennas and things would freak out a bit. This is 1000% due to the design of the iPhone 4, and not an issue with other phones. It had nothing to do with "covering the entire antenna with your hand".

So who's wrong? Apple, for not considering this? Or a good 10/20% of the world for doing things with their left hands?

I think a big factor of this is the number of reports in the time-frame... Nine reports over the course of a year is one thing, nine reports over the course of the premiere week is something else entirely.

It has been blown out of proportion. But so was the iPhone 6 launch. It's the downside of the Apple hype machine, basically.

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