
Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend - atupem
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3a3gg/iphone-6-touch-disease-documents
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simonh
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...](https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/09/consumer-reports-
tests-iphone-6-bendgate/index.htm)

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

~~~
urda
Batteries exploding causing fires, damage, and possible harm to those around
it

vs.

An expensive slab of metal and glass that, _surprise_ , bends if you do things
like sit on it with it in your back pocket or other unnecessary forces.

100% completely, completely different. One is an actual danger (Samsung), the
other is mistreating and not respecting the device (People who spend a ton of
money on an iPhone and then treat it roughly).

~~~
earenndil
To be fair, an order of magnitude more devices bent than exploded.

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L_Rahman
Still holding out hope for the 2016 Macbook Pro keyboard class action and
subsequent repair programs.

~~~
drcode
Finally got tired of random letters "n" missing in my text and got a PixelBook
with Linux support as my new dev laptop.

~~~
Theodores
Would really like to know how that works out for you, tempted to get one
myself. Holding out for 8th gen i7 though - work XPS 13 has 8th gen and not
looking to 'downgrade' CPU. Pixelbooks are rarer than hens teeth on eBay so no
refurbishment bargains to be had.

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Konryan
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.

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
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.

~~~
chipperyman573
I can't find out why everyone rants and raves about the XPS13. Everywhere you
look people are more or less shouting their positive reviews for it. The one I
bought (top of the line i7 with fingerprint reader, touchscreen, the works)
broke. They sent me a replacement (after a lot of arguing, even though I was
in warranty), and _that one broke too_. I called again, they sent me a third
laptop and within a month it broke again!! All of these problems were internal
problems with the hardware... For example, my first one had a heatsink (heat
pipe? I don't remember. Something to do with heating) come loose and would
constantly overheat. Anyone who's had a XPS knows that these things are
fragile enough that dropping it would shatter the screen before dislodging a
heat pipe.

It also had one of the most annoying touchpads I've ever used and the small
bezel made me not want to use it for anything that took more than five minutes
- for some reason programming especially was difficult. I'm not sure why, it
just felt way more difficult to do on the 13.

I finally just bit the bullet and bought a surface laptop - I love everything
about it. I'm on month three right now, no problems so far. Fingers crossed.

(I don't work for Dell or Microsoft)

~~~
emmanuel_1234
Hahaha. I had one of the original XPS13. When I got it delivered, 4 or 5 keys
on the keyboard were broken (they were attached on 2 points, when of those
broken).

I got a new keyboard delivered, spend a solid 2 hours opening the whole thing
(YOU HAVE TO REMOVE THE KEYBOARD FROM THE BACK OF THE LAPTOP WTF???), put the
new keyboard in, only to realize a key was broken on the new keyboard.

That was my last purchase of a Dell laptop.

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Sidnicious
Mike Mullane’s “Normalisation of Deviance” talk to a group of firefighters[1]
is relevant here. He describes how the Challenger shuttle disaster happened
despite internal memos about the problem years prior.

The message of the talk is, essentially, that a person or team can get used to
ignoring their own standards when under pressure.

[1]:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o)

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spike021
And yet out of all the people I knew who owned an iPhone 6 from launch never
dealt with the "bendgate" issue, including myself. That's from personal
experience owning and using one daily for 3 years.

I still think this was an over-dramatized problem.

If you eat/drink while working at a keyboard you can get stuff between the
keys and either get them sticky or completely broken. Some actions can just
cause issues but if you handle the thing properly then you have nothing to
worry about.

~~~
simion314
>Some actions can just cause issues but if you handle the thing properly then
you have nothing to worry about.

Those keyboards broke because of small dust particles, nothing related to
liquids, people are using the laptops as before but this time the keyboards
are to fragile.

The issue with Apple is that they sell products with defects and then refuse
to replace them for free until they have to because of lawsuits.

Apple acknowledged that it made fragile phones that can bend, if you do not
know people that had this issue does not mean that only a few people have
issues, as you read in the article Apple made some changes in the way the
phone is built to patch the problem, they would not have changed the
production line for a few cases only,

~~~
spike021
>Those keyboards broke because of small dust particles, nothing related to
liquids, people are using the laptops as before but this time the keyboards
are to fragile.

I didn't specify which keyboard. Even mechanical keyboards can be affected by
this. I wasn't referring specifically to the new Macbook butterfly keys.

~~~
zaarn
The amount of dust that would be necessary to incapacitate a mechanical
keyboard would probably coincide with the amount of dust necessary to fill all
the space of the key travel.

Most mechanical keyboards are basically protected from dust entering the
physical area of the switches due to a hat-like dome formed by the keycap
itself. On top of that a lot of the switches are closed and rated for minor
dust exposure (cherry's can with stand some water and dust internally)

I've never heard of a keyboard failing because of dust with the exception of
Apple's MBP keyboards.

~~~
spike021
Again, I didn't specify dust. My point was that keyboards are susceptible to
getting sticky from different ways. It's an accepted potential issue.

~~~
zaarn
Most well engineered keyboards are splash resitant and easy to clean if they
get sticky.

But that is not the problem. The problem is really that the keyboard is
susceptible to a problem that 99.9% of other keyboards are not, even on
laptops.

A complete failure of operation because of dust is inacceptable on a device
that will be expose to a lot of environmental dust from being in laptop bags
or having people carry them around to eat or similar.

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bangonkeyboard
"Apple argued […] that consumers could not have been uniformly exposed to any
alleged misinformation or lies of omission because Apple keeps its iPhone
boxes in the back of the [Apple] store, where customers aren’t allowed."

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gruez
so apple is basically saying it's okay to make a defective product as long as
you keep the packaging at the back of the store?

~~~
mrguyorama
If people are willing to buy your product sight unseen, will the actual
product specifications and warnings fend them off?

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zamazingo
Even reviews or average stars will if you're buying anything online, no?

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ianai
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.

~~~
stouset
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.

~~~
robin_reala
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.

~~~
stouset
I actually love the new keyboard, except I've already had one die and now have
to keep the new one under a silicone cover to keep it clean.

The failure rate on them is nuts though.

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finchisko
Not going to defend Apple. But one doesn't have to be genius to find out that
iPhone 6 would be more prone to bending than iPhone 5 (2x times thicker). The
internal document doesn't proof anything. It's just numbers.

~~~
bangonkeyboard
It's not just that they knew it would bend. The document shows that Apple also
knew that bending from normal use would detach the Touch IC chip and render
the phone unusable. They secretly addressed this in later iPhone 6 runs
("after internal investigation, Apple determined underfill was necessary to
resolve the problems caused by the defect") while continuing to charge
affected users $350 (generously reduced to $150 after media attention) to fix
their bricks.

