7 ms·

Internal Documents Show Apple Knew the iPhone 6 Would Bend

99 points by atupem 8y ago

ianai 8y ago
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.
- mc32 8y ago
  Yeah and Papermaster being made scapegoat despite the issue mostly being Apple UI overestimating signal strength to the end user... but yeah, you be holding it wrong.
- stouset 8y ago
  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.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    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.
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
  - bm1362 8y ago
    I worked at Apple doing phone tech support during this time and it was a big issue. You could take the iPhone and hold it one way to drop the signal almost completely. For users, it was incredibly frustrating.
  - mavendependency 8y ago
    I distinctly remember reading article that they fixed this on later production runs with some sort of coating. Wasn't the white iPhone 4 delayed for this?
- drcode 8y ago
  That's why I pay the "Apple premium" on all my devices, so that apple can claim their hardware has the highest quality, and can pay to fend off all the class action lawsuits that claim otherwise.
bangonkeyboard 8y ago
"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."
- gruez 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    If people are willing to buy your product sight unseen, will the actual product specifications and warnings fend them off?
    - zamazingo 8y ago
      Even reviews or average stars will if you're buying anything online, no?
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    Technically everything relevant is probably accessible via the Apple website, using the computers in the store.
- lb1lf 8y ago
  -I am quite possibly a bit slow here, but can anyone please explain how keeping the iPhone boxes out of reach of customers somehow gets Apple off the hook? I am honestly puzzled as I am typing this on my non-bent, company-issue iPhone 6.
  - millstone 8y ago
    IANAL but I think the idea is this: The plaintiff claim that Apple knew about the defect, and so it was willful deception to omit the defect in any written materials which could influence a purchase decision. Apple's reply is that customers weren't given any written materials prior to purchase, not even the box. So there was no way omissions in the written materials could have influenced purchase decisions.
finchisko 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
Konryan 8y ago
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.
- tooltalk 8y ago
  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.
  - rwmj 8y ago
    Going back to 2003 in fact: http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-do-i-get-my-broken-g4-ibook-fixed.html/comment-page-2 http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-do-i-get-my-broken-g4... http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/ http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/ I had one of these laptops and Apple charged me £75 to look at it, and failed to fix it. Later the Danish Consumer Complaints Board investigated and found that there was a systematic fault in the solder joints.
- Boulth 8y ago
  Couldn't agree more after watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8 with detailed schematics and explanations.
  - mboto 8y ago
    I think I started watching Louis Rossmann from a Hacker News link. He's got some really interesting videos on various issues with Apple products. Really interesting to watch.
L_Rahman 8y ago
Still holding out hope for the 2016 Macbook Pro keyboard class action and subsequent repair programs.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  That is going to be a very interesting can of worms to open.
- drcode 8y ago
  Finally got tired of random letters "n" missing in my text and got a PixelBook with Linux support as my new dev laptop.
  - Theodores 8y ago
    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.
- giobox 8y ago
  Me too, a free repair program would be nice, for those of us unlucky enough (like me...) to have spent thousands of dollars on one, and a replacement keyboard coming in at ~700 dollars thanks to it requiring so much of the machine to be replaced. I bet we just get a 12 dollar check in the mail though.
simonh 8y ago
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-reports-tests-iphone-6-bendgate/index.htm https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/09/consumer-re...
- schwap 8y ago
  Live by the sword, die by the sword. In this case, the 'sword' is the perception that Apple is a leader in quality.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    In this case, the 'sword' is a strategy that originally tried to appeal to everyone, from the least competent user to professionals. Judging from some of the idiocy I see in app reviews, a part of what's happening is that the LCD users are bringing expectations down to their level. What does one expect when you subject a deliberately thin electronic device to the full force of your body?
    - barrkel 8y ago
      Where do you put your phone? I put mine in my pockets. It's not unusual for a fair amount of strain to be applied there.
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        I put mine in my pockets. I also exercise some intelligence and common sense in how I do it. It's not unusual for a fair amount of strain to be applied there. For you and other people, apparently not.
spike021 8y ago
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 8y ago
  >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 8y ago
    >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 8y ago
      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.
Sidnicious 8y ago
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

99 points by atupem 8y ago

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.

mc32 8y ago
Yeah and Papermaster being made scapegoat despite the issue mostly being Apple UI overestimating signal strength to the end user... but yeah, you be holding it wrong.
stouset 8y ago
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.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  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.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
- bm1362 8y ago
  I worked at Apple doing phone tech support during this time and it was a big issue. You could take the iPhone and hold it one way to drop the signal almost completely. For users, it was incredibly frustrating.
- mavendependency 8y ago
  I distinctly remember reading article that they fixed this on later production runs with some sort of coating. Wasn't the white iPhone 4 delayed for this?
drcode 8y ago
That's why I pay the "Apple premium" on all my devices, so that apple can claim their hardware has the highest quality, and can pay to fend off all the class action lawsuits that claim otherwise.

bangonkeyboard 8y ago

"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."

gruez 8y ago
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 8y ago
  If people are willing to buy your product sight unseen, will the actual product specifications and warnings fend them off?
  - zamazingo 8y ago
    Even reviews or average stars will if you're buying anything online, no?
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  Technically everything relevant is probably accessible via the Apple website, using the computers in the store.
lb1lf 8y ago
-I am quite possibly a bit slow here, but can anyone please explain how keeping the iPhone boxes out of reach of customers somehow gets Apple off the hook? I am honestly puzzled as I am typing this on my non-bent, company-issue iPhone 6.
- millstone 8y ago
  IANAL but I think the idea is this: The plaintiff claim that Apple knew about the defect, and so it was willful deception to omit the defect in any written materials which could influence a purchase decision. Apple's reply is that customers weren't given any written materials prior to purchase, not even the box. So there was no way omissions in the written materials could have influenced purchase decisions.

finchisko 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

Konryan 8y ago

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.

tooltalk 8y ago
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.
- rwmj 8y ago
  Going back to 2003 in fact: http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-do-i-get-my-broken-g4-ibook-fixed.html/comment-page-2 http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-do-i-get-my-broken-g4... http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/ http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/ I had one of these laptops and Apple charged me £75 to look at it, and failed to fix it. Later the Danish Consumer Complaints Board investigated and found that there was a systematic fault in the solder joints.
Boulth 8y ago
Couldn't agree more after watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8 with detailed schematics and explanations.
- mboto 8y ago
  I think I started watching Louis Rossmann from a Hacker News link. He's got some really interesting videos on various issues with Apple products. Really interesting to watch.

L_Rahman 8y ago

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

Apocryphon 8y ago
That is going to be a very interesting can of worms to open.
drcode 8y ago
Finally got tired of random letters "n" missing in my text and got a PixelBook with Linux support as my new dev laptop.
- Theodores 8y ago
  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.
giobox 8y ago
Me too, a free repair program would be nice, for those of us unlucky enough (like me...) to have spent thousands of dollars on one, and a replacement keyboard coming in at ~700 dollars thanks to it requiring so much of the machine to be replaced. I bet we just get a 12 dollar check in the mail though.

simonh 8y ago

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-reports-tests-iphone-6-bendgate/index.htm https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/09/consumer-re...

schwap 8y ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword. In this case, the 'sword' is the perception that Apple is a leader in quality.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  In this case, the 'sword' is a strategy that originally tried to appeal to everyone, from the least competent user to professionals. Judging from some of the idiocy I see in app reviews, a part of what's happening is that the LCD users are bringing expectations down to their level. What does one expect when you subject a deliberately thin electronic device to the full force of your body?
  - barrkel 8y ago
    Where do you put your phone? I put mine in my pockets. It's not unusual for a fair amount of strain to be applied there.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      I put mine in my pockets. I also exercise some intelligence and common sense in how I do it. It's not unusual for a fair amount of strain to be applied there. For you and other people, apparently not.

spike021 8y ago

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 8y ago
>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 8y ago
  >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 8y ago
    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.

Sidnicious 8y ago

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