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iPhone 4 Screens Break 82% More Than 3GS
A surprising number of readers have submitted linkage to a story discussing a recently released study that
proclaims that iPhone 4 glass breaks way more often than the 3GS's. Although the chart that I found more surprising was the one that said almost 9% of iPhone 3GS screens crack after a year.
Probably due to the fact that people slam the phone down 82% more of the time, because of the antenna reception issue.
Just saying..
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
What the fuck do iPhone owners do with their phones? Crack open coconuts with them? I've been using cellular phones since they came in bags and ran off nicads and lead-acid batteries, and I have never managed to break a screen. I mean, sure, cell phones are portable electronics and thus delicate to a degree, but exercise a modicum of care and they should last a while.
I think iPhone owners are one or more of the following: a. careless individuals who regularly drop their phones onto concrete, b. people who frequently beat on their phones out of frustration with Market policies and/or AT&T's network, or c. suckers that got sold an mechanically inferior product.
There are other pigeonholes, but that'll get you started.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is good unbiased, peer reviewed, wholesome and all-American goodness coming from a company that sells warrantees.
Good times
Unless the glass is breaking all by itself, I'm going to go with "people who spent too much money on a phone don't know how to take proper care of them."
Fact is, I spent like $100 (and renewed my contract with tmobile) to get a samsung vibrant. The first thing I did was slap a protective case around it and put on a screen protector. Following that, a visit to eBay showed me some nicer things to protect the phone and I also got one of those belt holders for the phone. Why?
1. I spend what I consider to be a lot of money for a phone.
2. Things I spend money on, I try to take care of
3. Keeping a phone in your pocket will cause problems starting with dust and ending with who knows what else
4. In spite of all the care I want to give it, things fall, slide off, whatever.
If I had an iPhone (and people who know me know the LOOONG list of reasons why I will never own an iPhone) I would do the same thing to it -- protect the shit out of it. It's frikken expensive and needs to be protected.
People need to get over complaining about how durable something is or isn't and start simply being careful for a change.
The data from the study shows a 42% increase in water damage for the iPhone 4 over the 3GS. From this data we can conclude, with some certainty, that the two bodies of data are fundamentally different and any conclusions drawn on simple differences are only partially caused by differences in the devices themselves.
And they get their information from?
Is there a place to report breakage on their site?
Square Trade loses money for every screen break.
Nobody has better stats than Square Trade, because Apple takes one look at it and says user abuse, and does not bother counting it. Same for the carriers.
Nobody is keeping statistics EXCEPT the third party insurance providers. This is largely true in medicine as well. Unless there is a contagious factor, the only nationwide stats you will find on injuries (broken arms) is from insurance carriers. Why you choose to denigrate that fact when Apple is involved but not for heart attacks is sort of, well, suspicious.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
In particular the toughened stuff is that it is fairly brittle. So yes, it may well be stronger than plastic, but when it fails, it does so in a more catastrophic fashion.
You can see this with knives. Most knives are steel, of course. However with a little research you discover you can buy more advanced, harder knives. Ceramic knives that more or less never go dull. They are the real deal too, I own a couple. You can't believe their sharpness, the hold their edge forever, food washes right off them, etc. Brilliant things. So why then are they not used all over? I mean they are pricey, but not much more than a forged steel knife.
Reason is they are brittle. They are indeed much harder than steel, however they don't flex. So you apply pressure to them and they are unmoving until a certain point, when they shatter. A steel knife can bend and flex a bit, and be just fine. Mean that ultimately, a steel knife is much more resilient. They may lose their edge easier and so on, but they can do tough jobs ceramics can't (ceramic knives are for slicing, not for something lick carving meat on the bone).
Same sort of shit here. A good polycarbonate will scratch easier than a toughened glass, and is less strong, you can flex it just by pushing hard enough. However it has a lot of give. It can take some reasonably hard impacts and survive, whereas the glass will hold strong up to a given point, and then fail badly.
Max strength isn't always the most desirable characteristic. Surviving stresses can be as much about moving with them as resisting them.
Glass is really remarkably strong when it comes out of the furnace. The tensile strength is amazing, it can bend enough to absorb some shocks. It's a great material before it gets to the real world.
But, once it does, it immediately develops microcracks in the surface, and each of these could be the beginning of a fracture that goes through the bulk of the glass. So, what to do?
I don't know if they've taken the hint from the semiconductor industry (look up 'strained silicon') but they did a similar thing with glass. By bombarding the surface of the glass with larger atoms, they create significant stress in the surface, so that any microcracks are immediately pushed shut. But, this is only true down to the level that these atoms diffuse into the surface...not far at all!
So, if you create a significant scratch (and this might just be 100 microns) you are through this surface, and have a potentially catastrophic failure waiting to happen.
A screen-protecting film of plastic would be a good investment.
I worked at a glass shop for a summer installing windows and doors in peoples houses when I was younger. If it wasn't a brand new house, we'd have to take out the old windows. Often those windows had tempered glass. We took all the old windows back to our shop and threw them in a big trailer for the dump (sadly, window glass isn't as high quality as bottle glass, so it wasn't worth recycling. or thats what they told me).
Anyway, we loved to break the tempered glass. Normal glass breaks in big sheets, but tempered glass is made for safety, so it is both stronger, and won't break into sheets - it shatters into 1000's of tiny pieces when it breaks, so you can't get stabbed.
The fun comes with how it breaks. You can hit a 1/4" thick tempered glass window head on with a sledge hammer and it won't break. BUT, tempered glass gets its strength from really high surface tension, which is unbalanced on the edge of the glass. So, after we hit the thing with the sledgehammer and it didn't break, we'd take a regular hammer and lightly tap an exposed edge of the glass, and BOOM, it instantly shattered!
I don't know how gorilla glass compares to regular tempered glass, but it seems like a bit of a bad design to have the edges exposed like that.
But then, we knew it was a bad design...
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
See, you're not holding it right.
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