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Users Report Warping of Apple's iPhone 6 Plus
MojoKid writes: Apple's iPhone 6 Plus weighs six ounces, and it's a scant 7.1mm thick. As an added bonus, according to a number of users, it has a hidden feature — it bends! And no, we don't mean it bends in a "Hey, what an awesome feature!" sort of way. More like a "Hey, the entire phone is near to snapping" kind of way. What's even more troubling is that many of the users who are reporting bent devices also claim that they were carrying it in front pockets or in a normal fashion as opposed to sitting on it directly. Either some of the iPhone 6 Plus hardware is defective (the vastly preferable option) or it's because the tests run by other venues are putting different kinds of stress on the chassis. It's not clear what the story is. Hopefully Apple will clarify it soon.
Other phones bend, but the issue here is that with the iphone's metal case, it doesn't bend back. Plastic, unless subjected to extreme amounts of stress, tends to return to its original shape. Aluminum not so much. The problem isn't the glass, as the phones I've seen bent have glass that is still intact (strangely enough), but rather the metal chassis that Apple has always been so proud of.
Here's a fix:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M0...
Did you even look at the URL in the OP? It shows several phones that are permanently bent - some plastic, some metal. It shows plastic phones, like the Galaxy, with a cracked display from where it was bent, plastic phones that are permanently bent (BlackBerry Q10, Oppo) as well as other phones with metal frames like the Sony Xperia Z1 and HTC EVO. It also shows various other older models of iPhones that are bent.
No phone is immune to this, and just because it's plastic and kind of "bends back" does not mean the screen or plastic won't crack, etc.
I'll tell you exactly what this is about. Millions of existing iPhone users now have a larger phone in their pocket, and because the previous models were smaller, they were just under the bending threshold (due to the weight of the person, size of pockets, whatever) and they didn't have a problem. Now with the larger phones there is more leverage to exert more force (plus being thinner might make them weaker as well), and suddenly the bigger phones can't handle the stresses that the smaller phones could handle. If these people were to stick a Samsung S5 in their back pocket bad things would happen too (and it just so happens that the older, smaller iPhones were tough enough to handle that).
Is the iPhone 6 as tough as the smaller previous generations of iPhone? Almost certainly not. Is it as tough as other phones the same size like the Samsung Galaxy? Probably so.
Better known as 318230.
"Don't hold it that way" was actually Apple's official stance. They even put up a series of videos on the Apple site showing other brands' "dead spots", which lasted about as long as you could expect in this corporate climate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.engadget.com/2010/0...
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Sorry, but your spelling is just stupid and arbitrary unless you apply the "ium" suffix to ALL elements.
Do you mean things like: potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and strontium?
Also the spelling of "aluminum" predates the spelling of "aluminium", so the former is proper.
The official chemical name IS Aluminium with Aluminum being an alternate spelling. But if you are being pedantic, then alumium predates both.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Not quite right, you (and many others, apparently) seem to be confusing stress and strain, or at the least assuming they are related. Plastic tends to be able to withstand a large amount of strain before the onsite of plastic deformation but this varies wildly based on the particular plastic (see http://www.plasticsintl.com/sortable_materials.php?display=mechanical), while aluminum withstands about 16% elongation before failure. The tensile yield stress of plastic is also highly dependent on the particular compound but, for example for polyethylene it is about 24 MPa (Wolfram|Alpha), compared to about 55 MPa for a 6061T4 aluminum (Wikipedia).
Stress is (roughly) the amount of load per area in a specimen, strain is the change in length (often due to an applied load) divided by the original length; these properties are independent in general. For example, think of a rubber band an piece of steel of the same dimension - when you pull on the rubber band it would clearly deform elastically, but when you pull (with the same force) on the steel much less deformation occurs (so little it may not be visually apparent). Both have the same stress (same cross section, and same area), but completely different strain.
The Note3 of equal size has a flimsy plastic removable back held on with small plastic tabs, a large open battery cavity with a relatively loose fitting battery and even hole down in the structure with memory card holder and slot. The Note3 is built like an open box and the iPhone is close to a cube. That cube closed design alone should make the iPhone MANY times more rigid and stronger but yet... Man, imagine if the iphone actually had a non structural removable back and and an accessible battery cavity how weak it would be.
You can use a car analogy and compare how rigid a convertible is to a car with a rigid roof or you can just play with a cardboard box with the top taped shut and with the top open and see the difference in its flex and strength.
Yes, I looked at the URL. The key difference here is that the phones of other models that were reported bending were largely "I sat on it" type scenarios (including one asshole who sat on his while it was in a cupholder), while many of the reports I've seen of the iphone 6 have often been in the front pocket. Sure, there were others that said "it spontaneously bent itself" but I'm betting those are "I sat on it, but I really don't want to say that". Yes, all phones bend, and as I qualified if large amounts of stress (or strain as Captain Pedantic in another response would have it) is applied, then they will break and stay that way. My point is that plastic tends to be a more forgiving medium for that kind of abuse than aluminum (or aluminium as another pedant stated).
Titanium will bend but has better memory to return to the original shape. Carbon fiber should be stiffer to resist the flexing in the first place.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
It's (mostly) not the material, it's the geometry. The bending modulus of any material depends on the cube of its thickness. Making something both thin and rigid is disproportionately hard, no matter what material you make it out of.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's a contradiction I guess. A really good design looks obvious.
...and a company which purports to support creativity, and feels so strongly about rounded rectangles that they introduce them as a graphic primitive on early systems (per Isaacson?), sues another company for daring to use rounded rectangles.
I hope they get sued for infringing on Samsung's design. Samsung went out of their way to find a way to make something equally effective, distinct non-obvious but obvious looking. Now Apple seems to think their screen size and aspects of design are obvious.
Yeah I'm sure they'll be able to patch in more structural integrity. I guess in the quest for thinness they forgot about strength.
They can't, don't be stupid. If they apply a patch to increase the structural integrity field, that will negatively affect the battery life or they would have turned it up in the first place. Those force fields really eat into the battery life. The Apple Reality Distortion field is bad enough.
Except it's not. You are right about "alumium", however.
It is the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) standard international name, though they recognise Aluminum as an alternative.
Do you mean things like: potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and strontium?
No, things like molybdenum, tantalum, lanthanum, and platinum.
Also hydrogen, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, silicon, phosphorous, sulfur, chlorine, argon, manganese, iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, arsenic, bromine, krypton, silver, tin, iodine, xenon, gold, mercury, lead, bismuth, astatine, radon.
In current usage and also in the Latin names for the elements, both -ium and -um are used frequently as endings for metallic elements.