Slashdot Mirror
Consumer Reports: New iPhones Not As Bendy As Believed
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past several days, we've been hearing reports about some amount of users noticing that their brand new iPhone 6 Plus is bending in their pockets. The pictures and videos shown so far have kicked off an investigation, and Consumer Reports has done one of the more scientific tests so far. They found that the iPhone 6 Plus takes 90 pounds of pressure before it permanently deforms. The normal iPhone 6 took even less: 70 lbs. They tested other phones as well: HTC One (M8): 70 lbs, LG G3: 130 lbs, iPhone 5: 130 lbs, Samsung Galaxy Note 3: 150 lbs. The Verge also did a report on how Apple torture-tests its devices before shipping them. Apple's standard is about 55 lbs of pressure, though it does so thousands of times before looking for bends. One analysis suggests that Apple's testing procedure only puts pressure on the middle of the phone, which doesn't sufficiently evaluate the weakened area where holes have been created for volume buttons. Consumer Reports' test presses on the middle of the device as well.
<tt>Consumer Reports: The iPhone users wearing skinny jeans aren't really as skinny as they believed.</tt>
The World is Yours.
There should be a minimum charge (like another $199) and a replacement phone be provided. I once had an iPhone that cracked near the camera lens and apple replaced it for free because it was a known defect. Has anyone had an experience where apple didn't replace the phone? I didn't have AppleCare either.
As is the case a lot (not all) of the time with Apple. They're worth a lot in click-bait, so what you do is try to find something outrageous to say about a popular product, put adverts on the page to generate you cash, and try and profit from the massive public interest in yet another Apple product...
Or maybe I'm getting too cynical in my old age.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
So, if a six year old kid puts an iPhone 6 in his back pocket once, or if a medium size dog sits on it, no immediate problems.
That's good to know!
Pounds isn't a unit of pressure, and by pressure I doubt they mean bending stress.
If they only test the phone on the middle, what's the point? Try applying the pressure where the volume buttons are. What people want to know is whether there's a weak point or not, not whether or not the middle of the phone is weak.
Wait, wait, wait...
iPhone 5: 130lbs. force to deform
iPhone 6+: 90 lbs. force to deform -> 30% less force
iPhone 6: 70 lbs. force to deform -> 46% less force
A reduction in resistance to deformation of nearly one third to one half over previous models and they are supposedly "not as bendy as believed"? WTF? That's a recall class problem in my book.
90 pounds is probably nothing when you consider the phone is being sold in the American market, where being sat on by an average member of the public should probably be measured in tons.
55 pounds per square inch, is this 110 pounds over half a square inch? 220 pounds over one forth an inch? 11 pounds over 5 square inches?
Read it again. People are accustomed to treating their iPhones in a certain way (storage-wise), but the 6 bends at nearly HALF the pressure of the 5. That's the crux of the problem. The 6 is a step backwards in strength. The larger size in part of it, since there's more leverage potential, but LG and Samsung seem to have solved that problem. No, it's not made of cheese, as some users seem to have reported, but it will bend under circumstances that the 5 would not.
the test is ok, but what *really* counts is how the product performs for ordinary users under ordinary conditions; any darn geek worth his salt can maintain a BSD box; your grandma prefers iOS
So, if the phones are bending in real world situations, they are by definition defective
I might add, as someone who is anti apple, that apple has a long, long history of defective hardware: the crappy power supply plugs for laptops, the battery on the first gen ipod, etc etc etc
for a company that sweats the details, they get an awful lot of hardware wrong
Who thinks it's okay to sit on their phone? Why do people think they ought to be able to? It literally makes no sense. It's an electronic device with a glass screen. If I handed someone a sheet of glass and said, "put this in your back pocket and sit on it!" they'd refuse.
But a phone? Oh, absolutely! Shit, wait, no! It broke?!?!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
One analysis? Every documented case of the issue shows that the bending occurs at a specific weakpoint that is not in the middle of the device. What fucking idiot would test for this weakness by only bending the device in the middle?
Consumer Reports' test presses on the middle of the device as well. Oh joy, a whole team of professional fucking idiots.
I'm sorry, but after seeing several of the pictures of deformed phones, it looks pretty clear to me that the victims of this "weakness" have been carrying their phones in their ass pockets and have spent quite a bit of time sitting on them. The solution is simple, get rid of your silly skinny jeans and get some pants with roomy front pockets. Sheesh
oh, and as far as people getting replacements, if i used me phone to prop up my wobbly kitchen table, i wouldn't expect a free replacement.
Obviously, the consumer reports testing was completely scientific, after all, they are known to be on the side of the consumer, right? It is nothing less than astonishing that the HTC One happened to tie the iPhone 6 exactly. And of course, this video must have been faked.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Given that Consumer Reports are the ones who were behind the antennagate affair, I would not think that Apple would or could pay them to write anything good about them. This is confirmation, not as bendable as believed!
Our precious HTC bends before the iPhone 6+ where is the outrage. ... Oh sorry android is sacred in this crowd. Come on slashdoters we are such google sheep.
Strawman. At least some of the reports of bending were from people claiming they put the phones in their front pockets.
Well hello, Counter Strawman.
In reality the 6 plus works fine in front pockets - I know. I've been using it for days and there's not even a hint of bending from having the phone in your pockets.
Furthermore that was the point of the tests consumer reviews did, under normal packet use these things are not going to bend - especially in front pockets.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It doesn't take much pressure at all to bend/break an iPhone 6 Plus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
but the 6 bends at nearly HALF the pressure of the 5
Neither figure matters if the pressure actually put on the phone in your pocket is 1/10th of 55 lbs.
To phrase it differently since you seem to have a personality tailor-made for being "misled by statistics", if the only force a device undergoes is 10-20lbs, why does it matter if a device can sustain a million pounds of force, or 30,
Remember that in realty Apple's has reports of just six actual phones being bent.
I have a 6plus and have been using it in my pocket. After sitting or leaning over or whatever, there is zero bend or even flex to the thing. To actually bend it would take enough force I'd be concerned about my own structural integrity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This video is a real public service.
Apple's claims about this only happening to nine phones, out of 10 million, are extremely dubious.
This is the second time this guy has done this with a new iPhone.
If they only test the phone on the middle, what's the point?
A) Most people with phones in the back pocket would have strain excerpted roughly from the middle, not some offset point.
B) With the 6 Plus the distance from the center to the volume buttons is so small I doubt there would be any change in the results. Forces distributed across the device find the weakest point even if it is offset.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
but /. articles initiate a lot of static in the information band.
So, if the phones are bending in real world situations, they are by definition defective
Except they aren't.
Apple sold 10 *million* phones over the weekend. Of those, Apple says they have six complaints. And we haven't seen that many pictures from real owners.
So the reality is that the iPhone 6 is not defective, a few have undergone more extreme forces than is reasonable. In the end a large flat object can be broken, that's just physics and no amount of design will change that.
If you plan to put ANY phone through more extreme forces than normal, get an Otterbox and call it a day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
The guy from Unbox Therapy, angry at the accusations that his original video was somehow staged, just posted a new video yesterday. In the new video, he unwraps a brand new iPhone 6+ on the street in Toronto with a handful of random witnesses watching, and again - by placing his thumbs on the back of the phone and applying moderate pressure- IMMEDIATELY produces a 25-30 degree bend in the unit, with the crease forming again at the bottom of the volume control cutouts.
In the new video, the iPhone deformed so badly the screen separated from the body.
He then attempted to bend a Moto X (2014 model) with visibly considerable force applied to it, and couldn't.
Is this really important? You decide. A lot of people - men, particularly - have carried their smartphones in the pockets of their jeans. If you're a big guy, and you have a tiny iPhone 5S in your back pocket and sit down in your car on a 3 hour road trip, the iPhone 5S won't deform because it's thicker, and much shorter in length, therefore providing a much shorter lever for your rump to apply force to. The iPhone 6+ however, being both thinner and significantly taller, provides a much longer lever for your 200+ pounds of man ass to press against the back of the car seat, making it quite conceivable that the iPhone 6+ WOULD have a bending problem in actual consumer use.
This issue has gotten enough viral traction and major media attention that it isn't going to go away. Worse yet for Apple is that unlike Antennagate, this problem won't be solved with a rubber bumper case costing Apple 20 cents manufacturing cost - NO, bent iPhone 6+ units still within their return period or covered by AppleCare are going to cost the company $200+ per unit, according to recent teardown parts costing estimates.
When, as educated tech consumers, are people going to stop confusing "smaller and thinner" as being "more advanced" ? All we are doing here, people, is sacrificing durability and battery life.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
I saw a group of people sitting around daring each other to put some pressure on their phones. No one dared to put anywhere close to enough pressure on any of the phones to bend them. It just feels wrong. But the remarkable thing was that the plastic phones (Nexus 5) made a creaking noise at less then a pound of pressure. The people in the circle that where used to metal phones (iPhone and HTC) where so grossed out by it they quickly handed the phone back to its owner in disgust.
Apple needs to get their ruggedness act together. Meanwhile, here's a real phone, the Caterpillar B15.
Cat B15 tested by users. Dragged behind car. Used to play basketball. (As the ball, not as a computer game.) Dropped off bridge. Run through cement mixer. Frozen in bucket of ice. Run over by car. No problem.
Cat B15 tested by Caterpillar. Dropped into pool of water. Scooped out with heavy equipment. Run over by front end loader. (One of Cat's smaller front end loaders.) No problem.
It's an Android phone. The B15 runs Android 4.2; the new B15Q runs Android 4.4. Price around $300. Available in the US at Home Depot. Unlocked; pick any GSM carrier. T-Mobile works. No annoying carrier-provided apps. Caterpillar preloads apps for ordering Caterpillar heavy equipment parts and renting heavy equipment.
If you have one of these in a pocket, you will break before it will. I carry one of these horseback riding.
One analysis suggests that Apple's testing procedure only puts pressure on the middle of the phone, which doesn't sufficiently evaluate the weakened area where holes have been created for volume buttons.
One analysis? Every documented case of the issue shows that the bending occurs at a specific weakpoint that is not in the middle of the device.
What fucking idiot would test for this weakness by only bending the device in the middle?
Consumer Reports' test presses on the middle of the device as well.
Oh joy, a whole team of professional fucking idiots.
a proper test would require dozens of each brand and model of phone. why don't you donate all of your money to consumer reports so they can afford to do more tests?
Have gnu, will travel.
How mush pressure does it take accounting for body heat? How must does it change for a person who is sweating ? Is this a parameter they test for as well?? How about say rubbing? If a person had the phone in there back pocket it surly is rubbing up and down as a person walks. Or a poor mix of whatever the iphone is made of? don't know I don't own a iphone. Plastic? Bad mixture to save money? metal? mixture changed to save money? Shit most of the stainless steel we get from communist country's is magnetic. Stainless steel is not magnetic.
Jack of all trades,master of none
" This is confirmation, not as bendable as believed!"
Correct, it's even more bendable. The iPhone 5 could take nearly double the force.
Which means the phone got weaker structurally with the upgrade.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
.
While the iPhone 5, the LG G3, and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 are much better in this regard (all >= 130 pounds), with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 at the top of the tests with 150 pounds.
No, it isn't. To properly calculate 'bendability' you have to calculate force moments around the points where it actually bends. If you take a look at the bendgate photos, you'll see that it bends and breaks at the lower end of the volume buttons. This point is about one third down, and the phone is 157mm long, so you have the bending force acting on a lever about 105mm long. Since the torque is proportional to the square of the lever, a much smaller force would be necessary to bend it there than in the middle. Since both consumer reports and Apple apply the force in the middle of the phone, they'll show you a larger force necessary to bend it.
Unfortunately, in your pocket the phone will eventually hit a place where the smaller force will be applied in the "right" spot and it will bend.
I wouldn't ever carry a bare phone or one with just a silicone bumper in a front pocket
I have for years without issue.
And that includes the iPhone plus.
Theres simply not enough force to even come close to flexing the phone, much less bending...
Back pockets are I think more worrisome but even there - the Plus (as the tests show) is pretty damn rigid.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So just get the iPhone 5 then. If you want a bendalbe phone, get the iPhone 6 Plus.
Choice is good.
What fucking idiot would test for this weakness by only bending the device in the middle?
Someone who just bought an iPhone 6 Plus, perhaps?
People who buy into the whole Apple lifestyle thing tend to be quite resistant to admitting flaws in Apple's products. There are bound to be a few of that sort working at Consumer Reports.
So it's a hype?
Who would have thought that!
I don't really understand why Consumer Report doesn't know the difference between force and mass. You measure force in Newtons (N) and mass in kilograms (kg) or, even less scientific because it's not a SI unit, pounds (lb).
-- Cheers!
The reason the iPhone 6 bends so easily in *manual* stress tests is because your fingers natural wrap the metal case and pull it away from the screen. When this happens, the screen itself plays no part in the rigidity of the phone and the metal backing bends like putty (as can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... )
If the Consumer Reports test had moved the blocks either side of the phone to the edges of the screen, the phone would have deformed with far less force (as all force would've been acting on the paper-thin metal). This matters because the stress applied to phones when in your pocket are uneven and focused on the phone edges.
Apple should have designed the phone in such a way that the metal directly attached itself to the glass and both reinforced each other.
Have you instrumented your ass, because you have nothing, at all, to back up that assertion.
Wrong.
It'll go great with my offline-only Xbox 360.
Came looking for this: http://www.willitblend.com/
Left feeling disappointed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"The Verge also did a report on how Apple torture-tests its devices before shipping them. Apple's standard is about 55 lbs of pressure" Oh, now I understand the issue. It has to do with how we define a 'torture' test. For Apple and/or the Verge, apparently it's applying the weight of a 6 year old child to your phone. Guess we can all hand our phones to the kids and grandkids while driving/sitting.
So it's a hype?
Who would have thought that!
Ironically this is all about Public relations and nothing about the truth, and nobody thinks its apple can tell the truth anymore.. Apples standard to simply lie about everything from taxies to white plastic to antennas to how there devices should be used.If finally catching up with them.
I look forward to the truth coming out.
Has anyone else noticed that the test machines used to test the phones are all running windows?
That is pretty funny.
I read the articles about people's phones bending, but the one thing I never saw was what pocket was the bent phone in? Was it in the back pocket where the person was sitting on it for hours? Well of course the thing would bend then. Hell, who puts an expensive device in their back pocket, sits on it for hours, and then is surprised when it's bent or broken?
they test the phone in it's strongest point... while the real life test is done in the weakest point... u need less than 20 pounds to bend the i6 and i6 plus in the zone of the volume buttons, where the case is very thin and not reinforced.
sure, if apple tries to bend the phone by the screen it won't bend neither, the idea is to test the chain by the weakest link
even people with no engineering degrees will detect where the iphone 6 weakest structural point is located at plain sight... and you could say apple design team won't realize that and just "test" it somewhere else????
i'm sure someone's head will roll in there, just like the heads that rolled when imaps launched
I wonder how much it cost them to get the results they wanted, and have them published.
If you think CR is still impartial, you are in the wrong century..
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Who thinks it's okay to sit on their phone?
I do. Of course I set it to vibrate first, then tell those around me that I can't find it and ask them to call my phone.
After seeing an impartial test by Consumer Reports I have to conclude that the reports of bent iPhone 6's are probably a ploy by Samsung or some other competitor to discourage people from buying the Apple product.
I haven't seen one bent to the point of damage, but I've held the regular iPhone 6 and I can flex it with one hand. It VASTLY more flexible than my nexus5.
Stop sitting on your phone, fatass! :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Where did this word "bendy" come from? It sounds like a Gumby pal. Isn't it "bendable" or "flexible" or "pliable"?
Somebody is trying to make English bendy.
Table-ized A.I.
in your pocket the phone will eventually hit a place where the smaller force will be applied in the "right" spot and it will bend.
You're putting it in your pocket wrong.
Burn.
consumer reports broke the whole antenna-gate thing specifically so that noone would suspect that they were really paid Apple shills.
What's it like to be an idiot?
My experience has been that Consumer Reports is no longer a competent organization.
They denied many people had them but eventually fixed it anyway with a free bumper.
That didn't *fix* anything though. As was widely reported at the time, ALL phones lose signal dramatically with a death grip, iPhone or no, even with a case.
I never used a case or bumper with the "Antenna phone" and need had an issue dropping calls.
The free bumper was just PR.
I imagine somewhere in Apple's labs they are testing strengthened cases
Possibly, but I think that will only come into play with the iPhone 6s. I'm sure they will consider it more strongly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Android phones bend too.
As anyone could have found with Google before they tried to make this a thing about Apple.
Just be aware and it'll be fine, with any phone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm a 2-decade subscriber to Consumer Reports, but sometimes they just get their science (engineering) completely wrong.
A force doesn't bend an object. A moment does. That is, the propensity to bend is not proportional to the force applied. It's proportional to the force times the lever arm. i.e. A 90 pound force applied to one point on an object may not bend it, while applied to a different point it can easily bend it. So the bigger (longer) phones were actually resisting greater moments, even though the force was the same.
Another problem is the test they came up with supported the phone at both ends, while pressing down in the middle. Basically a simply supported beam. The important thing to note here is that in such a config, both sides of the phone are resisting the bending moment. If it took 90 pounds of force applied to the middle, then the left side was resisting 45 pounds, the right side 45 pounds.
When a phone in your pocket is bent, it is in a cantilever configuration. One end of the phone is held rigidly, while the other end is free-floating. If the phone reached sufficient deflection to permanently bend in a simply supported config at 90 pounds, it will reach the same deflection at just 45 pounds in an equivalent cantilever (more precisely, 45 pounds pushing one way at one end, while your body weight holds the other end of the phone in place). You can try it in the calculators I've linked. Give both the same load, make the cantilever half the length, and you'll see the cantilever has twice the deflection. Make the load on the cantilever half that of the simply supported beam, and they have the same deflection.
(The actual force and moment diagram when you're sitting on your phone is a lot more complicated, since the force is distributed along the phone instead of all at one point. Integrating this is trivial for anyone who's taken a structural engineering course, but explaining it is beyond the scope of a forum post.)
I feel the need to repeat someone else's story.
Anyway, dude once said he used to work for a manufacturer of household refridgerators who was one day having a meeting to decide whether to make their product worse so that it would test better with consumer reports. The issue was that consumer reports always tested refridgerators in 90 degree fahrenheit houses, but that their refridgerators were optimized for 75 degrees as that's a much more likely indoor temperature.
It remided me of one article I read in the magazine when it was presented to me in one of my classes, where they were testing VHS tapes for recording quality. They mentioned that in the VCRs they were using, they had disabled any circuitry to reduce noise or otherwise enhance the playback. It always struck me as an odd thing to do, since I'd prefer a tape with problems that my VCR can fix during playback to one with problems that it cannot.
Kind of a stupid thing to test things in ways in which they won't be used by the consumer.
In the case of the phones, they should have tested each not by bending in a specific place, but by bending in all places, and reporting the lowest force required in any position to provide a bend. After all, if you apply 50 pounds of force to one side of your phone one day, you'll probably provide it to the other side tomorrow, and to the middle the day after that, and so wherever that weak spot is, you'll eventually find it and break your phone.
To only test the phones by applying force in one specific place is mythbusters-quality experimentation, where the only standard seems to be that, if you can state it, it's a legitimately useful experimental protocol.
Consumer Reports always kowtows to corporations anyways
Guilty as charged, torque is proportional to the lever length, not the square. But I was calculating moments of inertia of a weird 3D blob while being drunk last night, so I hope you forgive me.
With the devices sitting inside their owner's pockets, next to large chunks of warm flesh, how is that affecting the required force required to bend the devices?
It's just the Danegeld, but over the internet.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
so consumer reports used a fancy machine and they waited till the device broke in half before making a determination of what weight causes the break to happen.
it simply doesn't take 90 pounds of pressure for minor bends to happen. CR only cared about what weight made the entire thing break into half.
once bent at lower pressures, it doesn't break into half, but it doesn't go back to it's optimal shape. this is what BendGate is about.
here is a video of a second bend test done on iPhone 6 Plus. they also try to bend a Moto X which doesn't permanently bend at all, under heavier pressure.
fuck Consumer Reports! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ3Ds6uf0Yg
Remember that in realty Apple's has reports of just six actual phones being bent.
Riiiight....becuase Apple has never lied about product defects and never, ever deleted a forum post that pointed them out.
No sig today...
In the end a large flat object can be broken, that's just physics and no amount of design will change that.
If you bother to look at the videos you'll see they all seem to bend right where the volume buttons are. That's called a "weak point" and a certain amount of design will change that (and without violating the laws of physics!)
No sig today...
Maybe you wear baggy pants with elastic waistband.
Hipsters prefer the "two pin plug" look.
No sig today...
...the iPhone 6 Plus takes 90 pounds of pressure before it permanently deforms.[/quote]
It's nice to know that someone very well informed has written this article.
Even though it is a design flaw, apple should build or preferably buy an exoskeleton case for the phone and give it free to users on request. Gee the X box from Microsoft required external coolers to be purchased by customers to avert certain failure. Apple has deep pocketa. Give users a bend proof case. Simple
no one is looking at how the body ie back pocket carrying is putting the point of contact on the phone - it wont always be the middle-look at mens wallets their credit/bank cards get bent in all kinds of ways depending on how they carry it, the type of wallet, and alignment of card to the point of contact.
But don't you think it's kind of crappy that the iPhone 6 is so flimsy, especially for the price?
If it were flimsy, perhaps , but in reality it's not - some Android phones are worse, and if you pick one up you can tell "flimsy" does not describe it at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Anyone who sits on their phone gets what they deserve.
"there is nothing wrong with the antenna on the iPhone 4."