Some Apple iPhone 6s and 6s Plus Smartphones Mysteriously Powering Down

MojoKid writes: Apple's iPhone 6s and 6s Plus were two of the most highly anticipated smartphones to launch so far this year. The excitement surrounding Apple's new refresh cycle flagships was so great that Apple reported record first weekend sales, with 13 million devices finding their way to customers. However, it appears that some of those customers are having a puzzling issue with their brand new iPhones. Owners are reporting that their phones are turning off randomly when left alone — even when the smartphones have sufficient battery remaining. "New Phone 6s 128GB turned off for no reason the last two nights," wrote Joachim Frey in an Apple discussion thread. "In the morning you then have to push the power-on button for a long time to get it started."

Comments

Are they actually powered down?

[drinkypoo]

Are these devices actually powering down, or are they entering deep sleep and not coming back? I only ask because that sort of thing is actually quite common on mobiles. I became familiar with it because I bought a used Transformer Prime (TF201) to dive into the wide wide world of Android tablets, it was priced nicely and I'd rather a slightly old mainstream SoC than a new but support-is-only-in-Chinese spanking new one, and with the "best" (highest-performing) kernel some but not all units suffer from a "Sleep of Death" failure where they exhibit precisely the same behavior as is described here in the summary. Holding down the power button for ten seconds or so forces a reset. I am running a different kernel (Omni-V1.1+) than what comes with the custom ROM ("KatKiss", now v28, based on 5.1.1 LMY48P) because the included kernel (GRIMLOCK 5.1-lite) causes SoD and the normal alternate kernel (GRIMLOCK 5.1 (not lite)) causes display corruption due to excessive overvolting... which causes me to pucker.

OK, I broke down and RTFA, and the same question is raised in the article. I'm gonna go ahead and guess that it's still on, but not returning from sleep.

Re:Are they actually powered down?

[Gaygirlie]

Agreed, unwanted shutdowns seem to be a thing with mobile devices in general.

I wouldn't quite agree. Most often I see it happening when people are using custom ROMs on Android and the kernel-dev screwed up with timings or undervolts the device a bit too much when it goes idle and it basically crashes when it goes to sleep. There are the occasional SoCs that got through the testing at the factory, but when in actual use they still end up crashing during sleep due to lower clocks than usual, but usually raising the clocks slightly fixes that. I would assume all it takes for Apple to fix this is a quick kernel-patch.

It's anecdotal evidence, sure, so take what you will from it, but I certainly haven't experienced sleep-of-death on any of my devices nor have I heard of anyone in my circles having such and therefore I find it hard to believe it was some sort of common issue.

Re:I'm shocked.

[dgatwood]

Apple hardware has been getting shoddier and shoddier since Jobs kicked the bucket.

You're imagining things.

• Many PowerBook Wallstreet machines had to be cracked open every couple of weeks to reseat the hard drive whenever it disconnected themselves from the motherboard. Others shot sparks in the back of the machine because the shielding near the power supply connector slipped sideways and shorted things out. One entire model was IIRC basically recalled en masse to crack open the screens and epoxy the video display cables' connectors in place because they kept coming loose during normal use.
• The original (black) power cords on the PowerBook G3 series were recalled en masse because of reports of overheating. The cables also kept breaking between the ferrite bead and the connector. These may have really been the same failure....
• The replacement (yo-yo) power cords on the PowerBook G3 series had so many internal cable failures (leading to scorch marks from the tiny electrical arcs inside the cables) that they were nicknamed "sparky" by folks in the know.
• The white iBook was notorious for GPU failures (with many customers going through several logic boards per year), as was the first MacBook Pro.
• The first G5 PowerMac had horrible power supply noise problems that led not only to audible noise, but also problems with internal and external professional audio recording equipment.
• The first two generations of MacBook and MacBook Pro cables (the non-L-shaped versions) were notorious for breaking internally near the connector.

Note that all of those product releases happened under SJ.