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

First Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sent by my iPh

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?

[Rosyna]

If you go to Settings -> Privacy -> Diagnostics & Usage -> Diagnostics & Usage Data on an iPhone that suddenly powered off, the reason why might be in one of those logs. For example, it may be something like a kernel panic or a thermal event (getting too hot and then being forced to shut down). Both events will be logged.

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.

Lack of Fondling

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Clearly the phone is just unhappy at not being fondled constantly, since most people can't put the fucking thing down for more than 2 minutes.

The phones detects that the owner, err, sorry- the "renter" isn't constantly touching, fondling, and using the device, and after 10 whole minutes goes into "Snit Fit" mode where it sulks.

10 minutes after that it goes into the "Why You Don't Love Me Anymore" mode, and after a final 10-minute grace period it decides that it's been abandoned for a newer, shinier wife, errr, I mean "phone", and shuts down in a fit of rage (but not before posting to Facebook that you smell, have a tiny dick, and hate your mother).

Re:Lack of Fondling

[willworkforbeer]

Clearly the phone is just unhappy at not being fondled constantly, since most people can't put the fucking thing down for more than 2 minutes.

Careful, you'e talking about my precious.

Re: First Pest!

[TheRealHocusLocus]

C: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
O: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting. Powered off I mean.
C: Look, matey, I if me mum canna call me at night the phone is deaad. I know a dead phone when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
O: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords.
C: PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he turn 'imself off the moment I got 'im home?
O: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable display and feaatures idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
C: The features don't enter into it. It goes dead.
O: Nononono, no, no! 'E's just off is all. Such a dimwit h'ta come in to the store to learn how ts turn a phone on? Gaaarsh.

Re:+++ Breaking News +++

[thegarbz]

When shipping 13 million complex computing units, some may be faulty.

People would happily accept this as an excuse if company's policies weren't so highly toxic towards user hardware. Like the classic response is always: have you restored it to factory defaults. Well no, not I haven't, I figured you may be able to tell me something more than nuke all my settings and hope the problem is gone.

MacBook Black

[SumDog]

Reminds me of my old MacBook black which liked to turn itself off randomly. My old housemate had a problem with his as well. There were a ton of blog posts back in the day about this being a physical problem; about heat causing part of the case to expand and a capacitor on the motherboard would push up against something causing it to short and shut-off. That was only one of the theories. There were tons of others. It might have been several different design faults depending on the model/generation.

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.