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A Design Defect Is Plaguing Many iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Units (iphonehacks.com)
Evan Selleck, writing for iPhoneHacks (edited and condensed): For many iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners out there in the wild, a design defect is apparently causing some huge issues. Gadget repair firm iFixit has reported about a flaw dubbed "Touch Disease", which it claims is cropping up. With it, owners of the phones are experiencing, to start, a gray bar that appears at the very top of their display. And, for many others, the display itself becomes unresponsive to touch, or less responsive overall. In the blog post, iFixit says the problem stems from issues with the touchscreen controller chip, which is soldered onto the logic board. Interestingly enough, iFixit posits that the same internal design decisions that led to "Endgate" might be causing the issue leading to Touch Disease, too: "In both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the Touch IC chips connect to the logic board via an array of itty-bitty solder balls -- "like a plate resting on marbles," Jessa explains. Over time, as the phone flexes or twists slightly during normal use, those solder balls crack and start to lose contact with the board. "At first, there may be no defect at all. Later you might notice that the screen is sometimes unresponsive, but it is quick to come back with a hard reset," Jessa explains. "As the crack deepens into a full separation of the chip-board bond, the periods of no touch function become more frequent."
Skip to 13:00:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"you're soldering it wrong"
isn't that what nvidia said?
these bga's really scare me. so fragile and so unworkable from a tech POV. I can rework square flat packs but I can't do bga's. I hate them since they are just not really repair-friendly, not to mention its not inspection-friendly.
flat packs with leads flex and bend. bga's are a fucking abortion, especially if they are at all big, in chip size.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Reminder to EU residents, all electronics must come with a minimum 2 year guarantee under EU rules. Each country implements it a little differently, but you have at least a 2 year warranty.
Reminder to UK residents, in the UK the Sale of Goods Act applies. An expensive, high end phone should last 6 years. If it dies after 3 years then Apple can either repair it or offer you a 50% refund, excluding any damage you did and fair wear and tear.
If they argue, mention the Sale of Goods Act (loudly, in their store) and if that fails Small Claims Court.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is the first time I've heard of this problem.
I have an iPhone 6 and many people I know have the 6 or 6s and nobody has reported it that I am aware of. This, to me, suggests that the "many" spoken of in TFS is actually quite a small percentage of iPhone 6/6s owners.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Consumer Reports did some tests:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/09/consumer-reports-tests-iphone-6-bendgate/index.htm
Apple iPhone 6 70 lbs
Apple iPhone 6 Plus 90 lbs
LG G3 130 lbs
Apple iPhone 5 130 lbs
Samsung Galaxy Note 5 150 lbs
So an iPhone 6 is about twice as easy to deform as an iPhone 5 and other manufacturer's high end phones.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
FYI: BGA = Ball Grid Array,
"Ball Grid Array rework is one of the most challenging procedures performed at assembly facilities and repair depots around the world. " ---
http://www.circuitrework.com/f...
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Apple pay isn't on android, by definition. Unless you're talking about the competing Google Pay, which is a different competing standard. And then there's Samsung pay because they have to duplicate everything Google does.
The real question is whether your institution supports it. If your bank, etc, supports Apple Pay but not Google Pay, or vis versa, and you really want that functionality, then your answer is clear, regardless of your brand loyalty.
Also, what is this facetime equivalent you speak of, assuming you're not just talking about Skype?
Samsung Pay is the most supported option out there, as it works with any mag stripe reader. Not just those with NFC in your network... I've never seen a place that will take ApplePay buy NOT Samsung Pay - and I've seen hundreds of places where Samsung Pay works and they do not have NFC so no Apple or Google Pay. If you want convenient payments, go for Samsung Pay - it will work everywhere you use Apple Pay now, and literally hundreds of thousands of places that Apple Pay will not.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Hmm...
*google Samsung Pay*
*goes to Samsung Pay website*
"SAMSUNG PAY IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE ONLY IN THE US AND KOREA" in ginormous 48 point font.
So much for that... :P
Apple pay isn't on android, by definition. Unless you're talking about the competing Google Pay, which is a different competing standard.
You mean Android Pay, not Google Pay. And it's not a different, competing standard. Both Apple Pay and Android Pay use the same NFC technologies and standards.
On the name, I should point out that it's somewhat understandable that you call it "Google Pay", since Android Pay is a successor to Google Wallet, which was Google's original NFC payment solution, released in 2011 (long before Apple Pay). The Google Wallet approach was a little different, though. Because of payment network limitations, Google used a "proxy card" solution, where a Google-issued credit card was what was actually used to pay at the point of sale, and Google then charged your credit card on the backend. That approach had problems both for the user, who might not get full credit from rewards cards, and for Google, who lost money on every transaction due to the difference in fees between the card-present transaction at point of sale, and the card-not-present transaction used for user's payment, but had the supreme advantage that it would work with any credit or debit card. Banks also really disliked the proxy card solution because it threatened to take too much control of the payment systems away from them. With the intermediate routing step Google could have arranged to use any payment system on the back end, and then used its clout to get the point of sale updated to a solution that didn't involve the banks, and removed the banks from the process completely. There's no evidence Google was going to do that, but the banks were afraid of it and chose to make Google's life very hard in all sorts of ways around the NFC proxy card (and its physical, plastic analogue, which Google issued for a while).
Apple waited until networks were ready to do "network tokenization", and until some more banks were ready to handle NFC transactions, both of which are required to enable the Apple Pay model where the payment is done directly against the user's card, with payment clearinghouses routing the the transaction directly to the bank that issued the credit card. Android Pay uses this same model, with the difference that if you have a credit card which was previously used with the Google Wallet proxy card solution, Google "grandfathers" your card in and continues using the proxy. This direct model fixes the disadvantages of the proxy card solution, but means that you can only use cards whose issuers have set up the necessary infrastructure. But these days, lots of them have. In particular, the big bank service providers like First Data have got everything set up so their clients who issue credit cards can do NFC. This means that nearly all small banks and credit unions can do it, and most of the big banks can do it. Some of the big banks, and many of the medium-sized banks still aren't set up.
(Note that I've intentionally left out some details, like the first version of Google Wallet using a direct, non-tokenized approach that only worked with one bank, and some of the other intermediate steps. I figured this was long enough.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yep. BGAs are difficult to rework, but perhaps the real blame for this can be aimed at the EU when they forced the electronics industry to transition to lead free solder 15 years ago, while not touching other industries, like car batteries.
Solder used to be 60%tin 40% lead. Lead was a great modifier to give ductility to solder joints. By going to almost 100% tin, solder joints are now more brittle, thus micro BGAs suffer more from thermal expansion fractures and shear fractures from physical drops.
The crazy thing, is the transition, which cost the industry Billions, was based on unproven science that tin/lead solder leached in ground fill rubbish dumps. It doesn't unless you have acid. But here we are today, stuck with a EU mandated change that increases energy to manufacturer and decreases reliability (see tin asker problem as well).
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