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."

Comments

So much for Apple's "better design"

[bogaboga]

I would like to hear what Apple fan boys especially in the media have to say about this. There's one particular Apple zealot who wrote this , praising Apple's design as still the best. I will wait for his take.

Don't count on it...

[Ecuador]

I've personally had 3 iPhone 4 & 4S's get the dreaded "wifi grayed out" issue where your wifi, bluetooth and gps stop working. It was so common that dozens of forum threads involved long discussions about it (you can still find them easily - and also on ebay devices with the problem) and even Apple had a page about it where they offered as a solution to "reset your network settings". Obviously this did nothing, as it was discovered the problem was the temperature sensor was malfunctioning and disabling the wireless module (which took down BT, GPS as well) and once your one year warranty was over you were out of luck with Apple. What's crazy is that the temperature sensor was not enabled with the shipping iOS of the iPhone 4 (possibly the iPhone 4S as well), but Apple enabled it from either iOS 5 or iOS 6 (I forget - but people not upgrading never had the problem), so they could disable it again if they wanted to. But they did not want to, my company purchased 3 iPhones for me because they were all failing the same way (after being used only in the office, sitting on a desk, occasionally debugging iOS apps), so it was good money for Apple.
Apple won't fix a widespread problem even if it is just a firmware update for them, so don't count on a solution (other than offering you the newest iPhone perhaps with a "generous 10% discount" if you are "lucky").

Re:The common denominator

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd be surprised how frequently Apple's pieces of shit go through repair stores. If you so much as look at them wrong, they'll crack or break. If you work in a mixed Apple/PC environment, go ahead and ask how often Apple's shit has to be repaired. You'd be amazed.

Remember Antennagate? Bendgate? Screengate? (Different Screengate, this one was MacBook Pros having their displays turning all blotchy.) There was a time when recommended advice for failing MacBook Pros was to try baking them briefly to see if that would resolve the soldering issues!

Apple is frequently plagued with quality problems that rival the Xbox 360. But for some reason, people keep buying their crap and they keep on getting a pass, despite making some of the worst quality hardware available.

Re:I-Beams

[LynnwoodRooster]

Making a phone thicker adds minimal structural material. Only around the edges. More volume internally, but actual structural material increase is negligible. Stiffness of the phone increases with the cube of thickness, so a small increase in thickness = more volume = infinitesimal increase in structural material = massive increase in stiffness. And you can put more battery in that extra volume, too...

Going from an 8mm thick phone to a 10mm thick phone may increase structural materials by 5%, but you gain 73% more stiffness and 25% more internal volume.