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Apple Is Still Ignoring One of the Biggest iPhone Engineering Flaws of All Time: 'Touch Disease' (slashdot.org)
Jason Koebler, writing for Motherboard: As Apple is preparing to ship its brand new iPhone, the company continues to ignore one of the biggest hardware defects to ever plague its smartphone line. Just two years after it was released, the touchscreens of thousands upon thousands of iPhone 6 Pluses are completely losing their functionality under normal use, which experts say is the long-term effect of the engineering flaw that gave us "bendgate." By most accounts, dead touchscreens have become an iPhone 6 Plus epidemic, and yet the company has not commented on it, leaving consumers uninformed and harming independent repair businesses. In many cases, Apple has charged hundreds of dollars to replace a broken phone with a refurbished one that is subject to the same engineering defect that caused the phone to break in the first place. A lawsuit has been filed against Apple, claiming the company "has long been aware of the defective iPhones," but continues to do nothing about it. "Notwithstanding its longstanding knowledge of this design defect, Apple routinely has refused to repair the iPhones without charge when the defect manifests," the lawsuit reads. "Many other iPhone owners have communicated with Apple's employees and agents to request that Apple remedy and/or address the Touchscreen Defect and/or resultant damage at no expense. Apple has failed and/or refused to do so." As for how many iPhones are affected by this? It's hard to tell for sure. But according to an Apple Insider report that cites anonymous Genius Bar employees at four large Apple stores, 11 percent of all iPhone-related service issues at those stores were related to Touch IC problems, and Touch IC issues made up about a third of all iPhone 6 Plus-related problems at those stores.
The iPhone 4 and 4S had a temperature sensor that would fail easily (usually in a couple of years, so outside your standard warranty) and would lead to the "wifi grayed out" issue (google it, the thousands of posts from that time should still be there, along with many iphone 4/4s listed on ebay etc with a non working wifi) - since the wireless module was disabled (taking bluetooth and gps with it). The official response from Apple was "reset your network settings", while users found that temperature shock (phone in freezer, then blow-drier etc) would "fix" it for a while. I keep a phone from each generation for testing purposes, my original 4 had failed that way, it was out of warranty and I replaced it with a 4S (fortunately company bought), which failed the same way and was replaced with a refurb unit, which, quite naturally also failed just outside warranty (all three phones were permanently on a desk and got a few hours of debugging/testing usage per month). What is infuriating, apart from the fact that Apple didn't care probably because their average customer was happy to just move on to iPhone 5 etc, is that it seems that it would be very easy to fix by software, ignoring the temperature sensor. I am not just saying it is easy, IIRC the iPhone 4 included the sensor without software support when it first came out, so whoever stayed on the original iOS version (was it 5?) did not have any issues regardless whether their sensor was working or not!
Let's see how my iPhone 6 plus does... It also gets very little use for some testing (I prefer Android as a personal phone), so the screen is fine so far.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Why would they fix this? More broken phones == more new phones sold in their mind. If it happens after 2 years, in many places that is just outside of the warranty period on your product so they are not legally obligated to _fix_ your phone anymore.
My counter example is that 2 months ago Apple replaced the logic board in my early 2011 MacBook Pro totally for free, under the replacement plan for the design flaws in that system. And I didn't even buy this computer new, I bought it as a refurb from Apple, and the Apple Care that I bought when I purchased the computer had run out a long ago as well.
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Joke as much as you want, but iPhone7 is as thin as iPhone6, so it might be subject to the same flexing that cracks solder joints in 6.
If you've been following the news, pre-order demand for the iPhone 7 has been exceeding all expectations. Originally most analysts believed demand for the iPhone 7 would be tepid because by all measures it's a marginal update over the 6s/6+. Then the day after the iPhone 7 was announced T-Mobile launched a free upgrade program that allowed iPhone 6 users to upgrade their phones to a 7 simply by turning their 6 in...along with committing to service for 2-years. This is the first time such a huge subsidy has been offered on a single phone purchase ever since subsidies were discontinued in the USA market (ironically by T-Mobile with their "uncarrier" promotion). On the same day T-Mobile announced the free upgrade, Verizon and AT&T followed as well.
It might just be that the carriers are using this promotion as way to compete and steal customers from each other, how they used to do before phone subsidies were stopped, and will eat the upgrade cost themselves. On the other hand, it might just be a sneaky way for Apple to get a bunch of these future-diseased iPhone 6's out of circulation, to allow them to avoid a massive recall. Apple kills two birds with one stone with this strategy - they take back the 6, which they can fix and resell into overseas markets that can't afford brand-new iPhones anyway and where Apple has been killed by lower-priced Android offerings - and they goose domestic demand for an otherwise-tepid release of the iPhone 7. The strategy may be working - Apple's stock price is up over 15% since T-Mobile and others announced the upgrade program.