Slashdot Mirror
Class Action Lawsuit Grows Over iPhone 6 Plus 'Touch Disease' (vice.com)
Nearly 10,000 people have joined a class action lawsuit against Apple over the screen-freezing "touch disease" afflicting many iPhone Six Plus phones. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard:
Lawyers who filed a class action lawsuit against the company in California earlier this fall have signed on three additional law firms to support their case, and an additional class action lawsuit related to the issue has been filed against Apple in Utah... Apple will not perform logic board-level repairs for consumers, which require soldering and reseating of millimeter-size components. This means the only Apple-sanctioned "fix" for a touch diseased phone is to buy a new one... Apple has been replacing touch diseased iPhone 6 Pluses with $329 refurbished ones, some of which are showing symptoms of touch disease within days or weeks of being replaced.
Despite contacting Apple five separate times, the reporter has yet to receive any official response, although "I have gotten hundreds of emails from consumers who have had to buy new phones to replace their broken iPhone 6 Pluses."
Despite contacting Apple five separate times, the reporter has yet to receive any official response, although "I have gotten hundreds of emails from consumers who have had to buy new phones to replace their broken iPhone 6 Pluses."
Samsung has courage to issue massive recall. Apple has courage to remove headphone jack.
This is what you get. It repeats over & over. We all know the difference between ignorant and stupid. Keep buying Apple so I can keep laughing at you and pre-judging you. When I see that logo I know I am dealing with an idiot. /discuss
We've both agreed that the next time we get them replaced, they're both going on Craigslist
You're selling broken phones to people on Craigslist, but how dare someone sell a broken phone to you? You're part of the problem.
My wife and I both bought the 6+ when it came out.
I'm on my 9th replacement unit. She's on her 7th.
Assuming that this story is correct, and the fact that most with the phone never experience the described problem, it is quite obvious that you are doing something destructive with your phones to get that many to fail.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Not necessarily. On the PCB there is a controller whose contacts eventually come loose and that is the fault here. The OP says he and his wife are both heavy users of their respective phones, which could indicate that the phones go through a lot of contraction - and expansion - cycles due to heating up and cooling down, thus likely hastening the process of those contacts coming loose. A user who doesn't use their phone that much also won't see the issue that quickly.
I've experienced similar issues myself several times, like e.g. the tablet I have got replaced by the manufacturer after its WiFi-chipset lost contacts due to the tablet heating; the tablet had worked great for half a year or so, but I got the Android-version of X-Com and played it quite a lot, then during the middle of one play-session the tablet lost WiFi-connection. After rebooting the tablet WiFi was gone, the system couldn't find WiFi-hardware at all. And these old laptops I have: one of them had a loose connection to the display and one of them had the connections from the GPU to the PCB loose -- both fixed with a bit of a heat-gun applied at the right spot to reflow the solder.
Hell no. We are not talking about a 100W CPU/GPU, we are talking about a touch controller IC that uses almost no power. Thermal cycling due to regular use is not an issue. I am not saying that the solder connection is not to blame, just that the cause of the problem is not thermal cycling. If one is having repeated failures then they are obviously carrying the phone in such a way that it bends. The back pocket is the worst place to carry a phone, but the front pocket can also be bad. Some people do not even realize they are doing it. But one thing is certain, if you have 9 successive failures, it's you. Better odds of winning a lottery then having 9 successive failures -- or at least it is close.
I noticed that the iPhone 7 is not any thinner then the 6+. A tiny bit thicker even. This bodes well for the durability of the 7 so it is possible Apple learned from their mistake. Not that the 6+ is defective, but it could definitely be stronger.
Apple first sells the customer an expensive phone with a serious engineering defect, then adds insult to injury by replacing it by one infused with somebody else's snot. Nothing is done about the customer's wasted time or poor user experience. Classy or not classy? I leave that determination to the interested reader. Keep in mind that a new unit costs Apple much less than it costs the user.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.