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Some iPhone X Displays Plagued By Mysterious 'Green Line of Death' (thenextweb.com)
Some iPhone X owners are reporting a random green line appearing on their displays. According to The Next Web, "the defect has already started to take on the endearing 'Green Line of Death' moniker." From the report: Several users across Apple forums and social media have reported the error -- I've counted over a dozen accounts, and MacRumors mentions it's read "at least 25" such reports. Oddly, the issue doesn't appear to affect users immediately, only showing up after some time with regular usage. In some cases it alternates with a purple line, for variety. It generally appears towards the right or left sides of the display, and sometimes it simply disappears altogether. Weird. Either way, it appears to be a hardware defect affecting a small number of users, and Apple appears to be replacing affected units. Mac Rumors first reported the issue.
Do the phones crash when the line appears? If not, this name makes absolutely no sense.
#DeleteChrome
You're just looking at it the wrong way!
Green line of death, but only because the Slashdot effect was already taken.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It should be named something like "Minus 5 Green Line of Obscured Vision".
Someone on Twitter said it was GameCenter felt trying to come back from the App Style Graveyard.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree, these allegations about faulty iPhone X displays, if true, could be bad. But I heard that the sites reporting on this once used Microsoft computers, so it's probably #fakenews. It's a shame that product flaws are being ginned up by SJWs to try to smear a righteous and godly company like Apple.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just a little bit of the matrix coming undone. Mr Anderson will be by to help you with that soon.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Not really.
It's more that it's a failure that both very visible (a randomly sticking line/column driver) and not fatal (it just messes that line up) and rather unusual, so it's getting attention.
That apparently two/four column drivers can maybe, sometimes, stick, then maybe unstick on their own or maybe require reset... that's sorta impressive at the hardware level. To get *that* close to everything working, but be so close that this happens now and then. It's probably not use damage (physically damaging the interconnect would be permanent and get worse with time), I'm betting either a defect in the display ASIC (occasionally locking up a line) or a defect in display quality control (letting a few units with some just barely working connects through).
Given the rate of failure, this would probably have slipped by nearly any QC above the factory production test level (i.e. anything Apple would be doing).
Reminds me of a local radio station whose transmitter had a very intermittent failure problem... It'd work fine for days, then random lose tx power for a minute. Then keep working fine again. Intermittent faults are the worst.
Samsung is making more money on iPhone X than on their Galaxy phones. If Apple wins a lawsuit, they will get back some of the money they paid Samsung for their engineering capabilities, which Apple doesn't have. Its' the Circle of Life.
lucm, indeed.
I had a Dell monitor develop a similar issue. Dell UltraSharps are individually tested and calibrated so it wasn't malfunctioning at the factory, but after shipment it had a dodgy green column that would flicker on and off, especially when the monitor had been on for a length of time. Turned out to be a mechanical issue; the panel had shifted slightly in the monitor housing, and as the panel warmed up and expanded with use, the pressure was causing one of the column lines to short.
The problem could be similar here; thermal expansion and/or battery swelling may be causing pressure on the display. Since the display is held in place at the edges, the strain would be concentrated there, eventually causing a column line to short or separate.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The Galaxy S7 Edge has a similar defect where a vertical pink line appears on many units. Do an image search or eBay search for that and you'll see what I mean. Given that Apple is using Samsung OLED panels for the X (which is what the S7 Edge is using) it makes me wonder if Samsung has a bigger QC problem on their hands.
You see this failure mode in Samsung phones with an OLED display. And the iPhone X uses a Samsung display.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Seems like it is a bad vertical line driver looking at this.
https://us.community.samsung.c...
One of the vertical line drivers is stuck 'on'. So you get a line mostly in one of the primary colours - R, G or B. Or, less common, a combination of the two.
My S5 is still fine, but for some reason I've seen a few people with battered looking S7s and S8s with the vertical line. Not sure if the battering causes the failure or if some display panels just fail spontaneously.
Incidentally, there's an amusing bit of Apple overcharging for glass
https://www.theverge.com/circu...
The iPhone X went on sale today, and with it, Apple released some information about the phoneâ(TM)s repair pricing â" and like the phone itself, it gets expensive. If you donâ(TM)t have the extended warranty, a screen replacement will cost $279. Thatâ(TM)s more than twice the price of an iPhone 6 screen replacement ($129) and about 65 percent higher than a new iPhone 8 screen ($169). The pricing was first spotted by MacRumors.
If that sounds high, you should be careful not to damage an iPhone X in any other way: all other out-of-warranty repairs will cost $549. Again, thatâ(TM)s a lot more than what other recent iPhones cost to repair. iPhone 8 repairs cost $349 and 8 Plus repairs cost $399. That means if you crack the glass back of the iPhone X (or the iPhone 8), you might just want to live with it.
Appleâ(TM)s extended warranty, AppleCare+, often looks like a pricey upsell. But for iPhone X buyers, it seems like it might be a necessary safety net. Appleâ(TM)s warranty costs $199 for the iPhone X (up from $129 for the iPhone 8 and $149 for the 8 Plus); but while the warranty itself is more expensive, warranty service fees (which apply only when Apple is repairing something with âoeaccidental damageâ) donâ(TM)t go up at all. So an iPhone X can still get a $29 screen repair if itâ(TM)s under warranty, and it can still get a $99 repair for anything else under AppleCare+, too.
So it's $279 for a replacement display out of warranty. Or $29 with warranty. And the warranty costs $199. And all other repairs are a whopping $549.
So if you're the sort of person who cracks the display on your phone, you're going to be paying through the nose for it.
IHS reckons the display assembly is
http://www.businesswire.com/ne...
IHS Markit estimates the cost of the display module, which includes the cover glass, AMOLED panel and Force Touch sensor, at $110.
I.e. Apple make a fair bit of profit out of people dropping their phones. Arguably the reason Apple and Samsung have moved to glass front and back is that glass breaks and repairs are profitable. Also, especially in the Samsung case, it's hard to take the phone apart without damaging expensive bits if you look at the iFixit videos.
I reckon I could get a whole new, or at least 'pre-owned' S5 for less than $279 if I looked around a bit.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Here's two stories that may help you understand.
1. Back in the summer I noticed that the screen of my three-year-old, out of warranty iPhone 6 was bulging out on the left hand side. I checked out the problem on various Apple web sites and determined that it was caused by a swelling battery. I took the phone to the Genius Bar at my local Apple store. The Apple employee took one look at it and explained that the battery was going bad but it would be "too dangerous" to replace it. Instead, for $79 (the price of a replacement battery) they took my failing phone and gave me an identical new (not refurb) iPhone 6. I was out of the store in 20 minutes.
2. A month or so ago a friend of mine (a retired college professor) asked for help with her iPhone. It's an iPhone 5S she bought in 2013 at Walmart with a StraightTalk plan. Let me emphasize this: A 4 year old phone she bought at Walmart. Of course it's out of warranty.
The phone was complaining that it had 0 free storage. She had managed to get so many photos on her phone that it literally had no free storage to do anything. It couldn't send texts or get email. I couldn't fix it so we went to the Genius Bar.
The first person we spoke to was stumped so he asked a superior to help. This Apple employee spent 1 hour and 45 minutes getting the phone working again, including doing a complete factory reset, restoring from iCloud backup, and calling StraightTalk to re-activate the phone. In mid-repair she had to call the manager to say that she was going to postpone her dinner break until she could complete the repair.
Do these stories help you understand why people might want to spend so much on an Apple product? In these two cases, do you think that Apple lived up to their responsibilities to their customers, even though both phones were out of warranty?
Do you think that my friend and I are likely to buy another iPhone when the time comes?
I have a Moto G4 Play phone. Not old. Bought last year. It has ... drumroll please .. a removable battery and micro-SD card.
Battery bulging would just pop off the back cover, worst case. $20 for a new battery, and it pops right in, same as a Blackberry from 10 years ago.
Storage? I can pop in a micro-SD card and expand it. No waiting for 2 hours at the Apple store. Both of the problems that you mentioned weren't intrinsic to the iPhone, but rather caused by Apple's (and many other similar phones') boneheaded designs.