Posted on 09/27/2014 12:04:20 AM PDT by Swordmaker
The verdict is in: You can bend an iPhone 6 Plus. But unless you are really trying to do it, it probably will be fine.
That's the conclusion coming out of phone warranty provider and durability testerSquareTrade, which ran some basic bending "tests" this week on the iPhone 6 Plus at The Washington Post's request after reports circulated that the 5.5-inch phone is warping from the strain of being in people's pockets.
Apple itself on Thursday acknowledged acknowledged that it has received reports of the phone bending. But cases are "extremely rare." Out of the millions of phones sold, Apple said a total of nine customers contacted the company about a bent iPhone 6 Plus.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
But these people apparently just can't help themselves -- they fall all over themselves spewing bile and making stupid comments about a piece of hardware. Unbelievable. It's like they've got a disease that takes over their mind, whenever something Apple comes within their view. They need to buy a life and do something positive with it. It's really a shame. I'm sure that in other respects they're probably nice folks. Right?
That's all I have to say about it, and even these couple of minutes typing were not a good use of my own time. It's a lovely morning, and I'm going to enjoy it without any more of this stuff.
Perhaps ADS? That’s Apple Derangement Syndrome. It is indeed a strange malady.
The reports of bent phone are from being in front not back pocket.. i carry my note 3 in my front pocket
But it is also the phone 6+ .. not iphone 6.
That's significant in the iPhone 6+ is longer, so more leverage and area to distribute force over the length to find a weak point
Having just watched the video the bent point is at the bottom left side button cutout... and the buttons seem to be lower down the body towards the center then the other large format phones..
In large format phones the ability to one hand reach a control is a concern so from an ergonomic perspective putting the buttons lower down the body makes sense..
But again leverage over length makes "closer to the center" bad for your weakest point
So you have the weakest point, the button cutout, closer to the fulcrum point over the longer lever of the 6+.
I want to feel sorry for Apple if this is whats happening..this classic engineering problem your trying to trade off things in this case ergonomic over mechanical requirements..
The thread is about a noted design flaw in a newly teased product. People pointing out and being concerned about this issue are not necessarily Apple haters. They are concerned consumers. If the phone bends, then it can be a potential problem. Deal with the problem instead of attacking those who express reservations What is it about the knee jerk Apple defenders. Are they incapable of realizing that a faceless corporation is capable of screwing up once in a while?
Apples pursuit for thinness got them in this jam. But they all try to make smart phones as thin as possible. Apple pushed it too far....so it seems
Apple tested everything but not some guy walking around with it in his front pocket for two weeks
Truth is i think the fix is moving the button higher up the body.. this would move the weak point of the cutout away from the center and shortens the leverage/ force that can be applied on that point...
But a quick fix so I don’t have to redesign internal layout might be smaller button ..thicker medal in the cutout area.
But then again ..marketing might repackage it from a bug to a feature... or a reason you must buy a case..
fYI I had forgotten about the antenna problem a while back when Apple and Apple fanboys were just telling everyone it was the enduser problem hold their phones wrong
You know more about the design than me. Me just thinking that going thinner and thinner be careful and test test test in real life situation. I am sure it was machine tested
The thing is from an engineering perspective I like a lot apple stuff
Its the Road-apples you get from the marketing and fanboys and the fanboys whine about the flys the road-apples attract ...that is annoying
“Maybe the Chinese aluminum fabricator ran out of the proper aluminum and used what he had to get by for a few thousand iphones”
So Apple had 9 reports of bent phones, out of millions. But other makers have far more reported problems of bent aluminum frames. See some examples here:
Samsung Galaxy S4 screens cracking: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2287882&page=49
Sony Xperia Z1 frames cracking for no reason: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Xperia-Z1-frame-bending-for-no-reason-claim-users_id51383
Nokia Lumia 925 phones bending for no reason: http://forums.wpcentral.com/nokia-lumia-925/261368-bent-aluminum-frame.html
Blackberry Q10 phones bending: http://forums.crackberry.com/blackberry-q10-f272/my-blackberry-bent-up-not-happy-932762/
HTC Evo 4G LTE phones bending for no reason: http://www.pocketables.com/2012/07/warning-dont-sit-on-your-htc-evo-4g-lte.html
Android Opo phones bending: http://www.oppoforums.com/threads/bent-phone.7197/
What’s the problem? I’d have thought a phone that conforms to a teenager’s butt-print when she puts it in her back pocket and sits on it, would be a feature rather than a bug. (Gotta be more useful than all those cracked screens I see on the bus.)
OK smart phones are bending up and curling up all over the world. All brands. Not just Apple.
No, P, it doesn't. Consumers Reports Magazine tested the iPhone 6 Plus and found it was not lacking in strength. It withstood over 90 pounds of pressure before it began to deform, and 110 pounds before the screen came loose from the frame. CU judge all of the phones tested to be sufficiently strong for "typical use."
Only nine iPhone 6 plus have been reported to Apple . . . Out of over 15,000,000 iPhone 6 models sold in the first week and in the hands of the abusive public. Nine. Apple puts their products through exhaustive stress testing before they are put on the market. . . and this "bending" did not occur, under either machine testing, or human hands on testing.
It’s still too big to be a phone. ;-)
If so, you can’t say that Steve Jobs didn’t warn you . . . .And even as Apple released the 6+ it released the smaller 6 - tho even that is larger than Jobs thought a smart phone should be.
While you are engineering small screens, you have to consider that some are more comfortable with smaller print than I am. I have considered smart phone service too expensive for my taste, and the screen size was the icing on that cake. If my ship comes in I may reconsider - and if I do, the larger format will be more to my liking IMHO.
Check my FR profile page for details on why I feel the way I do, if you wish.
There was never anything wrong with the iPhone 4 antenna, Erik. The iPhone 4 had the longest continuous run of any iPhone model in history and the antenna design was NEVER CHANGED. The only area of the world where there was any controversy was in the United States, where a concerted FUD campaign was mounted orchestrated by Google and Samsung to push the release of their new Android phones over Apple's phones and AT&T's abysmal handling of the iPhone 4’s rollout and their network's inability to handle the sudden influx of around two million new customers in a couple of weeks in urban centers overwhelmed their cell towers caused numerous dropped calls.
Steve Jobs made a joke saying "you're holding it wrong" as part of an email to a customer explaining that attenuation occurs on every phone. That out of context joke was picked up and repeated, and repeated, and repeated, always without the context, which has now been lost in the flurry of deliberate FUD. The recipient of the original email tried to set the record straight but got tired of being attacked by the FUD spreaders as a liar.
Compounding the issue was the Consumers Report article in which they decided to "test" cellular phones for signal strengths for the first time and used the on-screen signal strength "bar graphs" as being "accurate" instead of using certified laboratory equipment and reported that the iPhones 4 got weaker signals and dropped signal strength faster than other phones based on the displayed bar graphs. The iPhone could easily have been switched to display a numeric signal strength in settings. CU testers literally did not know what they were doing.
Other labs who did know how to accurately measure signal strengths, such as Anandtech and technical cellular testing labs, found that the iPhone 4’s signal reception and transmitting was actually superior to other phones tested and could often pick up signals better in fringe areas where other phones could not. In response to CU's incompetence and the confusion it caused, Apple changed the algorithm that determined when the bars dropped lower in response to a lower signal strength to better reflect the exterior antenna's greater sensitivity and ability to receive weaker signals than the older phones.
Blogs and and Google leaped on the negative, the FUD, ignoring the accurate data, and "Antennagate" was born out of this confluence of events and kept it going. Googled articles on the actual facts were deliberately buried several pages deep after pages and pages of FUD articles. The facts were there, but you had to dig to find them, or use a different search engine to find them.
In the rollout in the rest of the world, no dropped calls occurred. . . and users were questioning what all the negative press was about. They simply did not experience what was happening in the US with AT&T's network. When AT&T got its network up to capacity, the problem went away. When the iPhone 4 began to be sold on Verizon, the FUD started disappearing, because Verizon iPhone customers simply did not have the problem at all. By a month later, Antennagate was over. The FUD just stopped. In fact, someone started spreading a rumor that Apple was "coating" new their iPhone 4 with a special compound that "fixed" the problem. Apple stopped giving away bands.
The iPhone 4 had the longest lifespan of any iPhone ever produced, spanning close to 4 years - it was still available in some developing countries until early 2014.. . .Something close to 50 million iPhone 4's were sold during those four years without changing the antenna at all, which is absolute proof that Antennagate was a totally created marketing effort to push another agenda. Antennagate occurred as Google was pushing Android to the other cellphone makers. . . and Samsung was spending large amounts pushing their cellular Android products as was Google with its release of Nexus. Follow the advertising money.. . . Despite the negative media attention regarding the antenna issues, 72% of iPhone 4 users say that they are "very satisfied" with their iPhone 4 according to an August 2010 survey by ChangeWave Research.[96] The iPhone 4 model continued to be sold unchanged up until September 2013.—Wikipedia article on iPhone 4
Apple, in order to stem the Antennagate FUD Storm, gave away the band cases in the US, but none anywhere else in the world, although they really did nothing to improve the antennas except in the publics' perception. Steve Jobs even demonstrated, using a field strength meter, that every other competitors' phone attenuated exactly the same way if a users' hand shielded the location of the phone's antenna. . . It is just the nature of cellular phone signals. . . Just as this bending issue is the nature of larger phones and the application of excessive force.
What I find amazing is their willingness to completely believe absolutely anything negative about Apple spouted by some nameless, anonymous nobody on the Internet over authoritative facts backed by organizations with long term reputations with severe financial repercussion if caught lying.
If it's about Apple, it has to be underhanded, lying hype, as far as they are concerned.
In their view, Apple users are poor deluded, stupid ego driven, dupes, who are technologically illiterates who want everything done for them, and are therefore easily manipulated into wasting their money buying outdated, slow, glitzy technology, that could easily be assembled by a technologically savvy person for a third the price, merely because we wish to look "cool" to other trendy, stylish, flaky people. Notice the implied assumption of their superiority in that assertion by their claim. . . They, of course, have none of those defective attributes.
That's not just true about Apple haters. It applies to Windows/Microsoft haters, Samsung haters, Linux haters, Ford haters, Chevy haters, Prius haters, Reagan haters, Obama haters, Sarah Palin haters... So it's not about Apple, and it's not really even about the haters as individuals.
It's about hate.
Hate is a poison, it's the blood and bile of the Devil, the evil stuff that oozes out when you squeeze Satan.
There's so much of it in the world. Makes me crazy to think about how much life, energy, time, and love are wasted when people hate. It's particularly odd, and so sad, when somebody hates a company or their products, because that's not even an animate object. It's tilting at windmills, pointless and unproductive. But haters gotta hate... *sigh*
I was quite surprised. Consumers Reports found in their stress tests that the iPhone 6 Plus was actually stronger than the iPhone 6, taking 20 pounds more force before it started to deform. The iPhone 6 started to deform at 70 pounds of pressure and popped the screen out at 90, while the 6 Plus deformed beginning at 90 and popped the screen at 110.
CU found that the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 was stronger than either, both deforming and catastrophically failing at 150 pounds of force. However, both iPhones still worked even with their screens popped out, while the Note was defunct.
Having just watched the video the bent point is at the bottom left side button cutout... and the buttons seem to be lower down the body towards the center then the other large format phones..
There are serious question about the authenticity of that video. . . the time showing on the screen before and after the bending don't agree with what is claimed. The narration says "I just bent my iPhone 6 Plus," with the screen showing 1:59, then ticking over to 2:00. . . but the screen shows distinctly 2:27 during the bending process. There are some video breaks or transitions during the bending process as well that are being questioned by video experts.
Some Twitter feeds from employees of a London based PR firm (SMI or MSI?, which is said to be in the employ of Samsung), seem to be bragging about "successful and easy their creation of the bending iPhones campaign" was in reponse to the iPhone 6 launch.
Apple has always been known for their engineering. I, too, would have assumed that would be the likely place for the bend to occur. I think Apple engineers thought that as well and took steps to handle it. Apple has stated they placed both stainless steel and titanium reinforcements at the weakest points in the body where the buttons go through the side.
...after he’s done hefting all that stuff, Mike Holmes has to rush over to someplace to help in a remodel.
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