You may remember that, back in 2014, Apple was involved in a large scale scandal because of its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Shortly after the phones were released, customers started finding that the devices were bending in their pockets, without any special force being applied to them.

The situation was a major topic of discussion in the following months and, in 2016, it was discovered that the "bendgate" problem was causing the devices to lose touchscreen responsiveness due to problems in the phones' logic board.

Almost four years after the scandal began, a new report by Motherboard shows that Apple knew the 2014 iPhone models were more likely to bend than previous generations. In fact, the company's internal testing showed that the iPhone 6 was 3.3 times more likely to bend than the iPhone 5s. The results were even worse for the bigger brother, as the 6 Plus was 7.2 times more likely to bend. This was because Apple did not use an epoxy underfill to strengthen the logic board as it had done with previous iPhone models.

Though Apple never acknowledged a design flaw in its devices, it did eventually change the engineering process for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in May 2016, a whole year and a half after the devices had already been on the market. It should be noted that this change was not the same as the ones made to strengthen the following generation of iPhones.

The company hasn't commented on the newly discovered documents, but it's unlikely that customers will be too happy to know that Apple knew the devices were more likely to bend and sold them for 18 months anyway.

Posted: May 28, 2018 8:44 am
Related Forum: Mobile Devices

Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/apple-knew-iphone-6-and-6-plus-were-more-likely-to-bend