TMCnet News
IPHONE 6 MOMENTS(Daily Trust (Nigeria) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) This past week wasn't a restful one for Apple as problems upon problems cropped up in connection with the company's newly released iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus smartphones and the accompanying operating system (iOS version 8.01). First were the complaints that the 5.5 inch iPhone 6 Plus might have come out too large after all. When he was alive, Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, derided largescreen phones and wouldn't make one. The new commanderinchief at Apple, Tim Cook, changed that a few weeks ago when he unveiled iPhone 6 Plus. Apple's customers were said to have asked for this larger phone, and they lined up day and night, even sleeping on the street overnight, to place an order for their dream phones, with the hope of enjoying the thrills often expressed by largescreen Samsung Galaxy smartphone owners. Now Apple's customers are complaining that iPhone 6 Plus wouldn't fit into their pockets because the screen is too large. With the high price tag of this phone ($750 in the U.S. without contract), customers apparently are demanding extra value for their buck. Who can blame them? There were even complaints about the ergonomic features of the phone which were said to be awkward, as if Apple did not care to squareoff the large size with ease of handling and typing, the way Samsung has with its own large phones. Consumers are also saying that Apple's new phones are too thin, the Plus about the thickness of 9 credit cards stacked on top of one another; that it bends too easily, in a way that customers haven't seen before! The Wall Street Journal said this: "The software glitch followed reports that customers accidentally bent the iPhone 6 PlusApple's largest and at $750 without contract its mostexpensive phoneby sitting with the phone in their pants pocket. Videos of people bending the jumbosized iPhone with their hands quickly made the rounds on social media." Apple, however, rebuts the complaints of bending phones. Since it started to sell iPhone 6 on 19 September 2014, Apple claimed that only nine customers (out of almost 10 million that have purchased the phones) have contacted the company to complain of the bending of iPhone 6 Plus. Apple points out that both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus had "passed a series of tests meant to check the products' strength and durability through everyday use." The company says the phones are made from a customgrade of anodized aluminum, which is tempered for extra strength. Apple said the phones also feature stainless steel and titanium inserts to reinforce highstress locations. It is ironic that material strength resulting from the use of titanium was actually touted as one of the attractive features of the iPhone 6 devices before they were released. As a mechanical and aerospace engineer, I know too well that most of these large smartphones packaged in malleable metals (such as aluminum) will bend if enough force is applied. Are the new iPhones too bendable in this respect when compared to competing products? We might have the answer from Consumer Reports (www.consumereports.org), a consumer advocate group in the U.S. who published the results of a bending test using the Instron machine to determine the amount of force required to bend several smartphones. The forces required to deform the phones are as follows: HTC One M8 (70 pounds), Apple iPhone 6 (70), Apple iPhone 6 Plus (90), LG G3 (130), iPhone 5 (130), and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (150). The forces required to separate the covers of the phones were 90, 100, 110, 130, 150, and 150 pounds, respectively. You can see that it does take quite a bit of force to deform the phones. Also, while iPhone 6 is not the strongest phone out there, it is not the weakest either. Thus, it seems that the nine or so iPhone 6 owners who reported that their phones bended must have applied unusually high forces on the phones. Moreover, nine out of ten million is not significant. Apple was also confronted with an embarrassing situation regarding a botched software update. Basically this past week, the company had to recall its latest release of the iOS operating system (OS) that power iPhone, iPad, and iPod, barely hours after making the update available. Some 40,000 customers who had installed the updated software on their phones complained that the software had disrupted their phone's ability to make calls and disabled the TouchID fingerprint sensor used to unlock devices. Apple acknowledged the problem with its software and instructed affected users to connect their iPhones to a desktop running iTunes for the purpose of reinstalling the previous version of iOS 8, as the company went to work to fix the problem. Apple has had difficulties with new releases in the past. Remember in 2012 when the company replaced Google maps with its own version that turn out to be quite buggy? The iPhone 4's release in 2010 was plagued with poor reception and it dropped phone calls. Steve Jobs disparagingly referred to the problem as "Antennagate," in response to problematic antenna reception. The problem was solved when Apple changed the design of its antenna. In 2009, there were complaints of stress fractures in the iPhone 3Gs. Apple's customers should take pleasure in knowing that the latest software update, iOS 8.0.2, was released Thursday, the version Apple says will "fix an issue that affected iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus users who downloaded 8.0.1." The takeaway from this article is that in the past week, Apple's customers have reported problems in the hardware and software of Apple's newly released iPhone 6 devices. For the most part, the real problems have been fixed by Apple. |