I understand this is a problem and the phones shouldn't be susceptible to problems like this from normal use. Apple will probably just have to eat this one. The thing that annoys me a little is that if any other phone had a similar bending problem, nobody would give a hoot. In fact it looks like the HTC One had pretty much the same bend-ability[1]. That doesn't make what happened to these people's phones acceptable, but I think it's useful perspective.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/09/consumer-reports-tests-iphone-6-bendgate/index.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/09/consumer-re...</a>
This is Apple's modus operandi. The same thing happened with the early 2011 MBPros, which GPUs kept failing systematically, even after costly repairs.<p>It took a class action lawsuit for them to start refunding repairs and provide an actual solution, but by then it was far too late.
Mike Mullane’s “Normalisation of Deviance” talk to a group of firefighters[1] is relevant here. He describes how the Challenger shuttle disaster happened despite internal memos about the problem years prior.<p>The message of the talk is, essentially, that a person or team can get used to ignoring their own standards when under pressure.<p>[1]: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o</a>
And yet out of all the people I knew who owned an iPhone 6 from launch never dealt with the "bendgate" issue, including myself. That's from personal experience owning and using one daily for 3 years.<p>I still think this was an over-dramatized problem.<p>If you eat/drink while working at a keyboard you can get stuff between the keys and either get them sticky or completely broken. Some actions can just cause issues but if you handle the thing properly then you have nothing to worry about.
"Apple argued […] that consumers could not have been uniformly exposed to any alleged misinformation or lies of omission because Apple keeps its iPhone boxes in the back of the [Apple] store, where customers aren’t allowed."
Duh, its been the same way with all of their hardware manufacturing errors. The standard template is:<p>Numerous social media posts about the same problem.<p>Denials and costly fixes for them. To the point of specialized third party accessories. Remember the iPhone antenna “bands”?<p>Apple acknowledges the issue.<p>Class action lawsuit filed.<p>Leaks about Apple knowing about the issue months before any corrective action.
Not going to defend Apple. But one doesn't have to be genius to find out that iPhone 6 would be more prone to bending than iPhone 5 (2x times thicker). The internal document doesn't proof anything. It's just numbers.