“People all over the world mail their broken iPhones to microsoldering specialist Jessa Jones. Aided by powerful microscopes and precision soldering irons, experts like Jessa pluck tiny chips off logic boards, swap them for new ones, and resurrect devices over which Apple’s Genius Bar would say a eulogy,” Julia Bluff writes for iFixIt. “Jessa can fix practically anything. But these days, she spends most of her time fixing just one thing. Because every single month, more and more iPhone 6 and (especially) 6 Plus devices show up at her shop, iPad Rehab, with the same problem: a gray, flickering bar at the top of the display and an unresponsive touchscreen.”
“Turns out, Jessa’s not alone. Lots of repair pros are experiencing the same influx of faulty iPhones—most with flickering gray bars and all with glitchy touch functionality,” Bluff writes. “Rami Odeh, a repair tech from New Orleans, sees up to 100 iPhone 6 and 6 Pluses a month that don’t respond well to touch. About half of the repairs sent to Michael Huie—the specialist behind Microsoldering.com—show symptoms of the same problem.”
“Of course, there’s no way to tell exactly how many phones are afflicted with what we’re calling Touch Disease, but every repair tech we spoke to told us that the problem is incredibly common,” Bluff writes. “Replacing the touchscreen doesn’t fix the problem. The gray bar eventually shows up on the new screen, too. Because, according to repair pros, the problem isn’t the screen at all. It’s the two touchscreen controller chips, or Touch IC chips, on the logic board inside the phone.”
“One microsoldering pro I spoke to speculated that the U2402 Meson chip—one of the two Touch IC chips on the board—has a manufacturing defect,” Bluff writes. “But the most popular theory I heard is that Touch Disease is the unanticipated, long-term consequence of a structural design flaw: Bendgate.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Do you have, or have you had, that gray, flickering bar at the top of your iPhone 6 Plus’ display and an unresponsive touchscreen? We did not see that issue, but we moved to iPhone 6s Plus units on Day One (plus we baby our iPhones and treat them like the valuable pocket computers they are).
If so, do/did you every tend to keep your iPhone is a pocket where bendable force could be applied to it?
SEE ALSO:
New iPhone 6s bend test reveals super-strong aluminum shell – August 19, 2015
Analyst: Apple’s ‘iPhone 6s’ to feature stronger 7000 series aluminum, slightly thicker for Force Touch – June 17, 2015
Next-Gen iPhones could adopt Apple Watch Sport’s 7000 Series Aluminum Alloy – April 16, 2015
