Yep, it bends! For anyone who doubted that Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy really bent an iPhone 6 Plus, he has done it again—with witnesses. This time, instead of shooting the bend in the privacy of his video studio, he choose a busy square in his hometown of Toronto. As you can see in the video above, the results are even more dramatic and convincing than the first video.
Hilsenteger can be forgiven for seeming just a little bit defensive. He has been fending off charges that he somehow staged the bend or used some special equipment or other trick. Unless he is a Houdini-grade illusionist, he has now demonstrated a bare-handed deformation of an iPhone 6 Plus.
So again I will ask, why does this matter? If I had a brand new iPhone 6 Plus, I would not put it in my back pocket. I would not bend it as a party trick. I would treat it with reverence. But not everyone is me! For Apple AAPL +2.94%, this means that not all customers are ideal customers and they won’t necessarily behave in expected ways.
But for Apple’s customers, they expect a new iPhone to behave like other iPhones. If they are used to slipping it in their pocket, then, pocket willing, they will do so with a 6 Plus too. The user experience equation is asymmetrical. The user is unpredictable so the product has to be predictable.
Apple finally commented publicly on “#bendgate” (as it is unfortunately known) yesterday in a statement, “With normal use a bend in iPhone is extremely rare and through our first six days of sale, a total of nine customers have contacted Apple with a bent iPhone 6 Plus.” Yet considering how easy it is to bend on purpose (as Hilsenteger has demonstrated now twice) it is hard to believe that nine customers are the extent of the problem. Nine out of 10 million would be an acceptable defect rate—if representative.
Mat Honan, wrote in his iPhone 6 Plus review in Wired that, “Like a lot of people, I have a bent iPhone 6 Plus. It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s there: a slight warp right at the buttons on the side. Put the phone screen down on a table, and it wobbles. I haven’t purposefully bent it and I don’t recall sitting on it (but I probably have).” The casualness of his description leads me to believe that the incidence of minor bends is likely far more prevalent than the all-out flexure in Hilsenteger’s videos.
In response, Apple gave Re/Code’s Lauren Goode access to their “secret testing lab.” This attempt to buttress the company’s rigorous image led to convincing photos and video (see original story), but questions remain. Apple’s statement refers to “custom grade of 6000 series anodized aluminum, which is tempered for extra strength [combined with] stainless steel and titanium inserts to reinforce high stress locations and… the strongest glass in the smartphone industry.” Yet how could Apple’s test lab not bent the iPhone 6 Plus with the same ease as a bearded guy in Toronto?
The bearded Hilsenteger himself points to the button cutouts as a possible point of failure. My colleague Mark Rogowsky wrote in these pages Wednesday that the new logo cutout on the back of the iPhone 6 Plus could have also been a source of trouble. These obvious weak points would seem to be exactly what those “stainless steel and titanium inserts” would be designed to reinforce.
This disjunction, this bend if you will, between what Apple seems to have tested and what consumers actually bought raises a more troubling possibility. What if #bendgate is a sign that Apple has lost control of its supply chain? Could the units that Foxconn sent to Apple for testing have been less than representative of the overall production run?
As a recovering magazine designer, I have been to many press runs. I know that the printers always sent the best copies to the publishing company, and those copies were often not representative of the entire press run. In the present case, what if not enough titanium was available in time for the production schedule and a lower-quality substitution was made for some portion of the run? And what if those units were sent to, let’s see, Canada instead of Cupertino?
This is just speculation. Manufacturing works this way in general, butnot Apple’s manufacturing. This is the reason for Apple’s reputation for quality, reliability and unsurpassed craftsmanship. The troubling aspect of the present debacle is not that some defective phones may need to be replaced. It is that the unity of Apple’s design and manufacturing may have just ruptured in a way that its extensive testing mechanisms did not detect.
I expect that as the complaints roll in, Tim Cook will not dismiss this as Steve Jobs did with “antennaegate.” Apple is now on a path to more openness and this is perhaps an opportunity to confront a vexing problem in a new way. As Hilsenteger says at the end of today’s video, “we’re expected to hold these phones for years, in some case, not just an afternoon. That phone [the iPhone 6 Plus] is weaker than many of the competitors.” This is not the image Apple wanted to project when entering the phablet market and it is not one it will allow to persist.
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