Continuing to fight back against claims that the iPhone 6 Plus is structurally unsound and prone to bending in people's pockets, Apple has given some tech reporters
a tour of the iPhone quality testing lab, showing that it does and did test the new iPhone to simulate situations like those seen in videos to aggravate or cause bending. The original instigator of the furor has noted that his iPhone 6 Plus was slightly bent
right out of the box -- opening up the possibility that some batches, rather than the phone itself, could have structural issues.
Hardware SVP Dan Riccio with test machines
Apple said in a statement earlier today that it has
only received nine complaints of bent iPhone 6s, despite selling around 5M in the opening weekend. In the video below, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller said that if users receive an iPhone that appears bent or becomes bent in normal daily use, they should take it to the nearest Genius Bar to let employees determine if the damage falls under warranty.
The company says that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were carefully testing for the kinds of stresses that could occur in daily use, using machines to twist, flex and put pressure the devices to simulate the effect of extremes of wear and tear, including the kind of stress some owners claim results in bending, such as sitting on the phone while it is in one's back pocket.
The tour is guided by SVP of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio, who says the iPhone 6 has been through "hundreds of tests" as well as real-world testing with Apple employees. In the process, the company destroyed some 15,000 units for each of the two models. ""The iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus are the most tested," Riccio told
The Verge. "As we add more and more features, we have to find out a way to break them before customers do."
"As we expected, it's extremely rare to happen in real world use," Schiller added on the controversy. "In this case, as in many things, we tell customers that if you think something's occurred that shouldn't have with your device, go to AppleCare, go to The Genius Bar, and let them take a look at it. And we'll see if your product is having an experience it shouldn't have, and is covered under warranty."
Specifically, the company says it has steel and titanium inserts that are explicitly designed to reinforce stress points. No smartphone is unbreakable, of course, but the quest is to get a phones's design to be highly-functional, stylish, and easy to hold -- all without being susceptible to easy damage. "We've designed the product to be incredibly reliable throughout all your real world use," Schiller said. "And in designing that, we then have to validate heavily, and see how does it live up to real world use, and what are the forces and pressures on it, and how do you measure and prove that you've delivered on a specification."
The video below shows an array of machines the company uses to test iPhone casings, including some machines specifically designed to emulate sitting and other situations where the iPhone 6 Plus would be subjected to unusual stresses while stored in the users' clothing. The lab is rarely open to outsiders, and it was revealed to be located in a small building some distance away from the main campus.
Units are tested in a way that strives to simulate years of real-world use without taking so long to do. The pockets test, for example, tests how the devices stand up to pressure from being in pickets when a simulated user sits on a soft surface, and even one specifically for iPhones put in rear pockets while the subject is sitting at an angle on hard surfaces. Riccio noted that Apple has a second, larger testing facility for stress tests in China. Units are tested thousands of times in some cases until they break, with the company noting such data.
The reporter noted that there was an inferred limit for the screen of the iPhone 6 Plus of around 25 kilograms (55 pounds), but Riccio said that was not the limit of what the device could take, but the amount Apple tests on the device while it is undergoing a "twisting" test. "The bottom line is that if you use enough force to bend an iPhone, or any phone, it's going to deform," he said.
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