This is pretty breathless reporting for iFixit. We can all draw whatever conclusions we want based on anecdotes. For example, I know a lot of people who have iPhone 6 and 6S phones and none of them have had this problem.
But let's look at some numbers; the article mentions that all of these repairers see "several a week." Let's round up and say that's 4 a week, or 208 per year per repair shop. They only mention a few repair shops in the article, but lets say as part of the research they actually talked to 100 repair shops. That brings us to 20,800 iPhones having this problem per year. But of course, not everyone takes their phone to a repair shop when it has a problem like this. Let's be pessimistic and say that only 20% of people who have this problem get it repaired, and 80% throw it away. That's 104,000 iPhones having this problem per year.
It's unclear to me from the article if this is affecting only iPhone 6 or also 6S, I'll assume both. Apple sold over 13 million iPhone 6S and 6S Plus in its opening weekend alone. Just from opening weekend numbers 104,000 phones with this problem is less than 1%, let alone whatever the total number of units sold over the last two years has been.
I have no doubt this is an annoying and frustrating problem for the people that encounter it, but try to have some perspective.
> Let's be pessimistic and say that only 20% of people who have this problem get it repaired
20% of people taking their phone to a third-party repair shop sounds very high. I'd say a vast majority would take their phone to Apple, who say it can't be fixed and to buy a new phone.
I'd say 80% is already a vast majority? But ok if you think 20% is too high we can go crazy and say half a million phones have this problem each year. That's still less than 4% of the 6S/6S Plus sold opening weekend. Let alone whatever the total 6, 6 Plus, 6S and 6S Plus sold over the last two years is (which I couldn't find a figure for from a quick search.)
The point is, it doesn't appear to be a widely occurring problem based only on what this iFixit report contains. Maybe there's more data out there that indicates it is more widespread? If so this article should have had that data.
No, because the 3rd-party shops are much, much cheaper than Apple's, and also more widely distributed. (Good luck finding an Apple store in or near a small town.)
Widely distributed sure, but it sounds like Apple is quietly handling this issue by providing the affected customers with refurbished phones at no charge.
Even under your hypotheses, I'd say 100,000 faulty devices is already a very significant amount. In terms of retail price, we're looking at more than 60 million USD, and 100,000 customers who were sold a (possibly) flawed device.
I'm not sure what perspective should be taken into account, but I'm pretty sure we should not be simply looking at whether the rate of failures is above or below 1% given the volumes involved.
The point of the article seemed to be that this is a very widespread problem, and I was refuting that point. If you look at it from the percentage of devices sold, it doesn't seem to be widespread at all.
If you want to take the view that if Apple sells you a faulty device they should repair it for free regardless of whether you're the only person in the world who has the issue; I would agree as long as the device is still under warranty. My guess is these aren't or the people wouldn't be taking them to third party repair shops.
Given the numbers we have and the hypotheses (75M devices sold, 100k defective devices), that would be 0.1% of the total volume sold, which does not sound that small (1 out of 1000 devices, what would we say if it was, e.g. 1 out of 1000 cars of a brand to be defective ? or 1 out of 1000 medical pills ?)
As for the warranty, if it's a design flaw and a widespread issue (and for that, even 0.1% of the whole volume should be significant enough) that pops up after 1 year of usage (because of thermal/physical wear under normal usage conditions), isn't it something that manufacturers should repair even out of warranty ?
Have another look at your numbers, you have assumed that there are only 100 repair shops in the word. I would imagine this number is much higher (a google search for 'iphone micro soldering repair shop' gives 473k results)
Right. He was underestimating to demonstrate that even a very small number of shops and iPhones/week would yield a large amount.
But also we should take into context how many iPhone 6 and 6+s have been sold. The first article on a Google search comes up with Wired who is discussing numbers from Oct-Dec of last year and in that time Apple sold 75 MILLION iPhones.
And I think the iPhone 6 model has only been out for a year or two, right? So even if we quadrupled the defect number per year, we'd still fall quite short of even the recent Samsung recall.
Please keep in mind I'm not saying it's not a problem, just trying to help put numbers into perspective.
Googling for "iphone witch doctor repair shop" gives 263k results. So there are roughly half as many iPhone witch doctor repair shops as iPhone micro soldering repair shops?
how about a google for "iphone repair shop" (with double quotes) gives 155k results. Eyeballing a few pages of results seems like the vast majority of results are for real iPhone repair shops. From this I would confidently estimate that there are > 15k and < 1.5m iPhone repair shows worldwide.
Read my comment again, I was positing perhaps the author of the article talked to 100 repair shops. Yes, there are certainly more repair shops than that worldwide. I was just drawing a line from what data the article has to what we could guess from it reasonably, each step trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the problem being as widespread as we can infer from the article.
Number of google results for a keyword doesn't really give a good indication of how many stores there are for that thing in the world. 473,000 repair shops would be 1,000 for every Apple Store. I'm sure there's a lot but that seems a bit high.
Regardless, I didn't attempt to draw the line through number of iPhone repair shops in the world because we have no evidence whether all repair shops in the world are seeing this problem, only the ones the author of the article talked to.
There's no particular reason to think that the repair shops which the author of the article chose to speak to are special in any way, so it's reasonable to assume that all the other repair shops are seeing similar numbers. It's definitely not reasonable to assume that the only iPhones that are failing are the ones served by that handful of repair shops.
> it's reasonable to assume that all the other repair shops are seeing similar numbers.
I don't know, it depends on how many the author actually spoke to and how he came by them. If he found them because he saw them all talking about this problem, that's not a statistically reliable means of sampling repair shops. His selection was biased and driven by the issue.
> It's definitely not reasonable to assume that the only iPhones that are failing are the ones served by that handful of repair shops.
But let's look at some numbers; the article mentions that all of these repairers see "several a week." Let's round up and say that's 4 a week, or 208 per year per repair shop. They only mention a few repair shops in the article, but lets say as part of the research they actually talked to 100 repair shops. That brings us to 20,800 iPhones having this problem per year. But of course, not everyone takes their phone to a repair shop when it has a problem like this. Let's be pessimistic and say that only 20% of people who have this problem get it repaired, and 80% throw it away. That's 104,000 iPhones having this problem per year.
It's unclear to me from the article if this is affecting only iPhone 6 or also 6S, I'll assume both. Apple sold over 13 million iPhone 6S and 6S Plus in its opening weekend alone. Just from opening weekend numbers 104,000 phones with this problem is less than 1%, let alone whatever the total number of units sold over the last two years has been.
I have no doubt this is an annoying and frustrating problem for the people that encounter it, but try to have some perspective.