There's a metal reinforcement that's not well designed

Sep 30, 2014 11:59 GMT  ·  By

Bendgate is far from over. Despite Apple claiming there are no more than 10 reported cases in the wild, it seems there will be far more if a “weak spot” theory is confirmed.

According to a teardown by famous repair shop iFixit, there's a metal reinforcement inside the chassis that’s not well designed.

Guy’s probably an engineer or something

The weak spot theory doesn’t actually come from the people who took apart the phone, but rather from a user on imgur who seems to be very knowledgeable in these kinds of things.

Looking closely at the images published by the repair shop, alleras4 saw that “When a profile is flexed the upper portion is stretched and the bottom portion is compressed, and we can see the upper portion [...] has less area for resistance so we can expect here more deformation.”

“If we look where the bend occurs and where the metal insert screw is, we see they are not far apart. This means the metal insert isn’t able to absorb moment so close to the screw because it doesn’t have any other substantial point there where to hold on to thus it spins following the bending,” he explains.

But that’s not all

The tricky bit is yet to come. While the deformation flaw seems explained, there’s still one small part that deserves attention.

In one of the photos published by iFixit, a metal reinforcement can be seen alongside the volume buttons. It’s fastened with a screw in exactly the area that these phones tend to bend first.

“It’s not about how much force must be applied and if a pocket will do the trick or not. It’s just that under a particular type of flexing, the phone is prone to bend mainly because a metal insert meant to reinforce instead spins in an axis too close to the critical point,” the imgur user further notes.

Had these parts been just a little further apart from one another, the design would have then allowed better support.

Apple’s tests fail to recognize the flaw

What’s worse is that Apple, despite claiming to have tested numerous scenarios in which the phone might bend, has failed to imagine one where pressure is applied precisely to that critical area.

“But if we compare how the forces where applied in our case to achieve deformation against Apple testing methods we can see they don’t match our scenario,” alleras4 outlines. “In this case, the force applied is distributed through the entire transversal profile, not just one side and it doesn’t generate maximum moment at the critical point we saw.”

This still doesn’t mean Apple overlooked something essential. In order to bend the thing, you still need to want to do it. It’s not going to happen unless you sit on it, crouch in a tight pair of jeans, etc.