“Bendygate”
Really? People buy giant-screen phones, put them in their back pockets, and sit on them? Then get upset at the manufacturer when the phones get bent out of shape?
I’m sorry, but that sounds really, really stupid. Two days ago, I broke a pair of glasses by sitting on them. I had laid them on the bed and forgotten where they were. Twenty minutes later, I come back to sit down, and crack! Oops. I felt a bit careless, but these things happen. (Got them fixed, by the way—Japanese glasses shops do that for free, so long as the damage isn’t too great.)
But I didn’t put them in my back pocket and then sit on them. That would have made me feel stupid. Also, I would not have gone to the glasses shop and complained to them if I had done this. It would be like going to a car dealer and saying, “I drove my new car into a brick wall at 30 mph, and now look at it! What are you going to do about it?”
Seriously, I would feel nervous about sitting on my iPhone 5 in my back pocket, and that’s a much sturdier phone.
A general rule of thumb: don’t sit on electronic devices.
Hi Luis.
I recall a couple of years ago the technology pundit Robert Cringley saying he had bought his sons Ipod Touches (4th gen, I think, the same that I have) and said they had been run over in the drive way a couple of times and still worked fine.
He more recently wrote that one of the problems with the Ipad is that its rate of obsolescence is too slow compared to smart phones. For starters, and this is from memory, he says they are too well made. People buy them and don’t feel the need to upgrade to a new one the way they do with phones, and part of the reason is the quality of the device overall.
Until now, people could say about Apple devices, “they take a licking and keep on ticking”. Maybe some of this can’t be avoided, if you keep making devices thinner and thinner, something has got to give, but they’ve come a long way if they have gone from being run over and not being affected to being bent out of shape by someone bending a phone because they left it in their back pocket before they sat down (as a personal philosophy, I generally feel putting anything in your back pocket is a bad idea).
still using a “Late 2008” MBP, late 2009 iPod, and launch-day iPad every day here. These work better now than the day I got them!
As for slagging on Apple, it’s both a cottage industry to get hits and something (catapult the bullshit) Samsung has to do institutionally to compete.
I’ll probably pick up a Nexus 9 tablet since I’m excited about that direction technology is evolving towards (tablets that can drive your big TV too) and think Apple is too conservative in the gaming sector. But if Apple announces a worthy iPad successor I’ll look at it of course.
I just heard on the radio that some are now claiming that the new iPhone is pulling hair out of their head and beards, saying that the hairs are getting caught in the tiny seam between the face glass and the metal frame (bezel) of the phone. Really?
Yeah, I saw that. Not sure whether to take it seriously. The hardest evidence is a video of some guy rubbing it against his beard for 30-40 seconds then saying “Ow!” and then a handful of people on Twitter making the claim.
Either it’s a hoax, or people’s imagination, or maybe a very small percentage of units with a slight manufacturing error, or something like that–if it were a real thing, with millions of phones out there, you would expect there to be a lot more reporting of this…
This came up on Accidental Tech Podcast I think, Marco Arment’s wife had a problem with the phone lens catching her hair.
https://twitter.com/tiffanyarment/status/518201137640779776
It’s entirely possible they didn’t test this well enough, since taking the new form factor out in public would have been problematic, and the circle of testers of the new phones would have been very, very limited.
Well this is embarrassing:
Troy
October 8th, 2010 at 07:20 | #2 Reply | Quote
^ I’ve long thought that Apple should just make a damn wristwatch — the industry has been stuck in 1980 forever.
what Apple created was not what I was hoping for — just too damn big. But we’ll see if people go for it.