iPhone "touch disease," a growing problem with iPhone 6 and 6 Plus that eventually leaves its touch screen unresponsive, is being called a "ticking bomb.
Signs of the "touch disease" usually occur when a flickering gray bar appears at the top of the iPhone screen, said CBS News. The flaw originates from two chips on the phone's logic board that can become detached from the phone's soldering as it is bent during use.
"This issue is widespread enough that I feel like almost every iPhone 6/6 Plus has a touch of it (no pun intended) and are like ticking bombs just waiting to act up," Jason Villmer, owner of STS Telecom in Missouri, told the blog iFixit.org, which first wrote about the problem.
iFixit.org gave examples of customers and employees from phone rehab stores around the country encountering the same problems with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on a consistent basis. It said customers may have to look outside of Apple and its stores to find a solution to the problem.
"Apple's repair Geniuses aren't equipped to make specialized repairs to the logic board in-house, so they can't actually fix Touch Disease," wrote Julia Bluff of iFixit.org. "But skilled, third-party microsoldering specialists (most 'unauthorized' to do Apple repairs, according to official company policy) can fix phones with symptoms of Touch Disease."
"And they can do it a whole lot cheaper than the cost of a new logic board or an out-of-warranty phone replacement. Which is precisely why so many of these damaged iPhones are finding their way into repair shops around the world," said Bluff.
Adrian Kingley-Hughes, of Hardware 2.0, said on ZDNet.com that the problem is covered under Apple's warranty and the company can sell the user a replacement logic board if the device is out of warranty.
"It's hard to tell how widespread this problem actually is," Kingley-Hughes said. "While I've not seen the problem myself, I have come across reports of it previously, and some of the third-party repairers interviewed by iFixit sounds as though they are inundated by requests to fix this problem."
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