jessica jones repair expert and owner of ipad rehab in medan New York can fix
just about anything but these days she finds herself spending more time fixing
one thing in particular every month more and more iphone 6 and 6 plus devices
show up better shop with the same problem a great flickering bar at the
top of the display and an unresponsive touchscreen which started as an
unfortunate trend now seems to be growing into an epidemic
so we went right to the source to learn more about what Jessica calls the iphone
6 and 6 plus touch IC disease maybe three months after the iphone 6 plus
came out people started saying hey have you ever seen this really characteristic
you know 6 plus with at the top of the phone and some flashing gray bars and
people notice that the flashing gray bars correlated with the loss of touch
function and then people started wondering you know what was up with that
because if you change the screen sometimes touch would come back but then
it would go away again and it was the sort of like really kind of
mind-boggling problem I phones have been using the same two integrated circuit
chips on the board for a long time to control touch function and like any
other ordered pair you know you can kind of work through that circuit so we could
look at the connector and the connector damage and then we could look into that
circuit and follow it all the way back to to the touch
IC chips and sometimes they would fail and we've been replacing them for four
years in earlier Fox so it would be very natural to see this sort of flashing
gray bars phenomenon that seem to be correlated with no touch that when the
connectors good
the power is therefore the wine everything checks out that it would be a
defect
the integrated circuit chip the touch IC chips as we saw more and more phones the
community saw more and more phones were sharing information and kind of
collecting observations the picture really began to develop over time so the
earlier phones are different than the iphone 6 plus the iphone 6 in a couple
of different ways regarding the touch
i season the touch IC area so here is an iphone 5s and iphone 5 s's don't really
get touch IC disease
sure sometimes they lose touch but it's you know a typical problem that you see
every now and then it's not a ramp an epidemic and what I want you to just
sort of appreciate is that there is a metal shield all the way down this work
and that gives the board some flexibility and now let's compare that
to the iphone 6 plus so this is covered with a sticker shield so it's not a
tough metal rigid shield here it's just a sticker and you know we can only guess
and hypothesize as to why that change was made the other change that was made
if you look at some of the earlier phones like the iphone 5c the touch I
season in the iphone 5c there's a substance called under filled that is
injected as a liquid that squeezes under in between all of those solder balls and
then it's cured to sort of a rock-hard kind of electronic superglue light stuff
and that really gives the sort of anchors and supports the touch IC
connection to the board around all the little marbles of the solder balls and
now we got this sort of you know combination of problems where the touch
i sees are on the board in a section
the board that no longer has the rigid metal shield and the touch i sees are
anchored to the board but they don't have the support of that under film so
that's sort of like two strikes against them and then that the board itself the
six plus is put into a great big gigantic phone and its kind of bendy you
know it just is your a back pocket carrier you know this thing is going to
you know conform a little bit to the shape of your butt and when it does that
that puts stress on the board itself and that's what we think is causing a
separation between the touch IC chip on top and the little solder balls that it
sits on the anchor it to the board so what is the solution in our interview
you have to have the chips replaced you know so replacing the chips prepping the
pads with blocks eating up the pads and prepping them to accept solder applying
new chips and then finishing that off with a metal shield on top that maybe
should have been there from the beginning but now we're going to add
that to sort of future proof the the design and then we send those back out
and it has a much more sort of robots and lasting results so as this 6 plus
ages
the problem is becoming more and more brampton so that my entire business a
year ago touch IC phones were very rare they would have been all under warranty
wouldn't see them very much today when the mail comes in
probably half of the phones that were getting in every day I have this one
problem you know in our case when we started adding a shield to the back of
the phone now we will solder matter
metal shield on the back of the UM that really seems to have helped with the
sort of long-term robustness of of the repair when I go to the apple support
community forums and I tried to just sort of raise awareness about this
problem you know I've personally been banned from apple support community
three times for sharing this kind of information that that I think everyone
should know about apple's support community forums is the number one
Google hit for you no iPhone repair and it always will be and they are
systematically deleting at any posts that I make that sort of references the
underlying cause and and it's you know it's real estates there was a time where
I thought that error 53 was was the worst thing that ever done was the
biggest problem in infected you know who knows
hundreds of thousands millions of phones we don't know and I remember thinking if
the world found out about error 53 you know that would be a really big deal and
I think that I think that error 53 hails in comparison to how widespread the
epidemic of touch i see disease in the iphone 6 plus we'll be keeping an eye on
this problem and updating you with all the newest info we have so make sure you
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