Often is the same hardware fault. Traces to the BGA balls suffering fatigue, just like the iP6+ touch, iP7 lag-audio, and plenty of other baseband IC issues ( U1 and V1 pads).
Here's a video of one being fixed (started at the point where he's looking right at the U1 and V1 pads ) https://youtu.be/tdD7BSIy_u4?t...
The fault is with the small traces connecting to some of the BGA chip balls. This is the same failure mode as what caused the iP6+ touch disease and the iP7 lag(audio) IC issue.
Fundamentally, we're getting circuits at a size now where the daily physical expansions/contractions and vibrations are causing these traces to fail because they're so fine/thin.
It's not the chip specifically at fault, it's the copper track on the top of the circuit board that's suffering fatigue fractures.
FTA: "An interesting side note is that the radiation-exposed rodents of both types lived significantly longer than their control peers: 28 percent of the original control group survived the full 2 years, while about twice that amount (48-68 percent) survived in the exposed group."
I fully expect this article headline to be linked by many sellers and promoters of anti-radiation stickers/trinkets/money-drainers, but the prolonged lifespan of the exposed rats would be the sort of thing you'd be more interested in as a scientist, but likely that isn't part of the budget.
Headline should have been more like "Radiation exposed rats live longer than control group", and we should see the resurgence of selling Radon water.
iP7/7+ are crippled with the same mechanical/physical issues that the iP6+ touch disease is caused by. In the 7/7+ it manifests in a different location (audio chip typically) and makes the phone become exceedingly laggy.
Overall the 7/7+ has not been a good phone for durability, the new alloy used for the chassis does a very good job at resisting damage to itself compared to the original 6/6+ but the consequence of that is that the shock is now being transferred to the PCB and we're seeing a lot of board failures from impacts; previously the 6/6+ chassis would be the crumple-zone and the boards would survive surprisingly well.
The iP6S/6S+ at this stage still represents the ideal balance of durability, repairability, cost, performance.
Apple really didn't want to have to go down the route of indicating/advising that something is wearing out and could be replaced because it infers that the phone is serviceable, and if people feel their devices are serviceable then that'll tend to bite in to the annual churn & profit rates.
From a technical perspective, throttling back the phone could have been pitched as a nice feature but again, it opens up the can of worms on serviceability, particularly in light of Apple's strong push against the "Right to repair" legislation.
If you're working the repair lines then you'll know if you tear apart a clone and compare to the genuine and you'll see there's notable differences. The protection/controller board attaching to the cell on those $4 batteries is a random hackjob at best. The cell quality too is different, cheap replacements have poor internal resistance compared to the genuine.
The $4~$12 replacements are a crap shoot, sometimes you get a decent quality unit, other times not so much. The resellers of replacement batteries give you grading options, cheap = 'zeroed' cycle count, non-original board, then you can get a "pulled from existing phone" batteries and their markings rubbed out, and then you can also get "Genuine zero cycles, high quality" packs but even if you ask for those, usually someone up the supply chain at some point pulls a swifty and starts sending you dodgy packs.
While Apple might pay $4 for theirs, the "3rd party" ones are probably $1 and it shows.
Apple has had some dud events like the iPhone 5 puffer fiasco but overall their packs definitely are of higher quality/consistency than the 3rd party replacements.
Couple of hundred batteries a year and it's averaging about 50% duds within 3 months.
You're not going to fix modern high density logic boards with a "home iron" or equipment, but if you pick up stuff like this...
$180~$300 Microscope
$200 Soldering station (Hakko FX951 and JS02 tip to start)
$250 Hotair station (Quick 951DW or even a $65 analogue)
$100 assorted hand tools
So sure, it's about a $1k investment in tools but it's still quite doable. Places like UnionRepair are making it cheaper every day, coupled with YouTube binge watching of people like iPadRehab, Louis Rossmann, Jason STS Telecom etc and you might succeed in fixing things like blown filters and perhaps a Tristar failure after a couple of attempts.
Don't even bother, waste of effort. If you want to expend energy, then focus it back on yourself and learn to accept that unless you're talking to peers you're always going to be misunderstood, not out of malice or intent, but simply because there's almost always a large collection of context and assumptions that you simply cannot impart on to those who ask the question.
Just keep it simple even and deal with accepting that it'll grind your soul. Same applies to a lot of other fields of work. Try hard and you'll just come off as self-important.
Fair call, incorrect use of term on my behalf. Thankfully won't change the progress of the industry.
There's never a break even for ICEs; at least once you start using an electric car your CO2 footprint is relatively reducing compared to similar ICE, even if you're using dirty power.
Coal power stations are being phased out (gas turbine does still have a presence for the next few years as a fast response base load assist), eventually there'll be a greater utilisation of direct solar panel / wind turbine to car charging cycle and I won't be surprised if cars perform a secondary function as a large power storage system ( even though there'll be a lot of movements, overall there'll be a lot of parked cars at any given moment ) to deal with the greater level of unpredictability associated with our current green-energy sources.
It's like the old complaint that solar panels used more power to produce than they ever yield, that became invalid about 20 years ago (we're now at about 4~5x return). Things get better, old inefficiencies are removed. In another 20 years we'll look back and wonder why everyone was freaking out so much.
The problem is the chip-overhang, the Meson chip itself obscures the entire area. The balls are about 0.25mm diameter, the trace is about 0.1mm width and maybe 1.5mm long. The trace separation can manifest anywhere from ball pad edge up to typically about half way along towards the via.
Blobbing / bridging doesn't really behave predictably enough at these scales and it's not unusual for the said bridge to itself crack (previously when people just replaced Meson this in some ways was what was happening). Usual repair is to solder a suitable length of 40~42AWG / 0.1~0.06mm dia wire to the pad, then run it up close to the via and typically overlaying the whole track as a suitable reinforcement against the tension (some people put a bend in the wire for added "flexibility" ).
I would not call this a design fault from incompetence, rather it's just one of those faults that sometimes happen in complex designs due to unforeseeable manifestation of factors (happens with cars, planes, and many other things). With phones pushing hard on the edge of manufacturing densities it's not entirely surprising that something like this occurs, just unfortunate in this case it happened to manifest in a crucial area rather than some benign way in another portion of the assembly.
There's a crack on the short trace from the M1 ball, and the pad will frequently lift away when you remove the Meson chip to perform the task. Sure, there's a lot of 6+ units out there which aren't suffering it but for each that is suffering the classic touch disease the M1 trace is at fault. Classic M1 touch-disease failure will have the flickering grey bars at the top associated with it.
I don't care if people call it a design fault or what ever, it doesn't change the actuality that that particular trace fails. As mentioned, it does *not* require the phone to be dropped, normal thermal cycling and daily use alone can cause the failure. It's also not a highly visible break in the track, even at 30~40X magnification you really cannot notably see it. To me it would appear that the combination of parts in the location along with the layout of the trace for what ever reason causes the trace to eventually suffer the micro-tear.
For quite some time we were trying to just replace the meson chip and there'd be some levels of success, but almost always the phone would end up back in the shop within a month or two with the same classic touch disease issue. Where the "penny dropped" was that we started to notice that for every phone we did the meson replacement attempt that lost the M1 pad during the rework forcing us to put in a replacement trace in, we weren't seeing those ones come back later, and thus the classic touch-disease cause and repair was finally found.
You're welcome to visit and I'll gladly show you.
The touch-disease happens even without a strike / drop.
The fault manifests as an extremely fine crack in the PCB track leading to the M1 ball on the touch controller IC. The proper way to fix this is the run a small jumper of wire from the touch IC BGA ball to further up the PCB track.
The phone does not need to be dropped for this to fail, just general thermal cycling and daily use is enough to develop the issues. Apple's little "addition" about requiring a drop is an attempt to try get some distance between the fault and themselves.
DickSmith was the chap who floated it:
http://hoaxes.org/af_database/...
When you decide to express your personal brilliance to the developer, take the time to word it in such a way that it doesn't come across as condescending or undermining. Not to say that developers are all precious snow-flakes, but if the feature request is important to you then learning how to present it goes a long way towards gaining an outcome that you like, as with pretty much every other area in life when it comes to trying to get something done by other people.
Beautiful pitches like "...unless it has feature X it's not going to be considered professional", or "... I like your software but it would be better if
Of course, if you can't stand that, you can always try add the feature yourself, though saying "do it yourself" pretty much causes the same level of angst in the other direction.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.
