A "failure" here includes an app that crashes. In your case you're saying the touch screen has failed to work, 4 times in a row, and somehow you know it's about to be 5 times.

The chance of a failure involving the touchscreen is statistically (from the report you didn't read) 3%. Raising 0.03 to the fifth power gives a failure rate of 0.0000000243.

Still going with Occam.

Well, literally hundreds of millions of people (per year) buy iPhones (last 12 months was 215 million) and don't have this problem.

I could see you getting a bad phone - shit happens. I could (just about) see you getting *two* bad phones out of two. There is no way I'd buy that you got three successive phones that failed in the same way, as for five ? Well, I'll be charitable and say you must be the unluckiest person on the planet. Is your name Brian by any chance ?

For reference: "In line with the firm’s fourth-quarter report, a study that analyzed smartphone failures during the first quarter of 2016 determined that Android devices cause far more problems for their owners than iPhones. According to Blancco Technology Group’s new data, 44% of Android phones experienced failures between January and March of this year, compared to 25% of iPhones"

Occam's razor says I still think you don't look after the phone, assuming you're telling the truth. Sorry.

Yep, in an nutshell.

You sell 215 million (how many phones Apple sold in the last 12 months) of *anything*, and there's going to be a tiny percentage of them that go wrong in some pattern-like way. Even 0.001% of 215 million is 2150 people with a problem, and although a failure rate of 0.001% is pretty damn good with such a complex device, that's still enough for "many" people to come up with a common problem and someone to get some ad-revenue from the click-bait headline.

(Also own an iPhone, a 6+, and haven't seen any issues)

Good luck trying to get *any* cell phone without BGA chips in them. Or any electronics component, really - maybe a toaster.

To be honest, I agree with the above poster. Absent any specifics, I'd say the problem is you and how you treat the phone.

*looks around*
*sees literally every single electronic item uses BGA chips*
*wonders what goes on in people's minds, sometimes*

Oh for crying out loud.

There are literally (and I use the word correctly) *billions* of BGA chips out there, in all environments from the most benign to the harshest around, from industrial levels of vibration to space exploration (including the launch). Shock, horror, in a sample size that large, some of them fail, well cry me a river. There is no human technology that is 100% perfect, but soldering chips, yes, even BGA chips to boards is pretty damn close.

As for not doing them at home, I've done BGA chips at home many many times - you can actually do them with a toaster oven, but if you want a good (i.e.: ~100%) success rate, you could always get one of these. If you look past the truly egregious website, there's a really well engineered product there, which guarantees alignment as the chip is placed. I've got one and frankly I prefer doing a BGA chip than soldering a QFP by hand (of course the machine does QFP too...)

Inspection, now, that's a different beast. I've thought about getting an old dental XRAY machine off eBay, but who knows if it's strong enough. One day I'll remember to take one of my boards along to my dentist and get them to take a snapshot of it. At the moment, I'm too busy building a laser-cutter anyway.

Yep, they ought to let you in to the "invite" group if you find something and they didn't "invite" you. For feck's sake Apple. Oh, wait, that's the 3rd paragraph in TFA.

Seriously, this is how Apple do it - they start a small project off to get experience, then they roll it out. I can't see the problem here...

Reading comprehension old boy... I didn't say that 1/7th of the world was using or had bought an iPhone (in fact I specifically said I didn't think that). I was simply comparing the magnitudes of the sales figure and the population of the planet.

When does it stop becoming "sheep" and more like "hey, this thing ain't bad" ?

Not all of those phones are going to be still in use, but 1/7th of the world's population is a pretty reasonable sales rate.

A parliament that cannot propose legislation is a parliament in name only. It's a check/balance, I'll give you that, but it's not where the power lies if it cannot propose and effect a change that it wants to.

In the UK, you elect an MP. That MP directly votes on, and can propose legislation. The "other" house, the House of Lords, can only delay any legislation that the House of Commons votes for by returning it with recommendations a maximum of 3 times. After the third time, if the House of Commons again votes it through, it becomes law (subject to Liz' royal assent, but that's not being withheld...).

This is effectively the inverse of the European "parliament". The EU commission decides what laws will be proposed, the parliament (the people who the people elected) then get to horse-trade the deal until the parliament and the commission agree, and then all countries must adopt the law. This is a significant reduction in the power of the people.

As a bonus, the commission are basically immunised against any effects of their political machinations, the only way for a member of the EU commission to be removed is if the parliament unanimously votes to remove all members of the commission at the same time. Yeah... Not gonna happen.

So to summarise: you have an un-sackable body that is the only group who can propose legislation, which gives them the ability to apply enormous pressure to the elected representatives (oh, you want X do you ? Well make sure you vote for our Y and Z and then we'll consider it). And then everyone is forced to accept the results of this as law.

Sorry. That sucks. Given the mission statement of ever closer union, the desire to raise an army etc., and the binding nature of EU law as supreme, the mismatch in democratic power within the EU *should* be concerning IMHO. Whether it's sufficiently concerning to brexit is a different argument, but I think it certainly played its part.

It doesn't have to be tradeable for the protections to stand. It just means the original person/company-if-it-was-an-employee that had the idea, and who filed the patent, now has the legal protections and can therefore attempt to attract investment that the patent encourages.

The idea of selling the patent to someone who has (a) no intent to manufacture or execute on the idea, and (b) simply wants to prevent anyone else from using the idea without paying some sort of (usually, after the fact, and punitive) licensing fees is what is counter to the original idea of what a patent would provide.

Intellectual property can be a thing - there ought to be some reward for working hard and creating something, but patents don't have to be considered normal intellectual property, they can be either a non-tradeable subclass, or simply defined otherwise.

Apple patents a lot of things. It's a big company, sure there'll be people at Apple working on AR/VR. There'll also be people there working on colour-coded mouse buttons... There's also the somewhat-nuts situation of "hey we should absolutely patent this in case we ever need it in the future, and we don't want someone else to patent it first".

Personally I think you should have to have demonstrable progress on anything you patent on a yearly basis until it makes it to the market. Also, the whole idea of patents as a tradeable commodity is nuts. If it has to be tradeable, make the patent lifetime be cut in half for every trade...

Yeah, that list is at best misleading.

According to the second chart, Apple doesn't have 1376 employees in the Bay Area. There are more employees ahead of me in the lunch queue at Cafe Macs than that! Apple are building a second campus (and keeping the first) which will on its own hold 13,000 employees. The first campus is supposed to hold ~7000 IIRC, but it's being pushed to about 10,000 right now with people doubling up.

And if you've ever gone over to the Googleplex, you'll see a whole bunch of buildings taking up a pretty huge space. I can't believe there's only 1374 employees there, either.

Fuck me, that's the biggest load of bullshit I've read on Slashdot in recent memory.

How one can distil down an enormously complex situation into "too"[sic] paragraphs of dubious authenticity and simultaneously claim to understand the issues involved sufficiently to invoke two strawmen designed to be easily knocked down is beyond me, but hey, knock yourself out.

Just don't expect to be taken seriously.

1) The "representation" for the *people* in the EU is horribly undemocratic. All the people get to elect representatives to is the toothless chamber, ironically named the European Parliament. Forgive me, but any so-called parliament that can't even propose legislation, or even have the final say in enactment of the legislation graciously imposed upon it, is no parliament worth bearing the name. I'm used to the people (or at least our elected representatives) having the power, not an unelected body of career politicians out to line their own (or their own countries) pockets.

2) There is an element of racism in every society on this planet, it's a leftover from the "us" vs "them" tribal nature of our shared history. There were indeed people with money who were advertising and therefore getting their message across this time, and some of those people had a xenophobic and sometimes racist agenda, agreed. To immediately paint all those who voted leave (for whatever reason of their own) as racist, because some other person was being racist in an advertising campaign beggars belief. Clearly critical thinking in whatever country you're from is lacking (and the point stands if that country is Britain).

The issues involved were complex, and it's not anywhere near as simple as "fuck those brown people"; to imply such is frankly insulting. Perhaps those who voted to leave simply chose the probability of lesser prosperity as an acceptable compromise for real self-determination.

... voting Brexit is a thing.

[sigh]