So Apple has finally fessed up to the existence of the much-dreaded “Touch Disease” — but users will tell you it’s worse that Apple admits, and they aren’t happy about the company’s plan to deal with it.
Touch Disease is the annoying phenomenon that plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the Cupertino tech giant have been saying is messing up their iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones, leaving a flickering bar at the top of the display and creating all kinds of multi-touch issues.
(You all remember “multi-touch,” right? All those cool things you can do with your iPhone by touching it in different ways and with different amounts of pressure? And you saw that Apple how-to a while back that said, among other things, “if the Home button doesn’t respond as you expect, make sure that your hands are clean and dry…”?)
I wrote about the issue back in August, when the lawsuit first became known. “The iPhones are not fit for the purpose of use as smartphones because of the touch-screen defect,” said the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose. At that time, Apple declined comment.
Now Apple has officially recognized the problem and announced a new worldwide program where it will fix any affected iPhone 6 Plus devices — for a $149 service fee.
So just how bad is it to have an iPhone beset with problems caused by Touch Disease?
Listen:
Elizabeth Jackson, having lunch with her husband, told WCPO Cincinnati that using her iPhone 6 Plus has become increasingly frustrating. “There’s sometimes when it won’t respond when I go to text or open an app. It takes a while to open up.”
WCPO also got an earful from Brianna Booker, whose iPhone 6 Plus would flash a light gray band at the top of the phone — and then simply stop responding to her touch. It was, as it were, unswipable: “I wasn’t able to swipe. I had notifications coming in, but I wasn’t able to answer any text messages or phone calls.”
It gets worse.
Commenting online about my colleague’s story this morning on Apple’s acknowledgement of the problem, a guy named John Smith complained that he had hit a wall when he tried to get Apple to fix his diseased phone: “I was told ‘tough’ by the Apple store employees when I brought it in even though they admitted it was also a problem with the 6.”
Over in Europe, where they were already wide awake and ready to share their tales of woe, “Süddeutsche Zeitung” tweeted “#TouchDisease: @Apple räumt beim iPhone 6 Plus Reparaturrabatte ein, weist aber die Schuld von sich. via @golem” which translates roughly to:
“#TouchDisease: @Apple admits iPhone 6 plus repair discounts, but assigns the blame from itself via @golem.”
The morning was just getting started here in Silicon Valley when a steady chorus of TD complainers began to grow louder. In responses to a story in TechCrunch, readers unloaded:
“I have never dropped my 6,” said Tommy Ray Pabst at Cornell University, “but it does a LOT of weird things on its own.”
Bill Thompson wrote that he had a iPhone 6 Plus “until the recent trade in offer on the iPhone 7. I never had an issue with it, but I promptly put it in a tough case that protected against drops and bending. It was tougher to slip in an out of my pocket, but I had little fears about easily breaking it.”
And a reader named Anono Mouser said Touch Disease was symptomatic of a larger problem: Apple’s incessant software updates and the problems they often cause:
“Seems like every few days my 6plus wants to update it’s OS to something new. It’d be nice if one of those updates made the smartphone smart enough to actually answer a phone call. I mean it is a phone, right? Instead it mocks me to swipe to answer, and then ignores every swipe, push, and curseword that’s thrown at it.”
But if you want to hit the mother lode of Touch Disease-caused agony, go read Jason Koebler’s piece at Motherboard. He said his inbox was flooded with TD complaints after he wrote about the problem in September.
“In the last 24 hours, I’ve gotten emails from 27 separate iPhone 6 Plus owners who have encountered this problem and were unaware that Apple internally considers it a known issue,” he wrote. ” Many of them have been put through lengthy tech support protocols on obviously broken phones only to be told that they would have to pay $329 for a refurbished phone that is still fundamentally flawed. Others have had to put up with months of forcefully bending or twisting the phone in order to get its Touch IC connectors to intermittently work for a few minutes, hours, or days before the problem inevitably resurfaces.”
Here are just a few of the tales Koebler heard:
From Cherish:
“Missed a lot of great photos during a friend’s wedding weekend because I unfortunately relied on my iPhone to be my camera. Apple called me on August 17, but when they called my screen was frozen and I could not answer the phone. They left a message saying they would call back. I went to my rental car, connected the Bluetooth and used that to answer. I gave them my alternate cell number so that solved the calling issue. I was on the phone with them for an hour after that and they insisted for most of the call that this is a normal occurrence and is often resolved by restoring the OS.”
From Paul:
“I’ve lived with this problem on and off for almost two years now. It started happening almost as soon as I got it. I got a screen change under warranty, and had to get a refurbished phone the day after because the screen change did nothing. A few months later it started showing the signs again, and now I can’t use it.”
Wait, there’s more from Paul:
“As a kicker just a couple weeks ago, the phone stopped connecting to my cellular network and AT&T said it was a phone problem, not carrier. I had to order an iPhone 7 Plus but I feel cheated out of my money as I paid full price for my 6 Plus and could’ve used it at least another year or even two, if it worked properly.”
And from Katasha:
“The top grey bar would almost flicker all the time, and that’s when I knew my phone wouldn’t respond to my touch. So, after dealing with this for a couple weeks, I ended up at the Apple Store, where I was told yes, it was a problem, but not something that could be fixed, nor was it covered, and I exchanged my phone for $329, to get a new one, because what else was I to do?”
