iPhone 6 phones infected with 'Touch Disease' that makes screens useless

The flaw causes a grey bar to appear along the top of the screen that doesn't respond to touch  
The flaw causes a grey bar to appear along the top of the screen that doesn't respond to touch   Credit: iFixit/YouTube

A bug that breaks iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screens is a "ticking time bomb" poised to affect a growing number of the smartphones, according to repair experts.

Nicknamed "Touch Disease", the fault starts with a flickering bar that appears at the top of the devices' screens that doesn't respond to a users' touch. Over time the bar grows until the whole screen is rendered unusable.  

It is unclear how widespread the problem is, but if it is an inherent manufacturing flaw in the two-year-old Apple phones, as iPhone repair gurus at iFixit suggest, millions of handsets could potentially be vulnerable.

"This issue is widespread enough that I feel like almost every iPhone 6 and 6 Plus has a touch of it - no pun intended - and are like ticking time bombs," Jason Villmer, owner of repair shop STS Telecom, told Mac Rumours

Several users have reported the problem on Apple's website, with some saying that the company refused to acknowledge it as an issue when they took their broken phones into the Apple Store. 

Twisting the phone slightly or applying pressure to the screen can make it briefly work as normal. But over time the grey bar reappears - and spreads. The "disease", which could be the result of the design flaw that lead to "bendgate", appears to grow across the screen of the affected phones until it stops working completely. 

The problem lies in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus' logic board, the part of the phone that facilitates communication between the different elements of the device. The Touch IC chip, which controls how the screen responds to touch, connects to the board through a lot of little solder balls. As the phone is bent and twisted slightly over time these balls crack and lose contact with the board, resulting in a dead area appearing on the screen.   

"At first there may be no defect at all. Later you might notice that the screen is sometimes unresponsive, but it is quick to come back with a hard reset," a spokesman for iFixit explained in the video. "As the crack deepends into a full separation of the chip-board bong, the periods of no touch become more frequent."  

How you can fix it

There isn't a quick fix for the problem. Replacing the screen on your iPhone 6 or 6 Plus won't solve the problem, because it isn't a fault in the screen itself. To fix it, you would need to replace the Touch IC on the phone's logic board, a procedure that Apple can't do in store, according to Mac Rumours

If it is indeed a design flaw present in a majority of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus handsets Apple may decide to offer help to its users. But for now there is little that can be done if your phone is affected by Touch Disease. 

Apple is due to release the next generation of the iPhone at the beginning of September. The iPhone 7 is expected to come with an upgraded A10 processor and could have 3GB of RAM, at least in the 5.5-inch version. It will probably look similar to the current generation, but could have an upgraded, bigger camerapressure-sensitive home button and no 3.5mm headphone jack

The Silicon Valley giant will be hoping that the release of the new phone can boost revenues after it reported a second-consecutive fall in profits in July as sales of the iPhone decline. 

 

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