14 DAY TRIAL // If you want to know if the general population indeed is having a problem with Apple’s products, there’s no simpler way to assess the gravity of the situation than visiting Apple Support Communities.
Faithful fans know where to come and weep, and if there’s one place that can tell you if something is truly wrong, it’s the official Apple forum.
Just saying
After countless bent iPhones, we were left asking ourselves just how many of these things were bent on purpose and how many of these occurrences were in fact accidents? Not to take Apple’s side, but there’s a good chance that there are more intentional #bengdates than there are accidental ones. Just saying.
But let’s leave assumptions aside for a minute and look at some raw numbers. After all, they tend to tell the truth better than words.
Search Google and you’ll find more #bendgate reports than there are grains of sand in the Sahara desert. Search the Apple forum and you’ll notice a pretty huge discrepancy. Just four open topics, three of which were mere discussions about the media reports, not about actual bending accidents. Here's a thread discussing Bendgate. At the time of this writing, it was six days old and it had just one reply.
To put that into even more context (as well as to see if the forum’s search engine was reliable), we typed iOS 8.0.2 in the search field. Well over 1,400 discussions (screenshots below).
Bottom line, #bendgate may or may not be a thing, but it’s certainly not affecting as many people as the media would have you believe.
Apple will do replacements nonetheless
We published a story a few hours ago about a guy who had his iPhone 6 Plus exchanged for a new one at the Apple Store. The reason? You guessed it: the phone had been bent. The user failed to explain how the phone got in that condition, but he successfully had it swapped for a new one after visiting two separate Apple Retail Stores.
According to his story, staffers at different Apple stores have different instructions and / or mentality, so it’s not 100% guaranteed that they’ll replace your device free of charge without asking any questions.
It’s also been widely publicized that Apple is willing to replace bent devices if the techie inspecting them believes it wasn’t the user’s fault. Which is certainly better than not getting the chance to replace it at all, but also quite arbitrary at the same time.
We'll admit it’s still too early to assess the gravity of the situation, since many of the ordered iPhone 6 Units are still waiting to meet their owners. So far, though, it seems that the issue is blown out of proportion.
