14 DAY TRIAL // The latest Apple smartphone is much more prone to getting dings and scratches, sometimes even before customers unpack the product, making it hard to produce bulk quantities rapidly, reports say.
Business Insider is taking a close look at the situation, reporting that Apple is exercising an insane quality-control crackdown at assembler Foxconn, with the purpose of reducing faulty units.
Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne, Agee & Leach Inc., is quoted as saying that “The iPhone 5 is not easy to put together because it’s a minimalist design. “Apple has a very high standard, where it aims to produce each model to be an exact replica where variance is measured in microns.”
Indeed, the company’s chief designer himself said that Apple is now looking for design irregularities measured in the microns, which makes scuffs and dings (like the one highlighted in the picture above) unacceptable. And customers agree.
“As soon as I opened the box, I noticed nicks and scuffs in the bezel,” Matthew Pendergraff wrote on Apple’s forums. “I realize that at some point this might happen from normal wear and tear, but right out of the box is unaccepted.”
Jacob Huang, a professor of materials engineering at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, said Apple is faced with a big trade-off at this point.
While the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S were far less prone to getting scratched, their all-glass enclosures were highly susceptible to an even more severe form of damage – cracking.
“It’s a trade-off because aluminum is strong and tougher to break, and it’s light and more economical, yet it is also easier to scratch,” said Prof. Huang.
“You could use magnesium, which is lighter, but even softer and easier to scratch, or glass which is heavier but harder yet more brittle,” he added.