The problem has nothing to do with the NAND flash chips

Nov 5, 2014 07:28 GMT  ·  By

Users experiencing random crashes and freezes with their iPhones are advised to keep their cool and ignore reports that suggest Apple messed up on the hardware. There’s a good chance they can fix their woes through simply restoring their firmware.

There’s a thread on Apple’s forums that seems to indicate that the iPhone 6 Plus is prone to crashing more than any other iPhone, for some reason. Most of the users discussing the problem seem to be wielding the same high-end model (128GB) and have numerous apps installed.

At the same time, most of them have performed an “upgrade” to the iPhone 6 Plus by transitioning their data from an older iPhone over to the new one. Apparently, some restores don’t play well with the new devices.

The story on Apple Support Communities

Thread opener “legalepa” shares his experience with the rest of the iPhone user base:

“Since restoring from my old iPhone 5S backup onto my 6 Plus 128GB (AT&T) running iOS 8.0, my 6 Plus is laggy (animations are very slow and stutter), freezy (after hitting ‘done’ it often freezes for a good five seconds before registering the click), buggy (the keyboard sometimes doesn't appear at all, the ‘halos’ around the folders on the home screen sometimes appear and sometimes don't, seems totally arbitrary), and crashy...”

He goes on to explain that, whenever he does fast app switching or changes the wallpaper, “the phone crashes, turns off the radios, then shows the Apple screen before rebooting).” He claims the crashing occurs so often – once every five to ten minutes – that he can hardly use the phone at all.

Sharks in the water

It wasn’t long before a media outlet decided to make a story out of these people’s misfortune, and Apple’s implicitly. Business Korea tapped the customers’ discussions and then cited industry sources as saying that “considering that technical defects mainly occur in the 128GB version of the iPhone 6 Plus, there might be a problem in the controller IC of triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash.”

Despite there being no indication that the iPhone 6 Plus is suffering from any hardware flaw, the Korean publication goes even further, stating that Apple might need to “recall all of the products that have been sold so far.”

A restore will do just fine

In reality, the crashes experienced by the handful of users reporting their troubles on Apple Support Communities can be easily remedied through a factory restore. While it’s not something users prefer to do, restoring the device to factory settings is usually a good precaution to ensure smooth sailing not just in the face of an upgrade, but in general.

Anticipating such reports, we recently published a how-to guide to show iPhone 6 users how to enjoy a snappy phone by doing a factory reset without losing their data. It’s headlined “How to Speed Up Your iPhone Using the Easiest and Most Efficient Method Possible” and we encourage everyone to glance over it.