A class action lawsuit has apparently been filed against Apple by a man who says that his daughter broke his iPhone 4 due to dropping it on to the ground from three feet (via 9to5Mac). The lawsuit claims that Apple refuses to acknowledge that the iPhone 4 had a serious design flaw and is more prone to breaking than the iPhone 3G or 3GS.
Combine this lawsuit with the fact that a SquareTrade survey suggests that the iPhone 4 is 82% more likely to break when dropped when compared to the 3GS. This sounds like a massive amount but here is the reason why this overblown ‘glassgate’ issue is a huge pile of steaming crap.
The statistic that “the iPhone 4 is 82% more likely to have glass break than previous iPhone models” is a misleading statement. Let me explain the reasoning. Previous iPhone models had a glass front and a plastic rear. The new iPhone 4 has a glass front and a glass rear.
If, to give an numerical example, previous iPhone models had a break rate of 1 in 100 when dropped on to concrete from 3 feet then you could expect the iPhone 4 to have a break rate of 2 in 100 when dropped simply because it has double the amount of glass real estate. This would be an increase of 100% compared to previous models. However, as the survey says, the iPhone 4 is only 82% more likely to crack which translates to 1.82 breakages per 100 drops.
So equally, you could therefore say that the glass on the iPhone 4 is 18% more resistant to breakages than on previous models and therein is where the inconsistency and misrepresentation of the issue could lie.
Let’s hope that the media doesn’t seize upon this daft issue and turn it into another antenna-gate. We have actually received multiple e-mails from a PR company looking to increase the publicity on this issue in the hope that consumers will be scared into purchasing insurance policies.
We told the PR company to bugger off.
Gain Some Perspective And 