Apple’s apparently got a problem on its hands regarding its
two latest smartphones, the iPhone 6 and
iPhone
6 Plus. And no, it’s not #bendgate. According to rumors out of South Korea,
a type of flash storage is causing the company some headaches in two models of
the new iPhones.
Only the 64GB iPhone 6 and the 128GB iPhone 6 Plus seem to
be affected. These iterations use a type of flash storage called TLC
(triple-level cell) NAND.
Apple has allegedly discovered a problem in the controller
IC of this TLC NAND flash, which is causing crashing, bootloops, as well as
slow reading and writing speeds on some batches of the aforementioned devices.
Such issues have first been reported on a few days ago, and now Apple is said
to have confirmed them, along with the culprit.
The faulty controller IC is made by Anobit, a company now
owned by Apple. For the iPhones in question, there will now be a switch to MLC
(multi-level cell) NAND, which is more expensive than TLC but doesn’t come with
such problems. TLC NAND flash is a type of solid-state memory that stores three
bits of data per cell. MLC stores just two, and there’s another option, which
is SLC (single-level cell) NAND flash, which stores one bit per cell. MLC flash
is widely used in smartphone storage as well as consumer SSD drives. If you’re
wondering why Apple chose TLC flash in the first place, the reason seems to be
solely tied to cost cutting.
Apple won’t issue a recall of the already affected phones,
rather it plans on fixing the problem through the upcoming iOS 8.1.1 update. On
the other hand, new 64GB iPhone 6 units and 128GB iPhone 6 Plus handsets will
come with MLC NAND flash, the rumor says. That’s a bit odd – if the issue is
fixable via software, then why switch to a more expensive flash type anyway?
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