‘Touch disease’ causing iPhones to become unresponsive

This forces users to go to third-party repair shops that perform unauthorized “surgeries” to fix the issue.

If you are facing the Touch Disease with gray bars on top of your phone screen, it requires to replace the touch controller chip on the logic board, which could be done by a professional technician. “A lot of these are not lasting much past their one-year anniversary”, said Jessa Jones, owner of iPad Rehab.

“In between taking care of her four kids as a stay-at-home mother, she spends her days casually recovering priceless data from water-damaged iPads that no one else would ever bother touching, or fixing short circuits that cause the iPad LCD backlight to burn out”, Motherboard reports.

Jones is quoted by Smith in BGR as directly linking the problems with iPhones bending to the touch disease issues. There is also another symptom reported by users, which is the touchscreen that refuses to work properly and the owners have no choice but to send their devices in for fix. “And it’s all because of Apple’s design choices”.

Unfortunately, it looks like this is an issue with the logic board, which can’t be repaired at the Genius Bar.

This isn’t the first problem with the iPhone 6 series. Two Touch IC chips on the inside of the phone, which connect the physical touch and internal response, are supposed to stay connected.

In Jones’s view, this is a fundamental flaw. “Every phone has one, but this one is a signature failure that got to epic proportions”. Numerous phones are now suffering from touch disease. Their crime? Explaining what was causing Touch Disease and suggesting someone other than Apple might fix it. “Users who had their touchscreen replaced noticed the flickering grey bar again even on a new display”.

Replacing the touchscreen doesn’t work because it’s a problem with the Touch IC chips on the board inside the phone, not the screen itself. That potentially makes the situation even more hopeless for iPhone 6 users experiencing the problem.

If there’s any good news, it’s that the newer iPhone 6s and 6s Plus don’t seem to be affected by the flicker screen problems that’s plaguing some iPhone 6 models. iFixit reasons that’s because Apple moved the affected sensors off the logic board and onto the display assembly; Apple also took measures to make the 6s and 6s Plus more durable than their predecessors.