You might have seen one of the viral photos or videos circulating around of the iPhone 6 Plus, curved and bent from being held in a pocket. But according to Apple, which provided a statement to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, this isn’t a problem that many users are experiencing: The company said that only nine customers have reported a bent iPhone 6 Plus.
On the one hand, nine people noticing a bend when a phone’s only been out a week does seem to be a lot. But Apple sold 10 million iPhones globally on the the first weekend they were available. That figure doesn’t distinguish between the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, though, and the bending figure only applies to the larger iPhone 6 Plus.
Even so, do the math. Using web usage data as a very rough proxy, for every iPhone 6 Plus in the wild, there are eight iPhone 6 devices, which would mean Apple ended up selling roughly 1.1 million iPhone 6 Plus over the first weekend. Nine affected devices out of 1.1 million works out to 0.0008 percent. That suggests you are more likely to experience other flaws with the new iPhone than you are to have your device bend.
In fact, the attention around what some have called Bendgate or Bendghazi says more about the media’s insatiable appetite for Apple stories than it does the latest iPhone. The story first picked up steam when a few blogs noticed a single anecdote posted to the Mac Rumors forum. Subsequent calls for other reports turned up two other stories and pictures. But the story really blew up when a popular YouTube channel, Unbox Therapy, posted a video in which the narrator sacrificed his device and purposely tried to bend the iPhone. Not surprisingly, when a grown man actively tries to break a fragile electronic device, he usually succeeds. But the video provided the iconic bent iPhone image (that you see at the top of this post) and was repeatedly offered as “video proof” that the iPhone 6 Plus bends — not just in the tech media, but also on the evening news. Nobody actually had a bent iPhone, but everyone heard about it.
Apple is reportedly replacing some of the bent iPhones — although I doubt the company will appease anyone actively trying to bend their device. We might even see Apple hand out free reinforcing cases, as it did when there was an antenna flaw with the iPhone 4. But really, the reason Apple provided that number to the Wall Street Journal is that it thinks that this story is silly — in a previous life, Apple may not have even deigned to comment. It’s not as if the company doesn’t have real iPhone issues to address — like fixing the iOS update yesterday that borked cellular service for many.

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