Will it bend? Consumer Reports puts iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to the test

By David Nield September 27, 2014

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. — Digital Trends

Apple wants us all to move on from the issue of bending iPhones — the company says it’s had just nine complaints so far — but Consumer Reports has decided to put the new iPhones through their paces with a bend test of its own. Run in a special lab not dissimilar to Apple’s own, the experiments found that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were more breakable than the LG G3, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the iPhone 5 from 2012.

The good news for iPhone owners is that all the handsets included in the report held up to the 70 pounds of pressure that Apple sets as its benchmark. That’s about the same amount of force you need to apply to break four wooden pencils in your hands, so it’s unlikely to be exerted by accident. “Our tests show that both [new] iPhones seem tougher than the Internet fracas implies,” says Consumer Reports.

The HTC One (M8) was the weakest of the phones tested, deforming at a pressure level of 70 pounds and becoming separated from its case at 90 pounds. Next was the iPhone 6 (70 and 100 pounds) which proved slightly less robust than the larger iPhone 6 Plus (90 and 110 pounds) — evidently that extra size and weight helps the bigger model stay stronger.

The top three spots in the toughness charts were taken by the LG G3 (130 and 130 pounds), the Apple iPhone 5 from 2012 (130 and 150 pounds) and the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which both deformed and broke at 150 pounds of force. “It took significant force to do this kind of damage to all these phones,” says the report. “While nothing is indestructible, we expect that any of these phones should stand up to typical use.”

In other words: Move on, nothing to see here. Yes you can bend your iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, but you’re going to have to use an inordinate amount of force to do so. Company executives in Cupertino will be hoping they can now get back to totting up the iPhone 6 sales figures, which reached 10 million units across both models on the first weekend of sale.

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Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

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