Apple is no stranger to catastrophic clangers when it comes to hardware. Can anyone ever forget the debacle that was lovingly named ‘antennagate’ by journalists after the iPhone 4 suffered from what we can only call a debatable antenna flaw. For a company that prides itself in the details, Apple can have some pretty woeful slips when it comes to quality control.
Which is why this latest story doesn’t surprise us one jot, though it admittedly comes nowhere near antennagate in the chart of Apple mishaps.
Speaking to The New York Times, Apple spokesperson Teresa Brewer confirmed that the company has identified a small number of iPhone 5s handsets that may suffer from a defective battery, leaving them either taking longer to charge than normal or simply having a shorter battery life than would normally be expected.
We recently discovered a manufacturing issue affecting a very limited number of iPhone 5S devices that could cause the battery to take longer to charge or result in reduced battery life,” said Teresa Brewer, an Apple spokeswoman. “We are reaching out to customers with affected phones and will provide them with a replacement phone.
Apple hasn’t confirmed just how many handsets are affected, but they did say that it is in the thousands which isn’t as alarming as it may seem considering 9 million iPhones were sold just over the 5s and 5c opening weekend.
Apple will be contacting those affected and offering replacement handsets in exchange for the faulty ones. If the numbers are as small as Apple says though, the chances of the iPhone 5s you have in your pocket being one of the faulty ones is rather small. Still, that’s no good to you if yours is one that is affected.
So, ‘batterygate’ isn’t really all that big of a deal after all.
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