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sillywabbit

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Nov 10, 2012
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Now I won't say "ColorGate," but has anyone noticed this with their iPhone 6/6 Plus where their color/paint is coming off?

"iPhone 6 Gold Coating Comes Off If You Rub It with a Tissue? We Think Not

User claims that the “gold” is coming off his iPhone
By Filip Truta on October 27th, 2014 15:40 GMT

You know what would be even more embarrassing than Bendgate? Colorgate. According to one user who attempted to clean his gold iPhone 6 Plus with a tissue, the gold paint used in the anodization process comes off easily.
Granted, we can’t put too much faith in this person’s words. He / she only shows a dirty tissue resting on a wooden surface with no iPhone in sight. It could well be cigarette smoke wiped off a piece of glass, by the looks of it.

The customer’s claim

So this person took to Reddit to complain about a problem which, if proven true, could spell another PR nightmare for Apple. Here’s what redditor aLunaaxxx has to say about his / her experience with a gold-colored iPhone 6 Plus.

And so I wanted to clean the back of my Gold 6 Plus, and when I used tap water and a damp tissue to wipe the back of the phone, the tissue turned brown, and I assure you it isn't dirt. I've actually wiped the back of the phone a few times with a clean dry cloth. Anyone know why? Did I accidentally wipe off some coating on the back of the phone?

Anodization and why the story shouldn’t stick

The image supplied with the post is available above for your viewing displeasure. A few Reddit users bothered to reply, telling this person that Apple actually doesn’t use normal paint to color its iDevices. Which is true.

The paint job isn’t even a coating, but rather a process called anodization, where the metal gets submerged in a special substance then gets bombarded with ions or something to cause it to rust in a controlled manner. The decay results in a bunch of nanotubes being created across the entire surface of the phone’s chassis. Apple puts the paint inside these tubes then seals it tight with another process. In all fairness, the anodization technique has probably been used particularly to avoid scenarios like the one described by our redditor here.

What if

Of course, no one would have believed that the iPhone 6 bends like jell-o hadn’t someone made it look that way. Yet millions today now believe that the iPhone 6 Plus bends as easily as marshmallows. So even if this thing isn’t true, it still has the potential to generate a few negative headlines.

We tested these claims on our own iPhone 6 test unit and we didn’t notice any gold coming off the chassis. Granted, it’s not a Plus but we can’t imagine Apple using different coloring techniques for the two phone models. Has anyone here tested this? What’s your take? "

Source: news.softpedia.com/news/iPhone-6-Gold-Coating-Comes-Off-if-You-Rub-It-with-a-Tissue-We-Think-Not-463245.shtml
 
Who knows. Maybe they skipped the anodizing step and hired some dude who chain smokes while giving each case a squirt from a spray can. Only the finest Krylon and the thinnest coating in the industry. Better margin that way.
 
Maybe the shop was all out of gold ones so just spray painted a white one and handed it over. That or he's just talking nonsense (I know which I think is more likely)
 
I noticed the 'Space Gray' rubbing off of the back of my iPhone... now I can reach through the phone... and touch the person on the line!
 
Let's see it.
But also black and other colors rub off after a while with use and time.
Unless you have it in a case then any contact with putting in and out of pockets, rubbing into things will wear out the color eventually.
 
The Gold and Space Gray are silver underneath. So, you can damage those with scratches and so forth and you will see silver underneath.

The Silver just looks scratched when you scratch it.

Hope that makes sense.
 
I also heard that some guy made a YouTube video shooting it with a .50 cal rifle and it put a hole in it. I mean wtf? Apple needs to get these design flaws ironed out ASAP.
 
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Likely an isolated case of defective anodized coating. We saw exactly the same thing with a batch of Slate iPhone 5 where the black rubbed off with wiping (a different issue from factory damaged iPhones arriving full of nicks out of the box).
 
The Gold and Space Gray are silver underneath. So, you can damage those with scratches and so forth and you will see silver underneath.

The Silver just looks scratched when you scratch it.

Hope that makes sense.

Yeah that's the natural color of the aluminum.
 
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Pics+or+it+didn+t+happen+_4a2048f0253f65ab37423e7e23cd54d1.png
 
I actually just tried this on my gold iPhone 6 for fun. Predictably, none of the colour came off on the tissue.
 
It's possible eventually for the gold color to come off in places, although I don't think it will happen except in exceptional cases when people have used their phones a lot over a long period of time (years). I've worn the finish off of my Mighty Mouse's aluminum in two places where I hold it. Needless to say, there is no earthly way you can rub off anodizing with a tissue.
 
I stopped reading when you used paint and anodize in the same sentence. Clearly you have no idea what anodization is and why being able to "rub it off" is ridiculous.
 
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