iPhone 6 'Hairgate' Controversy Is Not The New Bendgate

The latest iPhone ‘...gate’ has arrived. It is trending on Twitter and has been written about on innumerable websites, including publishing heavyweights like Time and The Independent, which are queuing up to report that the new iPhone 6 is “ripping out” users’ hair. Inevitably ‘hairgate’ has been born.

Here’s the long and short of it: hairgate stems from a community post on popular Apple site 9to5Mac in which the poster claims his hair gets caught in “the seam between the glass and aluminium” and “when you try to free it out, it hurts.” The post has been picked up on social media and gone mad.

There’s only one problem: it's nonsense.

Having reviewed the iPhone 6 and currently being in possession of an iPhone 6 Plus for Forbes’ upcoming longer term review, I can report the gap between the front glass and aluminium does not exist (photo above). There is a bevel, but the glass front panel is actually fused to the aluminium and the tiny gap you do see is significantly narrower than a human hair.

Furthermore even if a significant gap did exist, hairgate would still make no sense. It has been pointed out that ‘Gapgate’ on the Galaxy Note 4 (where a tangible gap exists in the phablet’s seam) was also present in both the Note 2 and Note 3 designs and owners go by without widespread reports of hair trauma. The Note 3 alone sold 10 million units in 2 months, so that's a pretty wide test base.

Meanwhile we have lived through an era of phones' gaps, notably between physical phone keys on dumbphones and keyboards on BlackBerrys. We even survived clamshell hinges without our follicles being terrorised.

What hairgate does demonstrate though is the ongoing hyperbole that continues to surround every iPhone launch and the ongoing fanaticism that meets the latest iOS and Android handsets (even new BlackBerrys can still cause a stir) and the blindness to reason this can cause. Case in point: a number of the hairgate tweets being shared are clearly parodies by people without hair...

My hair keeps getting caught in the microscopic seam between glass and aluminium on my iPhone 6

— Kavan (@KavKilledKenny) October 1, 2014

Yes, the iPhone 6 does have faults and there was some truth to the fact that bendgate was symptomatic of Apple’s obsession with thinness over the wider user preference for increased battery life. That said, of the things for which the new iPhones can be criticised, hairgate is not one of them.

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