Apple’s Hiccup, Blue Apron Gets Picked Up

It’s hard to feel sympathy for Apple, given how much money it makes ($9.2 million in net income every hour in the most recent quarter). But the flood of complaints on social media about overheating in the latest line of iPhones makes you feel a bit for the tech giant and its executives. Here’s a company that wanted to make its high-end phones lighter by using titanium, and what sounds like a smart idea appears to have backfired. Of course, early complaints are par for the course for most new smartphones and usually get resolved eventually, so this may not matter much in the long run.

Still, it is a reminder of the horrendous complexities involved in making these devices, something the consumers who carry them everywhere undoubtedly do not appreciate. But in our continuing efforts to remind people about this, we brought you this fascinating story today about Apple’s continuing battles to reduce what it spends on iPhone screens. You can read the details in the story, but briefly, Apple engineers figured out a way to etch a minuscule QR code within the glass that makes up part of the screen of every iPhone. Don’t try looking for it—you need special equipment to see it, but it was located near the speaker receiver hole on iPhone 12s and “somewhere inside the black frame at the bottom edge of the screen in some later models,” according to our resident Apple expert Wayne Ma.