‘Bendgate’ is driving some people to believe insane ‘9/11 Truth’-style conspiracies

Listen up, people: The videos of bent iPhone 6 Plusses will do very little damage to Apple’s long-term reputation. So long as Apple is correct when it says that your iPhone 6 Plus isn’t likely to bend under normal usage, this issue will go away very quickly, just as “Antennagate” went away quickly when Apple gave out free bumpers and just as “Mapsgate” went away very quickly once Tim Cook apologized for it and recommended that people download different mapping apps. That said, there are some iPhone fans out there who are so irate over the whole issue that they’ve seemingly lost their minds about it.

Earlier this week, we received an email from an iPhone fan who claimed that Lewis “Unbox Therapy” Hilstenteger’s original video was a fake because of time discrepancies — as you can see in the picture below, the time shown from earlier in the video before the phone was bent is later than the time shown in the video after the phone was bent:

After a minute and 38 seconds in the video, the time is 2:26. After 2 minutes and 18 seconds in the video, the time is 1:58.

Per Business Insider, Hilstenteger explained on Twitter that he had to reshoot the overhead clip due to glare, which explains why the time on the first part of the clip is later than the time on the later part of the clip. We assume that Hilstenteger had two iPhone 6 Plus models on hand just in case he needed to get two takes of the video.

Even so, we could see how this sort of discrepancy could raise some eyebrows… if there weren’t already a ton of other videos out there that backed up Hilstenteger’s account. Here, for example, is one that was done using far more scientific methods than the ones Unbox Therapy used:

And here is one that’s in German, but you don’t need to speak a foreign language to see that it shows the 6 Plus does bend under pressure in the exact place Unbox Therapy said it did:



And then there’s this video, which bends the iPhone 6 Plus so easily that we actually do have a hard time believing the device wasn’t doctored somehow beforehand. We personally wouldn’t put too much trust into it but your mileage may vary:

Now, maybe Samsung has hatched an international conspiracy so vast that it’s paid lots of YouTube users to fake bending their iPhones in the exact same way. But let’s be honest: The chances of that being the case are slim indeed and we frankly don’t think Samsung is smart enough to have thought of it.

If you find yourself obsessing over the nuances of the bent iPhone 6 Plus the same way conspiracy theorists obsess over grassy knolls and moon landing videos, please just take a break from the Internet this weekend. This sort of thing could be very bad for your mental health.