A lot of the design aspects in the iPhone 6 and 6S seem superfluous, including but not limited to: an obnoxiously large frame that makes it near impossible to fit the phone in your pocket, being so thin that it can bend in your pocket, a 8MP camera (if you really cared about quality photos you’d buy an actual camera)…the list goes on.
But what about those horizontal plastic lines running across the back of the phone?
To the untrained eye, they look completely unnecessary – but according to Mirror, they’re actually the phone’s antennas:
The stripes are in fact the phone’s antennas, and they are rather important because that’s how the phone communicates with the network.
These aerials can’t be hidden inside the handset, because the phone’s all-metal construction would prevent the escape of the radio waves, preventing the antennas sending and receiving information.
Instead, Apple decided to cover the antennas in plastic, through which the radio waves can pass, and stick them on the outside.
Rumors have suggested that the bands will not be present in the new iPhone 7, as a recent patent application from Apple outlines how they plan to replace the plastic with a metal composite that looks and feels like metal yet allows radio waves to pass through. Not that anyone was really dying for the plastic lines to be eradicated – did you even notice they were there before reading this? Doubtful at best.
[H/T Mirror]