Just been out on the market for a short time, the iPhone X is reported to experience a hardware problem. A vertical green line is reported to appear on the phone’s iconic OLED display, which TechCrunch suggested to be possibly related to an electrical flaw.

(Image: MacRumors)

Over the past week, several users reported that an unmovable green line appeared on the phone display, some on the right edge, and the other less close to the edge at the left. They have tried to reset the phone but failed. The cause for the uncanny green line remained unknown.

A few media have approached Apple about the glitch. The company has yet to reply or explain how this could be fixed. A user reported his phone was replaced at the Apple Store.

Last year, the Samsung Galaxy S7 reportedly had a similar issue. The phone display showed a vertical pink line, prompting Samsung to compensate those impacted users with new replacement phones.

It is speculated that the ‘green line of death’ has something to do with the RGB sub-pixel pattern in the iPhone X OLED display. All the green sub-pixels align both vertically and horizontally, while red and blue sub-pixels alternate. This structure possibly cause voltage to flow to all the green sub-pixels in a line.

(Image: TechCrunch)

Despite the fact that OLED is growing popularity among smartphone and other consumer electronics makers, it seems there are still some quality issues that need to be resolved if it is going to expand its share over those of other display technologies in the next five years.

Other OLED manufacturers such as BOE that just ramped up their capacity will also need to dig into the problem and figure out what could possibly lead to cases like Apple’s and Samsung’s.