I saw your pictures. That iPad was either sat on or someone put a lot of pressure on it. That did not happen by heat of a defect!! No way!!! That iPad was damaged intentionally. Why would you spend $500 or more on something and not take care of it??
Like someone else said, please don't make assumptions.
So you say it never leaves the house!
Then why do you have a WiFi + Cellular model?
Something is fishy here.
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Did they say what could have caused the bend?
I'm very interested on the ending of that story too.
And regarding your first statement, there's nothing fishy actually. I simply bought it thinking that its cellular capabilities may be useful in the future, but so far I just haven't had the need of taking it out of my home.
I've taken my iPad out a few times, but I wouldn't say it was more than three times. So it stays at home on a regular basis.
The battery has enough power to MELT the aluminum casing, if a thermal run-away event happens. Google it.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/lithium_ion_safety_concerns
Maybe this is a lesson about not charging your iPad inside of a zipper case. Which is a really bad idea. These things have Li-Ion batteries in them. Which get really hot during charging. Hot things expand, and aluminum has a much higher thermal expansion coefficient than glass (3 times as much), which it is bonded to. Unequal stress = bending action.
No sitting required.
^THIS. I've been charging my devices in a bag since always. However, due to the thin enclosure, hot weather and battery/processor/whatever-part-of-it-that-is-heating-up, maybe it's time to stop doing it. Though I hope you concur that this shouldn't be an issue at all.
The warranty will cover it if Apple cannot produce the reason why it was bent. They would have open it up, make sure something like the battery didn't perform out of regulation, then take the material apart and test it for impurities that could lead to bending. Once they have established that the defect is not their problem, only then are they allowed to deny the repair unless it is clear that the user bent the product then of course the warranty will not cover it.
I don't know what the user did, but a lot of people with Macbooks have had their chassis bend due to batteries expanding. Not saying this is what happened here, but just as an example.
Dude, a friend of mine had exactly the same problem. He uses an aluminum MacBook (late 2008), and it turns out its battery started to expand.
I'm not completely sure that that's the case here (though I suspect it), but as we both live in a zone where temperature get considerably high during summer, I wouldn't discard the explanation.
This iPad bent not by itself. The seam won't bent this way even if everything went wrong during production. Aluminum is a soft alloy and does usually not warp or build up tension during production. If heat would be the cause the bend should also show in the opposite direction because the expansion coefficient of aluminum is bigger than of glass. And it would not be permanent.
What do you mean by not being permanent? There are reports of other devices staying like that forever thanks to bloated batteries.
Also, as a general clarification, I can't take my iPad back to an Apple Store. There's no way I can deal with Apple directly (unless once again I'm luck enough to send an email to Tim Cook and have a phone call back from the US). So my only chance is to go back to the reseller where I bought my iPad and explain the situation.
The purpose of this thread was actually looking for some additional information and evidence, but as I haven't found a lot of similar cases so far (at least regarding this specific iPad model), I'm afraid that I'm on my own.
