Backstory: I’ve had this hand-me-down iPhone 6 for the past 3 years. It’s still kicking and is pretty useful, however around a year and half ago it stopped charging and as it was smack-dab in the middle of when university was really ramping up requirements, I decided to just chuck it in a drawer and use my old iPhone 5C in the meantime (I don’t use my phone often other than social media anyways so not much of a spectacular change in quality of life).
Cut to a few months into the quarantine, I thought “Wonder if that iPhone still works?”. So, I took the phone back from its dark, dusty cave and sure enough
Nothing.
As excepted, still not charging, but now since I had the time to think about a solution and mess around with the phone (I’ve survived without it this point, won’t lose much if I break it). I decided to search up possible reasons on why it won’t charge, lo and behold the first response was simply cleaning the port . I did that using some toothpicks and very carefully with tweezers I use for electronics, and hey what do you know, it charges again (pretty short-sighted not to have just done that in the first place but eh, what you gonna do).
So I set it up again but quickly noticed a problem, the phone’s WiFi signal was horrible. I’d be right next to the router and it would still only get a bar or two if I really stick next to the router. Also, my Bluetooth audio devices would cut out when connected to the phone. Clearly something funky was going on in the phone. I used mobile data on it fine though so I thought “well, at least it’s still kinda useful”, but I had the time so might as well look into maybe fixing this phone (again, the risk of breaking the phone didn’t worry me anymore, so this was very much more for the learning experience at this point with a possibly functioning phone at the end).
So doing a bit of Googling, it looks like what I was experiencing was pretty common, and was a fault of the internal antenna of the iPhone breaking. This antenna serves both for WiFi and Bluetooth as both operate on the 2.4GHz band and made sense on why that would be the culprit. Replacement parts were easy enough to find alongside kits with tools to open the phone. Note, I’ve already opened a fair share of basic electronics at this point (laptops, fans, dumb phones, etc) but never opened a smartphone yet, so good experience without the pressure of bricking a daily use phone.
As with most repairs, iFixit has an amazing guide on how to do this exact repair (iPhone 6 Antenna Flex Cable Replacement – iFixit Repair Guide) and there were multitudes of YouTube guides too, so resources were ,luckily, abundant.
If you’ve ever wondered what’s inside the magic box called your phone, well, here it is
The repair needed to go until the mainboard of the phone could be removed from the phone which made me realize “there isn’t much phone at there at all”. The device was mostly a battery and this thin mainboard that of course, had the bundles of unicorn hair and fairy dust that made the phone work under metal shielding.
Now, I’m not gonna lie, this repair had me sweating, the phone was very compact and fragile so I was very careful not to unintentionally break something just to make sure I was doing the repair right. Small components and shaky hands don’t mix. I even used a piece of cardboard with some sticky tack to keep track of all the screws like the guide said since they were all specific. I took all the precautions I could have thought of (ESD safety, clearing the repair area, being careful around the battery). It was doable (and based on the comments under the listing of the replacement parts I bought it from, was done successfully even by first-timers) but I would not suggest doing this without some brushing up on the resources.
So moment of truth, I had replaced the parts, assembled the phone again aaaaaaand…
Apple Logo, it turned on ( *breathes*, okay it’s alive at least )
but of course, since this is the real world, the screen was not responding to inputs and had grid lines all over.
Okay, what went wrong? well a quick sanity check of Google troubleshooting and sensible thought showed possibly not connecting the digitizer and screen cables properly.
So I opened up the phone and reconnected those cables and once again turned the phone on and…
Success, full screen functionality and the intended repair worked, full bars on WiFi again and bluetooth works without a hitch. With that, I resumed using this phone as my daily driver.
So, takeaways:
Well first, I went on quite a rabbit hole about repairing devices again because of this, I watch a lot of tech repair videos just out of pure entertainment value and maybe the occasional useful tidbit of information, but you also get to learn the community of people that realize the importance of being able to repair our own devices and tools. The movement is called Right to Repair and is mostly relegated to areas of the world where repair your own stuff isn’t common anymore. Moreover, just saving a device from the landfill or being left in a drawer is enough of a reason to see that repairing devices shouldn’t be an afterthought. I’ll probably write a full post about Right to Repair in the future, compelling ideas in there.
Second, being able to repair this phone on my own at all was lucky, and was very much circumstantial as I had a backup phone anyway and this phone dying wouldn’t be an issue for me. That can’t be said about other people’s devices breaking when they are actively using it everyday and have a lot of information on the device that needs to be recovered (there is a mini lesson on the importance of backing up data there as well), so this was a chance event and the confidence of opening up your own phone and messing around with its guts is something that should be accompanied by an even deeper regard for the safety of doing a repair and risk assessment. As always, safety first and don’t risk what you aren’t prepared to lose.
That said, device repair and this attitude of “I’ll fix it myself” is common in a lot of these technical creative communities (Makers and Engineers alike I think would agree on this), and technical skills in these fields are something I personally believe should be essential and shouldn’t be glossed over as grunt work. As an Engineering student, I do see how it’s easy to look past these practical skills when getting drowned in the theory and information barrage of the curriculum, leaving practical subjects such as laboratory courses to the side. However, I think appreciation should be given to both sides of the coin. At the end of the day, everything we plan to create once we do become engineers would need to be maintained and operated by those with technical skills (technicians and co-engineers), so it is essential to keep in mind the actualization of designs. (I’d probably also write about the struggle between technical and theoretical skills in engineering in the future, but for now this post about fixing a phone has rambled long enough).
With that, I have effectively used this phone for nearly the past year so looks like it all went well.
Over the Corner 