My Jesus Phone Died and Didn’t Come Back. . .
September 20, 2008
My iPhone is dead, less that two months after I bought it - I am now waiting on the resurrection. I have been a fan of Apple for years. I bought the first generation iPhone on the first day and attended the first iPhone Developers Camp in San Francisco later that week. The iPhone was by far the best phone I had ever owned. When the 3G iPhone was released it took me a month to actually get one in my hands. By the time I did I was less than pleased; I wrote my review of the 3G on August 13th. It is now September 20th and my iPhone is no longer working.
For some reason, starting this morning, my iPhone thinks I have the headphones plugged in and has disabled the handset speaker. Fortunately I was in the mall when my phone stopped working. With Ethan and Erin in tow I went to the Apple store and consulted a Genius. He suggested that I had water damage. I explained that my phone had worked fine when I was at the toy store, but stopped working by the time we were in Nordstroms and that we hadn’t visited a pool between the two stops. He was insistant indicating that there was an indicator in the phone that was like a pregnancy test and my iPhone was pregnant. I joked that my iPhone really was the ‘Jesus Phone’ since I was certain it never got wet. I tried to explain I was going to be in Manhattan next week and really needed a working phone before I left on Monday. They indicated that my phone had water damage and could not be replaced.
Realizing I had a limited amount of time in the mall (Erin is 8 months old and can only last so long) I walked over to the AT&T store and asked them if I could just BUY another iPhone. They would sell me one for almost $500, but they would not allow me to purchase one at the subsidized price. I tried to explain how silly this was. Anyone walking in off the street could buy the same phone for $200, but me a longtime customer with 5 active iPhones on my account would have to pay the non-contract price of almost $500? They suggested I talk to Apple since it had been more than 30 days since I bought the phone. I explained that Apple had determined that my iPhone had been damaged by water.
So I left the mall pissed. I will end up buying the phone for $500 tomorrow because I don’t have a better option (despite the fact that Apple is going to refresh their phone in a few months). I am considering buying it with my AMEX and reversing the charges letting Apple deal with the hassle of trying to get their money from them (at least as much hassle as I have had).
UPDATE: Bradley Joyce read my post and suggested that this is a known problem (i.e. he had it) and there is an article suggesting a fix here. I FOLLOWED THE INSTRUCTIONS AND NOW MY PHONE WORKS! How come I get better help from readers of my blog than I do at the Apple store? My only question, ‘is my phone still water damaged?’
