I’m in the market for a new phone right now. Having been an Android user who went to Windows Phone then back to Android for the past few years, I’m pretty certain I’m wanting to grab an iPhone this time around. In fact, I already know the one I’m wanting to get – no, not just the model, but the exact specific phone — one that a friend of mine owns and uses strictly for work.
He’s having some issues getting everything figured out on his end (he needs to find a better plan to switch to, among other logistic issues) but when it’s all finally resolved I’ll be the happy owner of an iPhone SE for a very, very reasonable price. Older? Sure, but still supported and still capable. More than enough for my needs and then some.
Since me getting the phone was delayed (as I write this by about a month) I took an odd opportunity available to me — borrow a phone from work!
See, our shop, for a time, dealt heavily in used devices like cell phones and laptops. Not so much anymore, but up until a few years ago it would be common enough. We still may buy the occasional MacBook or iPad, but not much else – certainly not phones.
Well, we still have some leftover units rotting away in the back. One of these which was actually in decent shape seemed an option. It was an iPhone 5S and while dinged up it worked fine in quick testing. It hadn’t been used in maybe a few years but was clear of any contract, had a good IMEI and all that jazz — it seemed like something fine, so, I took it. I say “took it” as in accepted it as a unit to borrow, not that I stole it, let’s get that clear before someone thinks something strange.
Anyway, as I mentioned the phone hadn’t been used in a while — it was on iOS 9. Right now we’re on iOS 12 so it was a little behind. No biggie, just update it! Easy. That night I connected it to my Mac Pro and upgraded it. Done. No biggie. Once that was done, I shoved my current SIM card in it and began to try it out. Sure enough it recognized my SIM and, no questions asked, it became my phone. This was, amazingly, the first time I had ever just swapped a SIM card in a phone, so it was a new experience. Neat.
That’s when I began shoving apps on it. Now, let me explain about my “old” phone — it’s a pretty budget Samsung affair that works well enough but has incredibly limited storage space and, even with an SD card, due to how there will always be some install data on the phone even if you use the SD card as an app storage space, the phone itself inevitably gets full.
This is a bit of an annoyance when even just opening the pictures gallery requires over 500MB of storage (for some stupid reason) and when combined with other nuances of Android (like, you know being made by Google for starters) and what you get is a device that works fine enough but that I can’t actually do much with, and the more I do use what I have on it, the less other stuff I can do. It’s a damned mess and sure, I could buy a better Android set, but why not at least give iOS a try? Especially for the same price I paid for my current phone 2 years ago!
Anyway, with that covered let’s move on.
I began using the iPhone 5S hardcore that night, talking with the same friend who I’m buying the iPhone SE from. By talking, I mean making stupid jokes over Facebook Messenger. Whatever case, we’re doing our usual talk about arcade machines and the like when the phone just goes black. No response, no nothing. It hadn’t done this at all in that night of using it, so I figured it was just a fluke. I eventually hold down the power button enough for it to reboot, and I let him know about it. He found it odd, but not a concern. Shit happens.
Well, after a little while, it did it again. Odd. Then it got into a boot loop. Then, it stopped as suddenly as it started. Right, this thing had a problem. What’s worse at that point it stopped charging at all. It was fine beforehand, but now? Nope. Won’t charge. Bummer.
I turned the phone off, put the SIM back in my old phone, went to sleep, and set my self to deal with it the next day at work.
The next day things seemed fine for a few hours, until I go to check my phone in the middle of the work day to see, surprise surprise, it’s on the glowing black screen of death. Wonderful.
At this stage I already acknowledged that the phone had a serious issue. I had looked this up and seen that it may relate to a loose display cable if the phone had been dropped a particular way. I could go in there and try re-seating the cable, but screw that – we don’t have the tools at work to mess with newer iPhones and their pentalobe screws, and it isn’t worth the time to try this. Well, maybe, but fuck it — I’m not ordering a kit just to fix a barely worth it phone. Nope. Not going to happen.
I kept on trying, though, to figure the phone out. After it crashed yet again, this time with a blood-red screen I was done messing with it while at work. I had decided a complet restore would be in order — perhaps the cable was bad when I upgraded it and the update from iOS 9 to iOS 12 went bad? Who knows. It was worth a try with a new cable, and putting the phone into Device Firmware Upgrade mode, or DFU mode — a way to do a very low-level reinstall of the operating system of the iPhone — is trivial, so, why not?
I brought the phone home and connected it to my iMac (which sits by my main PC) for the install. I connected it while it was still active to make a backup, and in the middle of this process it did it’s black screen of death mess. That’s when I noticed what came up in iTunes.
The phone was putting itself into DFU mode!
Yes, for some reason which I cannot ascertain, the phone has been randomly going into DFU mode and in many cases just getting stuck in a boot loop! This loop actually would trigger even when I tried to put it into DFU mode myself — I had to wait for it to decide to stay stuck in this mode to do the update, which went fine.
Once it was done updating, I began the setup process again to have the phone decide to crash to DFU mode in the middle of setup!
With that last event, I was done with the thing. Obviously it’s fucked. We’ll probably sell it online for parts, get what money we can for it at the shop, and move on. I’ll just have to put up with my current phone for a little while longer until my friend gets things figured out on his end. I can live with it, but it would have been cool to borrow a near end-of-life phone and give it one last bit of use. At the very least having a fresh experience, and getting some familiarity with modern iOS would have been nice, but whatever.
More to come, as always.
