After a trip to the beach last weekend, my iPhone 12 Pro Max is on the fritz. (I actually have no idea what happened to it — it didn’t get dropped in the ocean or buried in sand or anything. I can only imagine it got splashed with saltwater while it was in my pocket.)
Some of the symptoms, for your schadenfreude:
Display is greenish sometimes
Display flickers brightly in rows
Touch only works sporadically
Swiping in from the edges of the screen works rarely
And most interestingly:
It taps itself (this morning, for instance, apparently it tried to email me while it was sitting on the kitchen counter)
It looks like repair will be north of $300 (and the $300 repair isn’t guaranteed to work, since we don’t know exactly what caused the problem). Given how close we are to September, I’m extremely hesitant to spend that much either on repairing or more on replacement, especially since I was kinda sorta planning on upgrading to the 15 anyway.
So instead I’m thinking I’ll try to live with a broken phone for two months. I have an iPad Pro lying around somewhere that I can use when necessary. I’m also trying to use Voice Control to interact with the device, and I’ve used Accessibility’s Touch Accommodations to try to make it more difficult for the self-tapping to do any harm (so far so good!).
Lessons learned so far:
I miss it. Living without it for a few days made it very obvious how useful the thing is!
Apps that don’t have good, native support for non-mobile operating systems are the worst (I’m looking at you, WhatsApp)
Voice Control is powerful but tedious
It’s a little weird that you can’t disable touch outright, even as an accessibility setting
Interesting. I might try it, although getting through the setup process without being able to tap anything (and with some phantom touches!) sounds like a recipe for frustration, hahah
I was in the same boat as you. I took my phone to a 3rd party shop for $100 screen replacement. Made it easier to stomach even though I do plan to upgrade this year. May be worth it if you’re having screen issues.
If using it becomes truly untenable I may do this, but I was quoted $270 for a screen replacement at our local third-party repair shop — with no guarantee that it would actually fix the touch issues I’m seeing (which are the main concern).
I just called our local place that I like with your model and symptoms and they quoted $415, plus a week to get the parts because almost no one gets that done. Crazy. This place charges $100 to fix an SE and has a good reputation, for context.
(I have removed the passcode. I think anyone who stole the phone would throw it away out of frustration before successfully stealing anything from me! [Not to worry: I don’t actually go anywhere, except the beach, apparently, so theft is not a realistic threat.])
Have you downloaded the what’s app app for Mac? You need to secure via your phone which might not work (I think there’s a QR code IIRC), but that might make life a bit easier. In some ways I actually prefer it to the phone (I don’t use it on iPad, not sure they have support for that?).
I think I’d survive just with iPad and Mac, but as you note the lack of consistent apps for some devices would be a tad annoying. I’d stumble with banking apps in particular.
I already do most my texting on iPad and Mac though, it’s not too bad and you’ll get used to it! (In fact I’m writing this on my iPad Pro with the two-thumb hold and I reckon I’m only a little slower than on a smaller screen.)
If it does totally fail, I feel like a 2020 SE or XR that you buy and then gift to somebody in need / sell cheaply to just move it on would be more reliable and nicer / cheaper than a repair that might not be successful.
Years ago (2010?), I jumped into salt water from a dinghy, forgetting my iPhone was in my pocket. iPhones were not at all waterproof back then, and the phone was bricked instantly.
While waiting to replace it, I put the SIM in an old unsmart phone I had lying around. It worked (AT&T in the U.S.). The only oddity was that alerts from various apps came through as two-parkntexts, usually with some incomprehensible garble around the actual alert. But it was good enough to get me to replacing the iPhone.
