Sometimes it is just a bad battery
Sometimes it really is just a bad battery



I have a secondary phone which doesn't get a whole lot of use.  I bought 
it a couple of years ago before starting a full time employee gig with 
the pink mustache factory.  I did this because my friends who were 
already there advised me that the company did not supply phones but did 
expect you to load a crapload of apps on to do your job.


I decided my way around messing up my "daily driver" with that much 
garbage was just to pick up the cheapest and simplest thing that would 
get the job done, and so I did: an iPhone 8.  It got all of the "two 
factor", LastPass, Slack, Google apps gunk, Google mail stuff and more,
and my "real" personal phone stayed nice and clean.


It also meant that I could put it away at the end of the day and all 
work-related stuff would stay out of sight and out of mind until the 
next morning.


Well, as previously described, I bailed out of that job right before the 
Twilight Zone started and we all went into lockdown early last year.  
That meant that phone had relatively little work to do.  It just kind of 
hung around, and while I used it to help out other folks who reached out 
to me for ad-hoc consulting work, it's been pretty quiet overall.


So, overall, I was surprised when it started being really belligerent 
about battery statuses.  I would find it at the end of the day somewhere 
down below 30% charge despite doing nothing but carrying it around in my 
purse all day.  Then, it would stay there at some low value for a very 
long time while on the charger, and might leap from the mid-40s to 90+% 
with nothing in-between.


It was behaving VERY strangely.  Not in fourteen years with iPhones had 
I ever seen one act like this in terms of battery life.  Also, there was 
something else troubling which had started at the same time: one part of 
the screen now had this white blob of sorts, like something was making 
it flex.  The phone itself hadn't been bent, and in fact had been in an 
Otterbox its whole life, so nothing had managed to hurt it.


The whole thing added up to "swollen battery that's pushing UP on the 
screen from underneath", and I just needed someone to swap it 
for me.  Now, despite the obvious battery woes, the actual iOS battery 
health thing still said it was doing well enough - somewhere in the 
mid-90s of health, and still able to do peak performance, and all of 
this.


That's when I noticed that actually using it would cause it to just shut 
down, presumably from having the battery voltage collapse under load - 
you know, the exact thing the "peak performance" test is supposed to 
catch?  The thing is, the phone won't let you disable that yourself.  
The thing has to detect it itself.  But... it never did, despite 
crashing the phone multiple times by putting sufficient operational load 
on it.


The app let me book service, and it sent me to a nearby Best Buy.  I 
went up there and wasted a bunch of time just to be told that "Apple 
won't let them replace the battery because it's not reporting any 
battery problem".  Great.  They also said the actual Apple store people 
have more leeway in these things.


The next day, I dragged it down to an actual Apple store.  They looked 
at the battery status screen which was still reporting that everything 
was fine, and said "it's the logic board".  Then, when it crashed by 
itself (again, most likely due to voltage collapse), the Apple person 
just doubled down on it and said it'd be a replacement, which for that 
phone would be the same as buying a new one, so why not just buy a new 
one?


At this point, I switched into "okay, nice doggy" mode, where I take 
whatever conversational path is going to let me politely end the 
transaction and get the hell out of there, and decided to take matters 
into my own hands.  [If you don't know what this means, ask anyone in 
your life who has experience with not being taken seriously when 
attempting to obtain technical services.  I'm sure they'll have any 
number of stories for you.]


I figured, okay, I'm going to try this.  It costs, what, 30 or 40 bucks 
for the repair parts?  If it fails, I'm out that money and my time, and 
will just have to buy a new phone.  But, if it works, I can feel 
righteous AND I can write a post about it telling people about why the 
right to repair matters!


Now, I've said this multiple times: I am a software person, not a 
hardware person, and if you see me with a screwdriver, worry.  With that 
in mind, I *still* went out to my usual haunt for repair supplies and 
bought an iPhone 8 battery replacement kit, which consisted of a new 
battery, a suction cup for pulling the screen, a glorified guitar pick 
for loosening things, a bunch of specialized screwdriver bits, and some 
other random doodads.


This shipped from the west coast via ground transit, so for a few days I 
just had to sit there and wait, but finally it turned up, and I went to 
work.  It took some careful blow dryer action to make some of the parts 
"release", but I eventually got the old battery out, the new battery 
back in, and put all of the itty-bitty connectors and screws back in.
(Oh, and I did this without starting any LiPo fires, too!)


Then I charged it up, discharged it completely (as per their advice) 
by streaming video at full brightness for like six hours, charged it 
again, then went back to using it as before.  It's been over a week, 
and you'd never know anything had ever happened to the phone.  It's 
doing its job just like before and looks fine.


Oh, and the white spot on the screen?  It's gone, because, surprise, the 
bad battery is no longer there pushing up on the screen.


Bad logic board, my ass.


