IMEI NUMBER

thank you and well said

this walks like a duck and talks like a duck...Hey
and can we guess what it is?


If you messed up your phone just admit to it

Its called a SIM card, not a SIMS card.

How do I know because an Apple spokes person told me as were were troubleshooting a problem, I was having. Turned out to be a SIM that the upgrade LOCKED which is also a BUG in their upgrade software/firmware or process.

1. Who was this "Apple spokesperson," an AppleCare representative on the phone with you or an actual Apple official with the authority to speak for the company?

2. Did anyone actually say they had confirmed a bug in the update, or is this your interpretation?

No offense intended to anyone, but people are forever saying "Apple" told them something when in fact what happened was they spoke with a tier one Apple support person & they misunderstood what they were told or mistook a personal observation or attempt to be helpful as an official statement. The truth is, the knowledge & professionalism of the folks that take your calls varies enormously, & even product specialists (the second tier folks you sometimes get passed to) or support managers are not software engineers themselves, much less spokespeople for Apple, Inc.

If someone tells you that they have been having a lot of trouble with an issue, it does not necessarily mean a bug has been confirmed.

You do realise that the 1.1.1 update DID flash the baseband don't you...?

I have an unlocked phone and happily stayed on the 1.02 version. But out of 6 americans I know with virgin iPhones who upgraded, 3 of them failed. 2 have the IMEI problem and are being refused service from Apple even though they never installed a single thing on the phone. The third flashed right out of a brand new sealed package and it is completely dead.

So please, know what you are talking about before casting dispersions on genuine problems with a genuinely faulty Apple software.

I have no sympathy for Apple whatsoever, they brought it on themselves and i honestly cant find many of my mac using friends with a good word to say about Apple these days.... the fanboy veneer has truly washed off all of them!

But out of 6 americans I know ...

Yet another second hand report. How do you know the phones were not hacked? These people could be too embarrassed to tell you they unlocked their phones, or not know that someone else with access to the phones did without their knowledge, perhaps by someone they trusted & should not have.

No offense intended to anyone, but this is the dilemma we face in evaluating the real extent of this problem. Not only are we asked to trust (for example) a just-registered stranger with a single post, we are asked to trust that person's trust in other strangers.

Some financial analysts following Apple & AT&T think that about 10% of all iPhones sold are unlocked for resale or for personal reasons. That is about 100,000 phones prior to the latest update. The resellers & users of these phones have obvious motives for claiming or hoping Apple's update kills "innocent" phones; common sense says some of them have yielded to that temptation.

This is all about trust & doubt. Some will always trust the reports; others will always trust Apple. Personally, I'm not ready to trust either side 100%, but I trust Apple's motives for getting to the bottom of this mess will eventually lead to its resolution. That doesn't make me a fanboy, just someone who thinks Apple has the most at stake.

So, to follow the implication of your post, that would mean that amongst the total number of iPhones sold, and allowing for those that are not updated to 1.1.1 or are not in use at all, there would have to be something around 500,000 bricked iPhones now, even aside from those that actually had been hacked. Half a million.

I would suggest to you that this is clearly nonsensical rubbish. There are, without doubt, some iPhones which the owners have discovered to be inoperable after the update and which despite Apple claiming have been hacked, have not been as far as the owner is aware. We have seen a steady trickle of such posts here which suggest there is an issue with some unhacked phones being bricked for unknown reasons or by unknown means. But have you any idea what this discussion area would be like if this was a problem affecting 500,000 people?!

In addition, to suggest the update itself was somehow faulty flies in the face of common sense, because if there were something in it that caused the kind of fault we are seeing, it would affect every iPhone, not just a few, because while there are production variances to some degree in the hardware of these devices, the firmware is a consistent foundation, whether 1.0, 1.0.1, or 1.0.2, upon which to apply the update.

SeerUK, did you read my post? The reason that the upgrade failed and "bricked" the phones, as you put, is because the BB flasher (or bbupdater as you probably know it) interrogated the EERPOM (the equivalent of doing a Settings/General/About) and then the BB using an AT command which reveals the IMEI of the SIM that is INSERTED in the SIM bay. The end result is that the BB is flashed and a lockdown is set using a well-known IMEI the 0049XXXXXXXX number.

I assume that you've used the Iphone Dev Team's unlock. Not too sure if know how to program in C, but a quick glance at their code will show you why the upgrade failed. Do you ever read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? We'll their unlock is exactly that. It's the poorest job of coding that I've ever seen in my life. It's amazing that it even works.

Bricking means that you throw the phone in the garbage. A phone with a IMEI as described above is immobilized and not "bricked" and takes less than 2 minutes to fix using a simple AT command.

sebaker Update: Please excuse my tecnological ignorance, but after searching online to see if anyone else has had this same problem (as my rep informed me), I now know more about "hacking" and from what I gather, there are three possible reasons people would want to hack into a phone. 1) 3rd parties are something one can put on one's phone to perform other applications that are not supported by Apple; 2) Ring tones not offered by Apple; and 3) different service provider. None of these things apply to me OR have been done to my phone and I have absolutely no interest in doing any of them. I don’t have time to mess with 3rd party whatevers (I trust Apple to eventually meet my needs), I don’t give two hoots about annoying ring tones (although Apple has come through on this as well), and I have been an AT&T patron my whole life. Furthermore, I bought my phone in the first hour they went on sale in CA from the AT&T store.

I also took the advice of many and went to the Apple Store where I did explain my problem in a very civilized maner (remember I am a teacher and must always remain calm even in the face of many an irate parent on reportcard day). One has to love the Apple crew; they have to be the friendliest most helpful people in the world (one of the reasons I am such an ardent fan, of course). They took my phone, did some hocus pocus in the back room, called AT&T, explained something about making the SIM numbers match and told me that everything would be fine when I went home and performed the sync, but it had to be after 10PM because something about “the system was down” or something like that. My faith had been restored; I hugged everyone in the store.

Being a trusting soul, I didn’t even look at my phone until 10PM, but when I do, I find the same message about the incorrect SIM. Red Flag!! But I hold my breath, plug it in and wella!
Same thing... I am devastated but email my rep at the store. Almost 24 hours now. No reply...

Yipes! I spelled (typed) manner incorrectly. Please forgive me.

I've been an Apple user since 1978, I call um as I see um.
The 1.1.1 software has bugs.

Does this mean that it is unuseable NO

Does this mean it wasn't checked, NO

Does this mean it can be fixed, NO

Will the next upgrade fix the bug, YES BUT there is 100% probability a new bug will arise.

That is a statistical FACT.

In any given number, there will ALWAYS be a few cases where some hardware for Whatever reason does not respond as expected. Many times it's a tolerance issue.

Over the years I've been extremely lucky in that I only can think of 2 cases where an upgrade did not respond a anticipated.

Given @ 1 million iPhones - HUNDREDS of problems is nothing, UNLESS you are one of the hundreds affected.

GET A GRIP!

ajm

heres one for you guys. Maybe when Apple repairs a unit they dont do a tamper screen and recirculate tampered iphones resulting in alot of innocent bricking. It happens alot in the Aircraft business.

That's what I've been thinking since three or four days post this problem cropping up. Cosmetically refurbing the units, doing a restore on them and repackaging them. Meanwhile someone had unsuccessfully tried to unlock them, messed with the baseband and for whatever reason returned them. So when innocent user runs the 1.1.1 update, wham!

nycruza,

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. You said earlier that an Apple "spokes person" confirmed a bug that changed the IMEI "inappropriately." Are you now saying something different? Is this your interpretation or something someone with the authority to make that statement actually said? If so, who was it?

it is stirring the pot trying to get a warranty back

I don't know the motive, but it does seem to be a contribution that juxtaposes a little fact with a lot of conjecture, the result being that we have no better idea than before if any Apple spokesperson has confirmed that it has identified a bug that affects locked (a.k.a. "virgin") phones in this way.

I'm still trying to figure out why anyone officially representing Apple would tell him anything like this while troubleshooting a problem with his phone ... which he says is unlocked. That sounds a little dubious, does it not?