Thanks, that’s useful.
If you mean you had symptoms other than the camera? I did too. I do not think this is limited to the camera but several unrelated things that again makes me suspect the software and not any one piece of hardware.
At the same time my camera performance became slow to the point of unusable, my phone service also broke. I was unable to accept some incoming calls — the screen would say I was connected, but it wasn’t, and the phone kept ringing. And the other times, inbound and outbound calls would connect but neither party could hear anything. Unless I was connected to a Bluetooth device.
A few times my cellular data would give SIM errors or lose its data connection (even after a new SIM). And once the haptics vibration of the iPhone 7 dummy home button at the bottom stopped vibrating until the next reboot.
When the phone problem started, it coincided with an IOS 14.x update that decided to change my default phone setting to show a top banner instead of full screen message for incoming calls. Changing the setting back didn’t help.
Ordinarily hardware is the first thing I’d suspect for problems that were intermittent. But I’d be surprised if that collection of symptoms was due to hardware breaking. I’ve never heard anyone else describe problems like that before.
Apple support also wanted to blame hardware (the battery?) and wanted me to pay more then the value of the iPhone to replace it as the next step. Also they already had me wipe and reinstall the
One thing — I’m currently using an older MacBook with an older MacOS that still uses iTunes instead of Finder to update manage iPhone software. I wonder if anyone else affected is too.
I suppose that’s on me, using an old MacOS. But I’m not willing to break or slow my MacBook with an OS upgrade, wasting more of my time jumping through still more hoops with Apple support, only to have them say it’s hardware and have to buy a new phone anyways. It kind of ensures people will declare the old phone “totaled” due to cost and give up.
I was disappointed that Apple support claims not to have a route to escalate apparent IOS software bugs to a higher team for consideration. Making me fill out a bug report seems inefficient — where Apple won’t know all of the testing already done, and I’ll be lost in a haystack of all sorts of other crazies with user errors.
