Q: wifi greyed out iphone 4s

iph24,

How much time did you wait before trying to turn it on? I would imagine you'd want to wait until the phone (at least the outside) was below 85-90º. BUt I guess the heat shut down sensor will not let it turn on until phone reaches a safe temp.

I have only had my 4S refuse to turn on due to heat shut down once. That was when it was in the center console of my car on a hot day in a parking lot.

didnt work for me

as for the hair dyer yes it worked the first time for 24hrs but thats it dont work after that oh no sorry think it did the second time to for like 2 mins if that counts ive been without my wifi now for a week an iphone without wifi is like having nokia 3310 cant do nothing with it!! **** not happy u spend all that money and for what ur having a laugh gonna go to apple store demand repair or replacement!!

mine happened b4 so its not the update

This Solved My Problem Thank you !

I have bought my iphone 4s here in Cyprus. In EU  the Warranty for Electrical items is for 2 years.  In June my troubles started after -as most of you mention- an update, I took it to Apple's representative they kept it for more than a month and then they informed me that they have 'repaired' it, of course with no charges since it is still the Warranty period. The 'repaired iphone' worked OK for a .. few days. The same problem. I took it again for repair on the 29/7/2013 mentioning them that I already know the issue of the UPDATE and 'ruining' the system and that I would not be satisfied with just  'temporary repair'. I got it back on the 30/8/2013 and the same problem insists! When I received it this time though I have given them 'in writing'  a letter, informing them that I keep all my rights concerning the Warranty. I believe it is a very unprofessional attitude towards us  customers of Apple, whose products are the most expensive in the market. I payed Euros 699. to buy it!!!! Thank you.

This just happenned to me last night.  I really think it's a software issue.  Here's what happened to me:

A month or so agao I upgraded to a windows phone 8 and have been using my iphone like an ipod tough.  It has always worked flawlessly, but I always had a voicemail message alert that would come up when ever I turned my phone on.  Finally, instead of hitting cancle, I selected "listen" hoping that it would get rid of the alert even though it was not connected. 

Immediately my WIFI disconnected and was greyed out so that I couldnt turn it back on.  This seems to be either that Apple deactivated something when it detected that I am no longer subscribed to a data service, or there was some sort of network confusion while atempting to connect to a call while it was not in service. 

I have not been able to get this going for the life of me.  I can't see my WIFI chip frying at the exact moment of trying to listen to my messages while not in service.

It's called a 'coincidence'.  It happens.

It's not the software.  It's a hardware defect (assuming you've used all the troubleshooting steps in http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1398 & http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1559)

No, I have not done any troubleshooting and I didn't know what coincidence meant.

Thanks for the tip.

this (manufacturing) fault is the reason I have finally sold my iphone and gone to Android.

Thanks to the people who made me feel guilty for being cross about the fault.

Goodbye apple.

I hear you man.  This is a combination of a hardware and a software issue.   IOS 6 has a hyper sensitive "defense" mechanism in it that disables the Wifi chip if it gets a little warm, rendering it useless in order to save it from being ruined.  Gee thanks Apple.  Apparantly this is for the most part this is an issue that comincides with IOS 6, leaving me to think that if I could roll back to ios 5 it would probably work again.  I was holdnig out on upgrading to 6 and this happened very shortly after.  This might not be everybodies problem of course, but it's a common one.

I totally agree with you!!! If we can downgrade to IOS5 , it will probably solve the problem... I'm thinking that's one reason why apple stopped signing older IOS for downgrading...

Thanks for your response, wickedmoose. When Apple identified my phone as faulty, they offered to sell me a refurbished one for around $250.00, with 3 months warranty. I declined this and decided to take it apart and do it myself. By applying heat to the Wifi chip using a solder station heat-gun in my workshop, I was able to get the thing working again for a couple of weeks, then it failed again. So, I continued to do this for about 6 months, every few weeks. Finally, I got sick of it and sold the phone as faulty.

Having owned Android for a couple of weeks now, I do admit that I prefer the look and feel of the iphone, but on principle alone, I cannot justify spending that much money on somthing that failed 10 days outside warranty (yep, that's when it died).

Well that's the problem, you cannot downgrade from 6 to 5 ... at least that was the case few months back when I had the same problem...

3 months after I let the phone to burn out in the sun, the wifi chip has been working flawlessly ever since

I've been using blowdryer to heat it up... It works everytime... I've been doing it ever since, I noticed that if the heated phone was exposed to aircon at our office, the usability of wifi lessens... When the aircon is extremely cool, it also enables the wifi...