Q: I drop my iphone in a cup of tea and now wont turn on, how do i fix this

deggie wrote:

 

Hope you are better at handling logic boards than quotes.

 

Lawrence, I would now be very reluctant. zenmanic I have you down with one of the crazies. And I place very little credence to internet reviews and when they go up into numbers like the thousands I become quite suspicious.

I'm sorry Deggie. Have i offended you or truly given outlandish information. I speak from my own experience.

Of course the propagation speed matters, the higher it is the less time it will take to get somewhere

This is a great question! Love it.  (Hope I'm not being trolled.)   The answer is "it depends on the liquid"

If the water is the most common insult---clean toilet water, then the damage will be very focal if the phone is opened for cleaning while still wet.  I would say 80% or more of fresh clean water damage to a phone that is addressed within 24 hours can be cleared and the phone will be okay (with white spots in the backlight perhaps).   

If the water is very corrosive--sea water for example, and if the phone is one with full screen---then the damage will be instant and all over the place.  This is where time is really of the essence---sea water left in a phone will *really* eat away at the components.   But even sea water, if addressed instantly, can be cleared.   The more time that goes by, the lower the chances of recovery.

The WORST thing you can do is put current through a phone that hasn't had the board cleaned.   That can (and does) render a repairable board unrepairable.   I can tell by looking at a board whether or not someone has tried to charge it after getting it wet. 

Unfortunately, hopeful human nature gets the best of us all too often.  We combine waiting (with ineffective "methods" like rice, that are really just letting the phone dry on its own) with hope (maybe it will be okay, maybe i got lucky, maybe it just needs to charge, maybe if I leave it overnight....).   This is a disaster

If I dropped 10 phones into a toilet right now and then opened them and they went straight to my ultrasonic, I bet all 10 would come back no problem after cleaning.

Csound1 wrote:

 

Of course the propagation speed matters, the higher it is the less time it will take to get somewhere

LOL are you really debating microseconds. In the real world that is still instant.

Csound1 wrote:

 

Of course the propagation speed matters, the higher it is the less time it will take to get somewhere

OK, enough.  The propagation speed determines the time it takes for the electricity to travel through the wet part of the phone.  The longer you wait, the greater probability that more area is wet.  If you're quick (and lucky), only a small portion of the phone is wet.

Read what I said again.

There is no delay propagating across all the already wet part of the phone, only the time it takes the water to infiltrate the phone is involved, any bets on that?

Liquid is plain tap water for the record.

Any of us would.  Seriously.  We do not believe that Apple would refuse to honor OOW swap on a phone that someone tried to fix that was not repairable.

This is what it would look like. 

Guy comes to me for data recovery after water damage instead of going to Apple.  Let's say his phone is not recoverable.  I put it back together and he goes to Apple.  He tells me that they refuse his $299 OOW swap.  I tell him to send me the phone and $299.  I take it 10 minutes down the road to my Apple Store where they know me, they know I do data recovery, and they have specfically told me in person not to even bother putting the shields back on that they can swap it as long as they can scan the QR code on the SIM tray.   I give it to them and his $299, they give me a phone.  I send it to him.

If Apple were to say "actually, we changed our minds, sorry."  then I would eat it on the next phone, and after that consider changing the way I do business. 

Yep.  That's what I said except for "no delay" for the electricity.  Although the delay is really really short, it's greater than zero.

I object to being misquoted.  We believe that we deserve the right to OEM parts.  We believe that we have the right to the same repair information that is provided to the in channel repair centers  (which I've already seen and there is not much there).    We already have the schematics, that's not the issue--although when I lobby for this issue, I make it a point that the schematics are already mine, the board and all its components are a 3-D schematic.  I could measure, read the numbers, and source each one.

The point is that people deserve a choice in repair, and that repair be subject to a free market.  We believe that the manufacturers do not get to monopolize the repair of their products--especially when they are not even willing to repair them at all.  

Lawrence Finch wrote:

 

Well, if this is a serious question, there's a complicated answer. It partly depends on the quality of the water. If it's distilled water and you drain it out quickly the damage will be minimal and may not even cause damage; distilled water is a poor conductor. Of course, the probability of dropping a phone in distilled water is minimal. If it's salt water the phone is DOA. You can't remove the battery fast enough to save it. As the most common dunking iPhones get is in toilets it depends on whether it is before or after you flush. Before, you're in the same position as salt water. For regular household tap water you probably have a chance, unless you live in Flint, Michigan. But that's all about the initial dunking so far. There's stuff in the phone that will absorb water, so even after you dry it the water will continue corroding parts, and the phone may appear to work initially, but may die days or weeks later. So I will agree with the more rational of the technicians who have posted here (I count 2 or 3 at most) that your best bet, assuming you don't just want a new phone from Apple at a discount, is to open the phone, disconnect the battery, and dry it out. But I would still recommend the new phone first.

 

I will ask a serious question of the technicians here - if the dunking was in dirty water, would you rinse the inside with distilled water? I've done this a couple of times with laptops that have been dunked in puddles (deep puddles; 3+ feet during a Bankok rainy season downpour) and they worked after disassembling, drying out thoroughly, and reassembling.

Really, Lawrence? Talk about anecdotal opinions.

Indeed, the answer is complicated because each case of a "wet phone" is uniquely different. The recipe ingredients for corrosion include 2 or more dissimilar metals and an electrolyte. Add electricity and you speed up the process. Inside a phone, dissimilar metals abound (tin, lead, gold, aluminum, steel, etc). Drop your phone into any type of liquid beyond pure water and you have the electrolyte. Unless the battery is missing, you've got the electricity - even a battery drained so low the phone won't power on still holds electricity. Once a phone hits the water, water enters through a number of entry points and how long the phone was in the water matters as 1 second and 10 seconds will yield different results in terms of water penetration into the phone.

But, even a phone dropped in salt water can be restored. In fact, the first phone I restored after launching my website was a salt water phone. Time is the key factor in restoring a wet phone and the more of it that passes by, the less likely the odds of success. I've never not been able to restore a phone that was still dripping water. Its the devices left in rice for days/weeks that become challenging.

As to your serious question, no matter the water's solute, I would not only rinse with distilled water, I'd do it in my ultrasonic cleaner with a cleaning agent designed for electronics. I only use distilled water and a cleaning agent designed for electronics in my ultrasonic cleaner and ANY device that's been wet gets cleaned in the ultrasonics, not just rinsed. Post sonics cleaning, I rinse the sonics cleaning solution in IPA on an agitation table, then place on a heat source at 60 degrees Celsius to dry before attempting to power it on again. Then it's microscope and multimeter circuit testing to find and repair problems...with, <gasp> a soldering iron.

love repair wrote:

 

I object to being misquoted.

When did I misquote you?

love repair wrote:

 

Any of us would.  Seriously.  We do not believe that Apple would refuse to honor OOW swap on a phone that someone tried to fix that was not repairable.

 

This is what it would look like.

Guy comes to me for data recovery after water damage instead of going to Apple.  Let's say his phone is not recoverable.  I put it back together and he goes to Apple.  He tells me that they refuse his $299 OOW swap.  I tell him to send me the phone and $299.  I take it 10 minutes down the road to my Apple Store where they know me, they know I do data recovery, and they have specfically told me in person not to even bother putting the shields back on that they can swap it as long as they can scan the QR code on the SIM tray.   I give it to them and his $299, they give me a phone.  I send it to him.

 

If Apple were to say "actually, we changed our minds, sorry."  then I would eat it on the next phone, and after that consider changing the way I do business.

Alright to be unbiased. Love.... First there is a quote button that will pull the last reply that you were on, selected, or clicked reply to into the conversation so that we can see what your replying to.

What you describe here is your experience. This of course is not always how it goes down for others. People do get turned down for OOW replacements because they took it to a third party. The logic behind that still baffles me. But to rely on Apple to hopefully take my phone in trade for OOW replacement phone is taking a risk. Possible a low risk but still a risk. Personally i think its a low risk they will deny it. Others here say they would not want to chance it and would not offer this advice to others because of the high chance the OOW replacement would be denied.

And yes you could still get the newbie in the Apple store that wants to do it by the book and deny your OOW replacement. Me personally would just show up the next day or go to a different store. But thats going the extra mile for a customer.

love repair wrote:

 

I object to being misquoted.  We believe that we deserve the right to OEM parts.  We believe that we have the right to the same repair information that is provided to the in channel repair centers  (which I've already seen and there is not much there).    We already have the schematics, that's not the issue--although when I lobby for this issue, I make it a point that the schematics are already mine, the board and all its components are a 3-D schematic.  I could measure, read the numbers, and source each one.

 

The point is that people deserve a choice in repair, and that repair be subject to a free market.  We believe that the manufacturers do not get to monopolize the repair of their products--especially when they are not even willing to repair them at all. 

Why do you believe that you have a right to have parts (and schematics) from Apple?  Isn't this a free world?

And when did I misquote you?

Meg St._Clair wrote:

 

Csound1 wrote:

 

That along with the fact that one of their number wants Government to mandate that Apple must use the independents, taxpayers supporting industry? how American is that?

I skipped over most of that part of the thread.

It was a blind alley, already gone.