Yesterday was my first foray into the local Apple store for support on my iPhone. While walking through a large chain electronics store, my phone displayed the phrase along the lines of, you phone can no longer send or receive phone calls, please contact support. I rebooted the phone hoping that it was just a one time issue. After the reboot, the phone had lost its entire configuration and would only allow emergency calls. My wife called AT&T support and they scheduled a appointment at the local Apple store for us. OK, the appointment time was 6. The problem, it was only 11. Also, by local, I mean that it was only 45 minutes from the house. Luckily, I was only about 10 minutes from the store yesterday, but I couldn’t justify driving 45 minutes home, and then 45 minutes back. So we decided to head over to the store and see if we could get in early.
Apparently, Apple fans have not noticed there is a burgeoning recession. The store is in a mall, and while most of the mall was fairly empty, it was standing room only in the store. We went up to the “Genius Bar” to see if we would get in the loop. Nope, they were extremely busy and expected that we wouldn’t get in an earlier than our appointment. They did say that we could hang out in the store and see if anything came up. I asked if I could leave the phone and have them try to slip it in whenever they could. Again, nope; they don’t like having customer’s equipment without them being there. So now, we have to decide what to do for the next 6 hours.
Fast forward, 6 hours…..
We head back into the store around 5:15 and get called around 5:30. The tech assigned to my phone was eager to help us out. He looked at my phone and stated that this was new; he had never seen this symptom. He spoke to another tech, whom had seen it one time before, and they believed that it was due to a failed 2.1 upgrade from the factory. This phone was only 4 weeks old and delivered from the factory with the 2.1 firmware. After asking when the last time we had done a full synch, the tech attempted a deep restore back to factory using the 2.1 firmware. Well during the restore the tech went on break and asked one of the other techs to keep an eye on the phone for him. 45 minutes later, I went back to the “Genius Bar” and asked for a status up. Apparently the deep restore had failed and no one had looked at it for the last 30 minutes or so. When the tech came back from break, he was genuinely sorry for the miscommunications. After another 15 minutes I was walking out of the store with a brand new phone.
So other then 7+ hours out of my life, it wasn’t an entirely bad experience. I did get to play with some of the new Apple desktops, and realized as a Wintel admin, I would have a hard time dealing with the Apple mouse. Weird..
Some of the symptoms, I was experiencing with my phone before it bricked it self.
- Overheating. Using the iPhone for any length of time caused it to run hot. According to the tech, this might be due to the bad firmware update.
- IPod play back would skip occasionally. This sounded like a scratched record.
- Applications would unexpectedly die and return to the home screen. This was most noticeable in Safari.
So the moral of this store is that if you are experiencing the above symptoms, make sure you get a good sync. Call Apple and make an appointment.
Apple iPhone support page: http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/
U.S. iPhone technical support: 1-800-MY-IPHONE (1-800-694-7466)