November 8, 2016 – While we were out of the area last weekend, I noticed my iPhone 5 was in worse condition than I thought.
I had noticed a while back that the screen was starting to separate from the body. I have always kept the phone inside of a protective case, so I have no idea how long this has been going on.
Saturday evening, I did a little bit of research on it. Apparently, this has been an issue for some iPhone 5s for quite some time. Most of the time, it’s due to battery swelling. Early on, Apple would just exchange the phone for a new one. Unfortunately, we’ve had our phones for nearly four years now, so they are long out of warranty.
On Sunday, we were at the Galleria mall in Houston, Texas. I had thought, when I was researching the problem, that I would stop in the Apple store there, if there was one, and see if I had any options along the lines of repair or replacement. Sure enough, there was a store, so I went in.
I must say I was pleasantly surprised. They weren’t able to help me right away, but I got scheduled into a slot and was told that they would text me when it was almost my turn. I was actually walking past the store when I got the text so went right back in. After waiting a short while, one of their Genius team people was able to help me is fairly short order. What he said they could do was to replace the phone for the cost of a battery replacement. Unfortunately, they didn’t have one in stock and we were leaving the next day (yesterday). Fortunately, there was another option. (This turned out to be wrong) He set me up with a customer service appointment for today at 10 a.m. and entered all of the information and conclusions that we came to. My understanding is that they will send me a box to ship the old phone to them and that they will ship the new phone once they’ve received the old one. (Again, wrong. See explanation below.)
I’m trying to figure out how to do this blogging thing just using my iPad. We each have a Bluetooth keyboard, so it is much easier typing than trying to type on the touchscreen of the tablet. I don’t particularly care for the ap that I am using for this post. I’ll have to look to see if there is something else.
November 10, 2016 (continued from November 8) – After I tried to view the post, it disappeared from the ap and I wasn’t able to recover it. I only discovered about a half an hour ago that the post was posted to the blog as a draft. I was actually looking for a different draft post when I found it.
The phone: I spent almost 45 minutes on the phone with Apple customer service. The customer service rep was very good, walking me through everything they needed to do to get this battery replacement swap done. Then, when he submitted the information on his end, it came back with a cost that was different from the battery replacement cost cited by the people in the Houston Apple store. It was going to cost over half the price of a new iPhone 6. He bumped it up to his supervisor who explored several different avenues, none of them satisfactory for me.
Apparently, the only place where the battery replacement phone swap deal can be done at the price quoted is at an Apple store. The closest is Little Rock (an hour and a half away) and it would likely require two trips as it is unlikely that they would have an obsolete iPhone 5 – even refurbished – in stock.
Nope, not gonna do that.
New phone, paying off over next 2 years.
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Hi Mike – well I sure hope the new one comes up to scratch … I’ve had my phone for ages … but I don’t use it much … so good luck and happy travels – cheers Hilary
I’m pretty happy with it so far. I use it all the time, more for internet stuff than as a phone, to be sure. I wish it had lasted longer, but 4 years is forever for modern electronics, especially one with heavy use.
Mike recently posted…Eyes of the Great Depression 139
I have never been a Iphone fan though I am a Mac computer user. I like my Samsung Galaxy handset and am very satisfied not only with it but also with its dealer and service network in India.
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Before our iPhones, our phones were Palm Pre smartphones (webOS). We originally went with these phones because they were able to serve as WiFi hot spots and our carrier was offering 5 GB free bandwidth for each phone with the package we got. In 2010, HP acquired Palm and, in August 2011, announced that it would be discontinuing sales of all webOS devices. Thus, when we decided to upgrade to new devices, we had to look for something different. I no longer remember why we chose to go with the iPhones. I do know that I did a lot of research before I made the decision. With the newest phone, it was an easy decision. I was already familiar with the phone, and it operates very similarly to my iPad.
Mike recently posted…Eyes of the Great Depression 139