one of my policies is to get about 5-10 years out of a cell phone. that's a big ask sometimes, but it usually just involves replacing cracked screens and poofed batteries
yesterday's job was replacing two things that failed on my iPhone SE (2020): the proximity sensor in the earpiece stopped working (the one that turns off the screen when you put it against your ear), and i had been living with a cracked screen for about a year. altogether, about $20 worth of aliexpress parts
a straightforward job, under an hour, mostly just dealing with tiny screws and my sausage fingers. the flex cables are finicky to position properly when re-assembling, especially in the earpiece+proximity sensor area which has very tiny parts.
i tested it during assembly, and everything looked good and seemed to work. i sandwiched it back together and - the top half of the phone sat about 1mm outside of the frame. i chalked this up to re-using the old sticky gasket/bezel tape which had weakened over the years.
after an hour, i noticed that the digitizer wasn't detecting my finger properly. sometimes it would stop in the middle of a drag, and twice it stopped working altogether until i rebooted the phone.
damned aliexpress. sigh. sent off a request for replacement from the merchant i purchased it from, and waited for a reply.
i checked my voicemail and... couldn't hear anything from the earpiece?
sat down and tore apart the phone once again. this time i focused on the earpiece area. it *looked* okay.
when i re-disassembled the earpiece area, it was a different story. the earpiece connects to the flex ribbon via four tiny spring-loaded electrical contacts. i had mis-aligned the earpiece by 0.5mm, which meant that half of the contacts were connected to nothing.
worse, due to the mis-alignment, the earpiece was propped up vertically by 1mm. i re-aligned everything, working much more carefully this time.
when i put it back together, suddenly the lcd panel fit perfectly in the frame. it no longer sat outside of the frame. the digitizer started working correctly again. and now the earpiece was working fine.
had to send an embarrassing "oops" message to the aliexpress seller asking them to disregard my request for a replacement đŹ
i've done this job a half-dozen times before. sometimes repairs just get borked.
#selfRepair #permaComputing #apple
