A couple of months ago, the lock button on my iPhone stopped working.
Only having a few actual buttons on the phone, you don’t really realize how much you use something until you no longer have it. In this case, it never quite dawned on me that any time I go to set down my phone or put it back in my pocket, I hit that button first to prevent myself from accidentally butt dialing someone or playing a very unaware game of Angry Birds in my pocket.
There is a workaround where you can turn on AssistiveTouch that basically gives you a new menu with all of the physical actions you would normally do with your phone, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass and it now takes me three taps to lock my phone whereas before I could lock it as it was going into my pocket without a second thought.
Admittedly the phone is getting pretty old – I got it as a warranty replacement just inside of my first year, so even this device is 2.5 years old at this point. Unfortunately, my wife’s phone is still the original, making hers 3.5 years old and it’s kind of hard for me to run off and get mine replaced at the first sign of trouble when hers has had random issues (out of warranty) and we haven’t done anything about them yet…
😛
So anyways, I thought I’d try my hand at fixing the thing myself. I replaced a hard drive in one of my old iPods very long ago, so how bad could it be, right?!
As it turns out, iPhones are really complicated on the inside and all of the parts are extraordinarily tiny!!!
I first tried this video that talked about inserting a piece of paper where the button sits, and then even this video that shows how to locate and activate the button with a needle, but after about an hour of frustration, several scraps of paper, and one broken needle, I still can’t seem to find the stupid thing and I’m not about to pull out every last component like some other videos have shown.
It looks like it’ll probably finally be time for us to upgrade to new phones when the iPhone 6 comes out … presumably in just a few months??? 😕