Don’t Pay $150 to Fix Apple Touch Disease
Every Apple user that I know of has their screen become unresponsive. You go to answer your phone and you just cannot slide the control to answer it. Or, you try to touch an icon on your home screen and the entire screen is dead.
Everybody seems to experience this. I am pretty sure you have experienced it, if you use an iPhone regularly.
Apple would have you believe that it is caused by your dropping your iPhone, breaking it inside. (You didn’t.) They would like you to pay $150 to fix it. (Don’t) They assure you that the $150 will fix it. (It won’t.) Here is the link to “Touch Disease” and how you can waste $150.
The $150 service fee will ONLY fix your phone if you have a gray bar at the top, and if you have repeatedly dropped your phone.
Probably, this is NOT the problem.
ALL iPhone users that I have talked with suffer from Touch Disease. Most do not have the gray bar at the top of their phone. Paying the $150 will not fix your phone unless you have this gray bar.
My iPhone 5 suffered from Touch Disease. My brand new iPhone 6 Plus suffered from Touch Disease the moment it came out of the box, new. My iPhone 7 suffered from Touch Disease the moment it came out of the box. I never dropped my phone. My brand new, just unwrapped from the factory box iPhones have suffered from Touch Disease.
My theory is that there are two types of Touch Disease. The kind that is caused from dropping and that leaves this gray box at the top, and the other kind of Touch Disease that affects everybody’s iPhone and that is a bug in Apple’s software.
So, if you are thinking of paying $150 to be able to reliably answer your iPhone, then you should think again. Chances are that unless you have dropped your phone and see that gray box at the top of the screen you will still have Touch Disease even after the $150 repair.
As I said, I think Apple has a serious software bug.
What might that bug be?
My best guess is that it is the iPhone doing memory compaction and garbage collection. When a call comes in it needs to swap a lot of stuff out and bring in the UI code. This can take 10~30 seconds. My guess is that while this is happening the entire phone is deadlocked and unresponsive.
The reason that I think this is because if you continue to swipe your finger to try to answer the call, eventually after 5~8 attempts you will be able to do so. Eventually the phone comes back to life. So the phone just seems busy doing something for a while.
I have reported this to Apple and the engineers there have secretly confided in me that it happens to them, too.
I contacted somebody on Tim Cook’s executive staff and they assured me that there is no such problem and that all I needed to do was to factory reset my phone and delete all of my data and rebuild it from scratch. Sadly, since I am unwilling to factory reset my phone, delete everything on it, and then restore each app individually (not from a backup) they apologize that there is nothing that they can do for me because I won’t “cooperate”.
So there you have it: The Apple MBA Talking Heads say there is no problem and I need to factory reset my phone. The old-time Apple engineers agree it happens to them.
This is what happens when you let MBA-tyes take over a company.
Poor Apple.