“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”<p>I bought an old BMW some time back. I took it in to the dealership for an inspection before purchase and I mentioned that the A/C wasn’t working before inspection. They charged me what you’d expect (plus extra to diagnose _just_ the A/C) but gave the car a completely clean bill of health aside from the A/C, which they attributed to a bad blower motor.<p>I asked the seller to have that fixed before sale, and they took it to another shop who replaced the blower…and still nothing. That shop kept the car for 2 more weeks and came up with nothing for answers. They took it to another BMW dealership who inspected it for another week and came up with nothing.<p>So I turned to Google. Found a likely problem, but needed BMW dealership to confirm with proprietary tools. The BMW dealership had <i>no idea</i> what I was talking about. I had to literally tell them “can you plug in the foo widget and go to the bar screen and check the baz value shown there? Now can you hit Reset in the corner?” Magically, the A/C started working.<p>I’m not sure how “right to repair” plays into my story. My real point is that technicians are human and imperfect; troubleshooting is hard. It’s not necessarily a conspiracy that they make mistakes, nor is it personal that they believe the diagnostic data in front of them over some random person _convinced_ it’s a specific problem—even when it seems completely obvious once the problem is fixed.
My car was behaving strangely recently. Sometimes when I gave it the beans it would pop up a flurry of scary error messages about the engine, that I had to take it to the mechanic to have it checked out and so on.<p>500 € later and the mechanic could not fix the issue.<p>Other times, just turning on the engine it would complain that some filter was almost full. And once, on a longer than usual trip, it gave up on me in a pretty steep incline and I had to stop on the side of the road, let it cool down a while, and turn it on again and it worked mostly fine if I didn't accelerate too much.<p>Then a few weeks ago it did not start at all. So I measured the battery and it turned out it was toast. I had a friend bring me to buy a new one and swapped it in.<p>The car started fine. But incredibly, it never again displayed any error messages and seems to be completely fixed!<p>Not really phone related, but yeah, sometimes it can be (surprisingly) just the battery...
I had a similar problem with an iPhone 6. The battery page in Settings said the battery was healthy but the phone wasn’t lasting long and was benchmarking at about half the score it should have.<p>Coconut Battery said the battery was around 65% of its design capacity.<p>After replacing the battery the phone went back to normal, benchmark scores improved.<p>It’s really scummy that the phone was downclocking itself to lighten voltage but not informing me. This was all after the iPhone 6 battery scandal and software updates to show battery health.
Good opportunity to mention this niche subreddit: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/spicypillows/</a>. I'm guessing her old battery wasn't spicy enough to merit a picture, the one pictured looks fine.
I accidentally discovered a good diagnostic test for swollen batteries:<p>(1) Remove phone from case and place on a very flat, smooth, hard, clean surface. (Granite countertop, glass coffee table, etc.)<p>(2) Give the corner of the phone a sideways flick with your finger.<p>(3) Does the phone spin around and around and around like a top? If so, it may have a swollen battery.<p>This probably doesn't work for every model of phone, but on mine, I noticed the phone's newfound ability to spin much earlier than I could easily see visually that the back of the phone was bowed.
> I did this because my friends who were already there advised me that the company did not supply phones but did expect you to load a crapload of apps on to do your job.<p>Serious question: what if you don’t have a smartphone (I know several people) or simply don’t want to install work stuff on your private phone? Is this a prerequisite, do they fire you or how would this be resolved? Also, this sounds like a security disaster waiting to happen (I also know people without a passcode on their phone)
Somehow it is missing in the article how the "they" in:<p>>They looked at the battery status screen which was still reporting that everything was fine, and said "it's the logic board".<p>call themselves "Apple Geniuses".
I had a nearly identical issue with an iphone, and it was the battery. The apple store employee was sure that the battery was fine because the "diagnostic" didn't show any battery problems.
But after insisting for half an hour that I wouldn't leave with anything except a battery replacement, they gave in and swapped the battery. Worked perfectly afterwards.
We need kind of consumer protection agency (with teeth) to advocate for "right to repair" and generally don't let corporations away with designing such lemons. (I mean Apple track record with swollen batteries, unworkable keyboards, bendy phones and ipads).
My singular experience with Best Buy as an Apple partner was similar to the experience described. Not much leeeway in handling things, no satisfactory resolution.
One time I bought a replacement battery for my ThinkPad, only to have it "die" after only a few hours of use - on A/C power. It wouldn't even turn on anymore. I dismantled the whole thing and pored over it for days, before thinking to remove the replacement battery and run it on A/C power with nothing in the slot. Then it started working again.
Thought my old NAS was going bad because the cheap power transformer I bought off of Amazon went bad (after the old one failed completely). Guess it wouldn't put out the wattage.<p>I actually bought a whole spare diskless NAS off of ebay, and wound up only using the transformer that came with it ($150 or so for a $15-ish transformer).
Swelling jelly rolls have a real competitor in the very near future:<p><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-to-build-a-safer-more-energydense-lithiumion-battery" rel="nofollow">https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-to-build-a-safer-more-energyde...</a>
I never get these articles. The writer always seems to take a super long and complicated path to the solution. Who has time for all this.<p>If I think it's the battery, I go into the Apple store, ask for a battery replacement, pay and leave. $49 for an iphone 8 or so.<p>You can set the apt up online, usually takes 2 hours.<p>What am I missing?