Opinions please

[Zourous]

I’ll try and keep it short as I can.

 

I try and replace my iphone SE battery myself and make a real hash of it. The battery replacement was eventually successful but In the process I damaged the power button and now also the torch doesn’t work. Fast forward about a year and the battery needs replacing again so I take it to a phone shop and ask for a replacement battery and to see if the power button and torch is an easy fix whilst it’s open. They replace the battery and then said I must have severed the ribbon inside by mistake, which I fully accept. They give me a price to replace the ribbon plus the whole back case as it’s a pain otherwise. I decline that repair as it’s almost not worth the cost due to the age of the phone. I get home after the battery replacement only to find that now the volume buttons and the silence button above have stopped working whereas they were working before I took it in for repair.

 

Where do I stand with this now? There fault or mine? Looking at a iphone tear down it looks like one ribbon that links all buttons at the top but I’m no expert. They said it was severed but I can’t see that it was completely if those particular buttons were working before. I haven’t contacted them again yet.

[Ditto]

Talk to them and explain what you've explained here. It's a tricky one as it's hard for them to be certain they caused the additional problems or whether it was inevitable just investigating. Perhaps they would be open to completing a full fix given, but at half cost, assuming that's less than the cost of a replacement.

[Zourous]

I was thinking along these lines but good to get an outside perspective in case I’m getting it totally wrong.

[Steve21]

Personal opinion, but if you knew it was already damaged/partially broke and still asked them to work on it, it's kind of in your hands there I'd say. If for example the only reason it was still semi-working is because it was squeezed in a certain way, and by them doing the battery it stopped that I wouldn't blame them

 

Were they told about the damage in advance? Just in terms of whether they'd be able to do anything to "work around" it

 

Steve

[Zourous]

Yes I was upfront and admitted that I had used a knife to get the old battery out when the pulley glue underneath the battery snapped on me. This is the first battery btw not the one they’ve just done. I just asked them to investigate it whilst the phone was open in case it was something simple. Clearly it wasn’t.

[Duranis]

Having done quite a bit of phone repair I can say it is 100% possible that the fault you are experiencing now could be due to the damage you initially caused.

 

You could quite easily have damaged the ribbon cables that are connected to these buttons but not enough to completely break it. Opening up the iPhone again the proper way would still have moved these cables so if they were already damaged just that little movement could have finished them off.

 

These people have probably replaced a few hundred batteries in this model of phone so I would be inclined to believe that it wasn't anything they did. Especially if you used a knife to open it up the first time. I obviously don't know these people but when I was doing this for a short time as a living it was very rare that we would break anything while doing simple things like a battery switch. The only times that things ever really got broken was sometimes trying to remove LCD's from digitizers (it was kind of accepted that its going to break) and when working on brand new devices that didn't have good tear downs available for them. For iPhones it pretty much becomes muscle memory level of work after your first 20 or so.