Hey everyone, this isn’t a real post for Medicine Mondays. Instead, I was just going to talk about what happened over the weekend, mostly about “iPhone Battery Expansion”.

So basically, my wife’s iPhone X suffered from the iPhone battery expansion problem that seems to be occuring more commonly. I read some posts, like this and this one.

After confirming the problem, I made an appointment with the Genius Bar over at the Apple Store near us. In the time between when it happened and the appointment, I tried my best to backup all of her iPhone data. The likelihood was that they were going to need to wipe out her phone and give us a new one (refurbished). I don’t currently pay for the iCloud extra storage option, but maybe we should. I mean, we do backup all of her photos to Google Photos anyways — but just to be doubly sure.

Anyways, I used this program to backup her iPhone data (and encrypt it):

CopyTrans Shellbee

It worked pretty well overall, although it took awhile to back my wife’s 100gb of data, so maybe give yourself enough time to back everything up. Of course, I was backing it up to an external hard drive (not SSD), so that made it take a little longer as well.

So then, after that we were all set to head to the Apple Store. My wife got the kids in my car, and tossed me the keys. I turned the key and heard the tell-tale sounds of “sputter, sputter, click”. This was almost certainly my battery being dead. I gave it a shot a few more times, but then just resigned myself that it was dead — something for Monday.

We got in my wife’s car instead and drove over to the Apple Store. To be honest, the Apple Store people are pretty great. We checked in and sat down with a guy and told us what our options were.

I kind of already knew it was going to cost at least the $79 for a new battery, but I wasn’t sure how they were going to go about it. Would it be replaced right there? Be shipped out and given a loaner phone for awhile? What was the procedure?

There were some conflicting reports online since this has been happening for a year or so now. So, apparently, they used to take these “expanded batteries” and ship them out for safety reasons. Supposedly, there is a theoretical risk of explosion and/or fire with iPhone Battery Expansion. However, he said that recently they’ve been authorized to fix them in house (if possible).

Oh… that’s good then, right?

Unfortunately for us, they didn’t have her battery in stock, the iPhone X battery. So, they just told us they would wipe the phone and backup contacts/notes/etc from iCloud. However, she would lose her pictures since we don’t have an upgraded iCloud account. This was why I backed up everything before going there, and I’m glad I did.

They then just gave her a refurbished iPhone X, and recovered the contacts/notes from iCloud. He was even able to remove the Spigen Tempered Glass Screen Protector from her phone and put it on the refurbished phone.

It all went pretty well, and the kids just kind of hung out playing on the iPads there while we got this stuff taken care of. I also brought our old iPhone 6+ phones in, just in case they wouldn’t give us a loaner phone or something. Apparently, those phones were worth $40 each, so we sold them back and got $80 in gift cards. That essentially covered the cost of the battery replacement, which was nice. Most likely, we will be upgrading to the iPhone 12 this coming September and trading our iPhone X’s in. Hopefully they’re still worth something by then.

Glad it worked out…

Me too!

Then when went and ate dinner at California Pizza Kitchen with the kids. My kids love the bread and pizza from there. After we got home, I hooked my wife’s new (refurbished) iPhone X to my computer. Then, using the CopyTrans Shellbee, I was able to completely restore this phone to pretty much the exact same state as it had been in before.

There was a little bit of hiccup in terms of removing the old (defunct) iPhone from her Apple Account and messing around with the iCloud settings. The program kept throwing me an error that an iCloud restore was in progress (even though it wasn’t). However, after a little bit of fiddling, I got if figured out, entered the encryption password, and did a full restore.

It took about 15-20 minutes to restore it. I think I may have won Husband of the Year honors (at least for 5 minutes or so) since we didn’t lose any of her pictures. My wife adores all the pictures she keeps on her iPhone and losing them what make her extremely sad. While the backups are available on Google Photos, I think just having them all back “right where they were” was better.

So that ends the iPhone Battery Expansion adventure.

Great! Anything else?

Oh yeah…Remember my dead car battery?

Well, I don’t have jumper cables because I’ve never really needed them here. Also, I don’t really trust myself with them because I don’t know what I’m doing around cars at all. Luckily, a friend of mine was able to stop by this morning, confirm my battery was dead/dying and gave me a jump. He had jumper cables — but he wanted to his new jump starter. I had always thought those jump starter things were huge, but this was actually not that big. I think it was this one:

Schumacher Instant Power Jump Starter

We hooked up the cables, hit the switch to turn it on, and turned the key to the car. The car started right up. Easy peasy.

Seeing how easy it is, and how batteries in Hawaii seem to die early since we don’t really drive very long distances. I was thinking of picking one up, maybe that same one from over at Walmart. Unfortunately, Amazon can’t ship stuff to me, I assume because of oversea shipping regulations regarding Lithium-Ion, but this one has good reviews:

DBPOWER 600A 18000mAh Portable Car Jump Starter

Anyways, I drove over to the gas station / mechanic near me and they managed to squeeze me in without an appointment. While it was going to be there, I figured I’d get an oil change and my state safety check done as well. They were both due in February anyways. I got some coffee with my friend then walked to get a haircut before heading home. Picked my car later on that day, somewhat of a pretty productive day.

TL;DR

Not a real Medicine Mondays Post.

Just a recap of my weekend and Monday adventures.

Hopefully these experiences of mine will be of use.

-Sensei

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