It's your fault!

[Mongo Skruddgemire]

So I have several iOS devices. Pair of phones and a pair of iPads for me and the wife.

A friend of mine (who also happens to happen to have an iPhone) comes to me and asks if I'm getting the new iOS 7 for my devices.

I said "Yeah, looks interesting, and so far I've had good luck with upgrading. I started out with iOS 3 back on my last phones, got them up to 6, new phones have 6 and are working just fine. I'm going to upgrade when it comes out."

Pay attention, There's a comment in there that's going to be very important later.

So my friend nods and toddles off.

This morning he comes to me desperate for help. Turns out he went to some torrent site and downloaded a bootleg version (possibly a beta, possibly a jail break, possibly pure garbage) and tried to force it onto his brand new iPhone 5.

So I take a look at it. It doesn't power on, hook it to a charger and the charging icon doesn't come up, iTunes doesn't recognize it, hell Windows doesn't even recognize the device and even a badly jail broken device shows up as a storage drive so you can get the pictures off of it.

In short? He's bricked it.

And he was none too happy to hear that he fucked it up and that there seems to be no way to recover from it. And I tried many of the ways to recover after a failed jailbreak and none of them worked. My friend was so unwilling to acknowledge that it's that tits-up that I eventually had to pull out and paraphrase a Monty Python Sketch to get the point across.

It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This iPhone is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It's computational processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, It's shuffled off it's mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-iPHONE!!

Then came out the phrase that really got me mad. He screamed "Well it's all your fault!"

If you haven't guessed by now, the important bit I mentioned above was "when it comes out". But he didn't hear that or decided to erase that bit from his recall.

Up until he decided to yell at me and blame me for his dumbassery, I had a solution that would have had a new iPhone in his grubby little protuberances no later than the end of the day and at no cost to him. But when he started screaming at me I decided to not offer that advice (or even suggest that I had some) until he can calm the hell down. At this point I'm willing to let him figure it out for himself, calm down and apologize (even a half-assed one will suffice), or fork out the cash for a brand new one.

But the questions that spring to mind are this.

1. What is the fascination of having the latest and greatest thing before it's released?

2. Why would you trust a $600 phone to some torrent site's software when the real version has not been released to the real world (I know that some Beta versions are in the wild but without Apple developer's credentials it's useless)?

3. Why blame me when I never told him to get it and simply stated that I would likely get it for my stuff?

4. And why have a meltdown when I can't fix something that is for all intents and purposes is unfixable?

Oh...and the solution for him is easy. He never buys anything electronic without buying the extended warranties which for Apple does include "Whoops! Butterfingers!" coverage for accidental damage. Just drop the sucker in the sink, take it to Apple, say "dropped it in the kid's pool while I was filling it up" and they'll give him a new one no questions asked.

If it's wet and not powering up they'll never know he goofed the software.

[Ginger Tea]

It's not as if it even costs to upgrade in iTunes, I'm still on the pre ditching Google maps, they may have put it back on, I dunno.

Even without the ditching of Google maps, I was hesitant to upgrade the OS cos one time I did it bricked the phone and I had to do a roll back, least I had that option.

But your mate, SOL.
Lets hope he didn't loose any important photos and the warranty swap goes ok, not that I care I guess, he did it to himself after all.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

1. When I worked in Tech full time, it wasn't fascination rather it was necessity that I was ready to go before a majority of the public was going to ask me about it. I didn't care at all but I'd have sucked at my job if I was behind the curve.

2. I've bricked things before so some things really aren't worth it. I'm not going to take an $800 risk on an iphone. A computer with some wacky mystery software that I can replace the hard drive with $50-$150? Sure.

3. Pissed off people. It comes with the playbook. Most people like that don't even realize that was a possibility and when it sinks in they go loopy.

4. See 3. The idea that $800 just went poof over something ridiculously stupid is extremely jarring.

[HYHYBT]

I was tempted to say something along the lines of that warranty workaround essentially being stealing, but then, they shouldn't *make* hardware that can be killed by software to that degree.

[bara]

Oh wow, this takes me back to the ATT call center days. After the second or third iphone was released we got calls all the time of people bricking their phones.

They would either go to a shop or send it to apple to fix (all iPhone issues were handled directly by apple then we could only assist with billing and most network issues).
What would happen is they were told that since they had installed non-approved software or tried to jail break the phones the warranty was voided. Then they would call us. Thing is, we couldn't do anything no matter what since it was the iPhone. Got cussed out a lot because of that silly little device. All we could really do was offer a 20.00 courtesy credit to try to get them off the phone. We couldn't even remove the data plan because of the contract terms so they were still stuck paying the 30.00 a month for that as well.

(Fun Fact: They upgraded the biller so that it could identify what kind of phone you were using. So if someone bought a smart phone/iPhone from a third party and SIM swapped the system would pick it up and automatically add the data plans. That produced a lot of angry people as well.)

[HYHYBT]

(Fun Fact: They upgraded the biller so that it could identify what kind of phone you were using. So if someone bought a smart phone/iPhone from a third party and SIM swapped the system would pick it up and automatically add the data plans. That produced a lot of angry people as well.)

See now, that's unreasonable too. If they don't want data service for their smartphone, they should be able not to have to pay for it and instead only have those features where there's wifi. Likewise, if they *really* want to be charged per kb like dumbphone (?) users, well...