iPhone unused for many years won't start up - Fixed. My experience fixing a new iPhone that was in the box for years and would not work.

I have had an iPhone 6 for many years and it has been very reliable even up to today. The only thing it needed was a battery replacement a while back which I wrote about in a previous article here. The phone still works great but recently some of the apps I use for work started requiring iOS 13 or later and unfortunately the iPhone 6 only supports up to iOS 12.

About 4-5 years ago I got an iPhone 7 through my work but since my iPhone 6 was still good, I decided to just keep the 7 in the box as a backup and wait until I actually needed to upgrade. I figured now was a good time to make the switch considering the apps require the newer iOS versions which are able to run on the 7.  

So I opened the box and plugged in the phone to charge. I knew the battery would be dead since it had been in the box for years. The phone flashed the Apple logo on and off repeatedly. I let it charge for a couple hours and then tried to turn it on. Unfortunately when pressing the power button, I could not get it to turn on. Even trying every solution such as doing a full restart did not work.

I figured the battery was probably completely dead and needed to be replaced. This is normal for phones that are many years old so I was not surprised by this. So I made an appointment to bring it in to the Apple store.

At the store I explained the situation to them about how it was a new phone that had been unused for many years and would not start up. They tested it out and were not able to detect a current. I asked if we should replace the battery but they said even with a new battery it still probably won't work. This was pretty disappointing to hear.

They said there really is not anything they can do at this point to fix it and wanted to know if I was interested in buying a new phone and giving them my phone to recycle. Considering it was a brand new phone I just unboxed, I told them I better hold on to it and that I was not ready to buy a new one since my old phone still worked.

So I took the phone home and decided to do some more research. There were some suggestions about trying to heat up the phone to bring it back to life. Apparently with the lithium batteries if the power drains too low, they sort of disconnect or something as a safety feature. I tried warming it up as suggested but unfortunately it did not work.

I thought about bringing it back to Apple again for a 2nd opinion and just asking them to do a battery replacement. Then just for the heck of it, I started looking up how much replacement batteries cost. They go for about $20 and this is including a full tool kit. Apple charges $50 for the replacement.

The tutorials online didn't look to hard so I figured I would give it a try since I didn't really have anything to lose. It would be a fun project and a good experience trying to change an iPhone battery.

So I ordered the battery with the kit. When it arrived I got to work. Honestly, replacing the battery turned out to be more difficult than I expected. The screws are extremely tiny and there are 3 different kinds. Just prying the screen away from the base was incredibly difficult since it is sealed on there with and adhesive. Still I was determined to get it done.

I followed the steps and managed to get through it in about 2 hours. Keep in mind, with all of this, there was still no guarantee it would work even if I did everything right. 

Then came the moment of truth. I plugged it in to the charger and after a second, the Apple logo came on. That's a good sign! Then after a few moments the start up screen appeared. It worked!

So it was just the battery after all just as I had suspected. Right away I was pretty annoyed by my experience at the Apple store since they told me nothing could be done to save it and that a new battery would not help. They wanted me to recycle the phone and spend hundreds of dollars on a new one, when all it needed was a $20 battery.

So if you have a new phone that has been in the box or unused for many years and it does not turn on, chances are it may just need a new battery.

Dreams and Creativity - Our brains may be more capable than we realize

The other day I had a dream where I attended a play. The play was about viral videos and it had a mix of live acting as well as videos. In the dream I distinctly remember how each idea presented was original as in not something I had seen or thought about in real life.

I remember each scene was very detailed like a movie that was fully thought out. As I began waking up this concept stuck with me. I thought how could these events in the dream be so well executed considering they were not things I had seen or experienced in my real life.

If I were to create it in real life, it would be incredibly difficult and time consuming. What I mean by this is that it would be like trying to make a movie from scratch. You would have to come up with the ideas, write out a plan or a script, do the acting, and then edit it. This would be very difficult and would take a lot of time to do. But in the dream, this all happened within minutes. The ideas were fully developed and executed in the dream as if they had been planned out and worked on for weeks.  

It got me thinking that maybe our brains are a lot more capable and powerful than we think. In real life, making a movie is very difficult, even just coming up with the ideas for it, but in a dream, it can all be done spontaneously in the moment.

If we could tap into that ability that we have in dreams, we might be able to be a lot more creative or more efficient in coming up with ideas in real life. It's just a thought and maybe it is not possible. I know that often dreams can be deceiving in a way that they seem to make perfect sense in dream world, but when you wake up and think about them in reality, they don't make any sense.

But sometimes dreams do make sense and they can be very enlightening. Like many things in this world, there is a lot we don't know. Who knows what we may learn about dreams in the future? They might be more important that we think.

Pet Peeve - Car Alarms that go off when they are not supposed to

If you live or work near a parking lot with a lot of cars, chances are you probably hear a car alarm going off now and again. Car alarms are supposed to help protect the car by alerting if someone is trying to break into the car, but I find that usually when you hear a car alarm going off, there is not even anyone near the car. These false alarms can be very annoying especially if it is a loud honking alarm that keeps going off repeatedly.

After doing a little research it seems there are quite a few things that can set a car alarm off such a low battery in the car or the key fob. Sensors on the car may also get triggered mistakenly causing it to go off. And of course there is the issue of people unknowingly pressing the alarm button on their key fob. Whatever the case, it is very annoying when this happens and everyone around has to put up with an alarm going off for no reason.

Car alarms are another one of those things like foldable stop signs that seem to cause more harm than good. The idea seems to make sense at the time, but in the long run, it just ends up being more problematic than actually being helpful.  If your car alarm has a tendency to go off when it is not supposed to, please get it checked out so it can be fixed as soon as possible.