This iPhone 13 Pro Max came in on a Saturday afternoon from near Magdalen Green, in Dundee's West End. It went on our system at 2:08pm with one word for the fault: battery. So a battery is what we set out to fit.
Getting into an iPhone means lifting the screen away like the cover of a book, and with it folded back you can see the battery, the board, the metal shields and every screw that should be holding them down. We did that on the bench in our Perth Road workshop. It was a right state in there. The note our tech left on the job says the phone was a mess inside, with half the screws missing. Here's what the photos show. A thick crust of black grime ran round the inside edge of the frame. A strip of green tape lay across the metal cover over the connectors. A few of the screw holes in the brackets nearby were bare. The shields had marker pen writing on them. The black sheet on the back of the screen had ragged patches, with loose scraps of silver foil lying on it.
Why do missing screws matter? Because every one has a job. Some hold down the metal cover that clamps the battery and screen connectors in place. Others stop the Taptic Engine (the little motor that makes the phone buzz), the charging port parts and the speaker from shifting about. Take half of them away and things can work loose with every knock, and every bump in a pocket. You can end up with a screen that flickers, a phone that cuts out, or one that won't charge. Once somebody has opened a phone, it's also unlikely to be as well sealed against water and dust as it was when new.
There's one more thing a missing screw tells you. iPhones leave the factory with every screw in place, and they very rarely shake them out on their own. So missing ones almost always mean the phone has been opened before. Who opened it, where and when, we can't say. Nothing on the job record tells us, so we won't guess, and we're not pointing the finger at anyone. All we can do is tell you what we found.
The job itself was a battery swap. We fitted a genuine Apple battery. It's a pulled one, which means it came out of another phone, and it's listed at 95 to 98% of a new battery's capacity. It was ready at 3:36pm, an hour and a half after the phone came in, and the customer picked it up at 3:54pm. Same afternoon, start to finish.
If your iPhone has been in somebody else's hands before and you're not sure how it was put back together, drop it in and we'll take a look.
Need the same repair? See our full Mobile Phone Battery Replacement Dundee service for pricing and what's covered.
