Chosen Solution
A customer of mine is having multiple issues with their device, no water damage, but screen is cracked. When they make a call, the ear speaker works sometimes when it’s recently been rebooted, and the caller can hear them. They say it stops working after a couple minutes or more. The taptic engine also was not working, and when I opened the phone up, all three screws were loose to the taptic. When I tried to make a call, the vibrator would still shake after making the call. Steps tried to solve the problem: Restored Disconnected and reconnect everything Make call without taptic engine Steps to try: Replace front camera assembly with earpiece Replace lightning port assembly Replace Taptic engine
The iPhone 7 series of devices have proven to be very unreliable, suffering from flex-based issues similar to the iPhone 6 Plus (Touch Disease). On the iPhone 7, the fault line runs along the top of the SIM card reader and affects the Baseband CPU and Audio IC. Any short copper traces running perpendicular to the fault line while connecting to micro-BGA pads, is subject to failing. On the Audio IC, this particularly affects the C12 pad/trace although there are 4 pads/traces along the fault line. Of those four, the C12 pad (I2S_AP_TO_CODEC_MCLK) is the most critical as it is a communication protocol line between the CPU and the Audio IC. Here are the typical symptoms, as collated by the repair community: Voice Memos app / Loudspeaker on call - greyed outSiri doesn’t hear you / Caller can’t hear youMost other Audio related issues that aren’t solved by modular replacementsLong boot times (3-5 minutes)iTunes detects the phone but stuck on the Apple LogoHaptic feedback on logo during bootLaggy Touch after PIN This phone seems to exhibit some of the symptoms so if modular repairs don’t solve the issue, and Audio IC repair may be the next step.
