Tag: ipsw

I was looking forward to iOS 7 for a few reasons. I was glad to be rid of the skeumorphic design elements (stupid shit like the “Notes” app looking like a yellow notepad) but also glad to get the Control Center to turn off Wifi more easily – I only need Wifi to be on when I’m in my house or my office. It’s just a battery drain elsewhere. Ideally iPhone would just do this via geofencing, and the fact that it doesn’t is beyond retarded.

So I upgraded the night it was released. Two days later the novelty had worn off. I tried to roll back to iOS 5 (I never upgraded to 6 due to Maps). Failed with error 3194. I tried DFU mode. Failed with error 3194. I was stuck. They released 7.0.2 this past Friday or Saturday night and I hoped it would solve my problems but it didn’t. Here’s some of what’s happened:

• Battery life is gone. I lose about 1% per minute at times, even with just 1-2 apps running and the phone in airplane mode. To go from 100% to 75% usually takes about 90 minutes.
• Phone doesn’t show up on computer at all – not in iTunes, not as a camera, nothing. I’ve reinstalled iTunes several times.
• It doesn’t check email any more. It tells me no new messages even when I login to Exchange and see new messages. Same for Gmail.
• Audio is broken. The hardware toggle switch appears to be ignored randomly – it won’t make sound at times, and then other times makes tons of sound. On the train, when I unplugged my headphones while listening to a song, it kept playing the audio out the loudspeaker and the volume buttons were ignored.
• The phone randomly powers off when it gets under 30% battery life. The behavior is what I used to see when it got around 3%, but now it happens at 30% or so. When I turn it back on, it says there’s ~25% left so I don’t know why it shut down.
• iCloud backup does not work. It gets to “1% remaining” or something and then says “iCloud backup failed.” The last successful one was from the day I last ran iOS 5.

As of this moment, as I write this, my phone is completely wiped and I’m attempting to restore it from backup. But the phone won’t show up in iTunes for me to restore it. Last time
I went to the Apple Store in Grand Central the “genius” was useless, told me my phone was fine even though it was barely getting 8 hours battery life with no use – his advice was to power the phone off at night. It’s a 4S so not sure what recourse I have, it’s definitely not under warranty anymore. I have work tomorrow and as of right now a useless phone.

I guess my point is, don’t upgrade to iOS 7 if you have an iPhone 4S.

Update, Oct 21, 2013. I took my phone back to the Apple Store and they essentially confirmed that my phone was broken somehow – it wouldn’t even connect to their Macbooks, though it would charge. They offered me a new 4S for $199 (no contract extension) but I didn’t want to do that. Last week I took my phone to Best Buy and got $100 for it towards a new 5S. The 5S is great and IOS7 works fine on it, though it does still have quirks and bugs.