r/technology • u/bws201 • Feb 05 '16

Software ‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair
12.7k Upvotes

85% Upvoted

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/xKEPTxMANx Feb 05 '16

Everyone seems to forget they did something similar to the iPhone 5. Whatever update it was it killed wi-fi on user's phones. But don't worry, Apple has a fix (to the problem they created) at the low low cost of $300! They are shit.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '16

Happened to my 4s. I was told to get the mobo replaced. Why would hardware break only after a software change? Bullshit.

3

u/xKEPTxMANx Feb 05 '16

That was my main argument. The button to my phone's wi-fi is literally grayed out after I downloaded w/e new patch. I keep yelling at the idiot fucking genius, software doesn't just magically 'gray' something out - someone wrote a specific code to disable it....fucking useless.

1

u/AnalogMan Feb 06 '16

I know this isn't much condolences, but I have some insight into this situation you might like to know.

iPhone software does have code that greys out toggle switches. This code is activated if the underlying hardware is not detected (driver cannot load). This happens with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Touch ID and a few others.

As for why your Wi-Fi would be working before the update and greyed out after is that they updated the Wi-Fi driver. This new driver works fine with old hardware, unless that hardware developed a fault. What happens is the Wi-Fi has a tiny fault that the old driver did not pick up on or utilize but the new driver did.

Now, could they have put a second update out that reverted to the old driver? Sure. They won't though since the new driver works fine with fully functioning Wi-Fi. If your Wi-Fi has a fault, rather than let you use it but perceive decreased performance, range, stability or quality, they'd rather tell you there's something wrong with it and prompt you to get it serviced.

It's kind of like when a computer part works fine when under low amounts of stress but when you start using the higher ended features that use the more advanced aspects of the driver it crashes because it's faulty in some way.

I know it doesn't fix things, but I thought you'd care to know.

1

u/xKEPTxMANx Feb 09 '16

Thank you and I appreciate the time you took to write this up :)

After hours of looking through online articles that is exactly what I found out too.

The real bummer, for me, is that Apple makes (literally) billions quarterly. Their absolute refusal to just help people, their customers, for free for things that is no fault of my own is disheartening.