IPhone 4 home button: planned obsolescence, or just poor design.

Ok so your otherwise adequate iPhone 4 suddenly becomes a brick. Why? The home button, without which IOS is useless, stops responding. You search around online, and find numerous threads on numerous sites with various random suggestions, ranging from turning on assistive touch, to starting to turn the phone off, but "fooling" IOS by holding down the home button until it returns to the home screen. Surprisingly, 8 times out of 10, this works, and IOS is back to its snappy home button responsive happiness.

This tends to suggest a software issue cleverly disguised as a hardware problem. To the average joe, it's broken. Time for a new phone. But wait. All my apps. All my iPod music. I like my iPhone. What to do? Ok I will buy an iPhone 4s, (or whatever is the latest model)

Kaching!

A few clever lines of code, and the apple share price goes up yet again.

Well. Maybe.

I am curious to know:

If you have an iPhone 4, has your home button ever stopped working?
Did you succumb and upgrade?

For what it's worth I have noticed it seems to be worse when more apps are running. However it can still randomly stop responding with no apps running. The assistive touch trick does help, but does not let you reach the task bar to kill apps that you don't need. Maybe it is a genuine bug. Or maybe, just maybe there is an internal hours of use counter that triggers some code....

In my experience, buttons either work, or they don't. Killing apps should not suddenly "fix" a hardware issue.

I own an iPad 2 for around a year now. Knock wood, nothing yet.

I have iPhone 3 and have upgraded/ updated it myself . They require regular updating to fix bugs, but half the time it fixes one bug and gives you another.


My home button has frozen like that.
Try pressing home button and sleep button at the same time, then power off. It will shut down and restart, home button should work

reply to post by FlutterByte


i absolutely hate it when companies and corporations make products with built in obsolescence.

lightbulbs that burn out faster because they want you to go back and buy more

cell phone batteries that become useless a few months after they are brand new.

perfectly soft beautifully made t-shirts and underwear, BUT WAIT, they are tagless. instead of having a tag i can cut off carefully with scissors, NOW, there is a massive wall of rubber text painted on the inside of my underwear, telling me how to WASH IT, and what to use.

WHAT the lalala?? washing these things after 3 times just causes that plastic "tagless junk" to start to get hard and flake off.

most annoying clothing ever. i want them to start using tags again so i can at least remove the tag.

they aren't actually tagless! they are impossible to remove!


they think im actually going to go back and PURCHASE ANOTHER PRODUCT FROM THEM.


LOL


all it means is that i will go straight to their competitor and buy something from them.


or maybe i just wont buy anything at all for a long time.

apple have a very well calculated upgrade path with just enough to tempt you to buy this one even though you know in a year they're gonna release something better that will empty your bank account

the port below the home button can get dusty and needs cleaning ?

Listen.

Apple is the KING of making substandard product and making hipsters pay through the nose for it.

Take the Iphone 4S for example, it has a wonderful Dual Core 1GHZ processor..

But it's UNDERCLOCKED at 600MHZ!

Why?

So that when iOS 6 comes out or something like that, they can unlock this in the update, push it up to 800 or even the full 1Ghz and then claim they're amazing at making faster operating systems, when in reality it was hardware all along.

Very dirty.

~Tenth

If its in warranty take it to Apple or an Apple store.

They will switch it out, Ive had every Iphone since the first, and the few times ive had a problem it was a painless quick switch.

I also tend to give my old iPhones to the Kids in the extended family, who are brutal with them, and surprisingly they hold up well.

Here is your fix and this worked for most users, including myself.

If someone already posted this, sorry for second line.

1. Find your standard iPhone 4 charger

2. Plug the charger into your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S

3. Gently/slightly tilt or wiggle the charger while it is still connected

Problem solved.

If this worked for you, then you should thank me because I spent quite a bit of time researching the net for this solution.

And yes, it is a manufacturing flaw/defect that happens to a lot of iPhone 4/4S users.

Originally posted by truthseeker84
Here is your fix and this worked for most users, including myself.

If someone already posted this, sorry for second line.

1. Find your standard iPhone 4 charger

2. Plug the charger into your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S

3. Gently/slightly tilt or wiggle the charger while it is still connected

Problem solved.

If this worked for you, then you should thank me because I spent quite a bit of time researching the net for this solution.

And yes, it is a manufacturing flaw/defect that happens to a lot of iPhone 4/4S users.

Thanks

Seems to work as suggested.

Only problem I can see is: next time it locks up "in the wild" I won't have my charger with me.
I am assuming this is a temporary solution.

I got the iPhone 4s when it came out,
Up till then I was still using an original 1st gen iPhone, it went through alot and it was still going strong after years of abuse.
You can complain about them all you like, they gave the industry a needed shot in the arm and revolutionised handsets.

reply to post by tothetenthpower

Take the Iphone 4S for example, it has a wonderful Dual Core 1GHZ processor.. But it's UNDERCLOCKED at 600MHZ!

Its under clocked because of Battery life, its a cell phone not a lap top, My laptop gets an 1hr at most of unplugged use at full clock speed, same concept but with a smaller battery supply.

Apple HELD off on 4g antennas because of the battery draw.

Other companies do this all the Time but its not till Apple does it that people bitch.

Its the same with the Antenna problem with the 4, every smart phone has a spot you can hold it and kill the signal. (I worked in cell phones since Analog)

And again not till apple does it do People complain.

I used to buy a new cell phone every few months, as that was my job, rain or shine Id get the newest phones out because I needed to keep up.

The iphone has been the only phone Ive owned since it launched, Ive tried Androids, and others, but its always the iphone I use for personal use.

Since it launched, and I am a power user, I use my phones and all their functions to their fullest.

I Jailbreak, and Root all my devices, the iphone is THE most Stable smart phone out there, with the least amount of returns I ever have seen on devices like this.

and Ive had to Root and overclock every single Android device I ever owned.

They all Underclock, but again, People like to focus on apple, and insult the consumers who purchase them for some reason.

Call them names like hipsters and #.

Gets annoying, almost sounds like jealousy when you hear it enough.

I always wondered why my old Iphone 3g would have issues after every update. Eventually the wifi stopped working all together after the update to 3.5 i think. I have since switched to the htc inspire which is currently running android 2.3.3. Works like a charm. I haven't had any problems with the phone or with the software asides from the occasional app that goes nuts, nothing a quick restart can't deal with. I've also been able to customize it, from the lock screen to the home screen, all without rooting the software. I've had this phone for about a year and a half and it's still running as well as it did the day i bought it. I've had friends and family members with iphone 4/4s that have had problems with the home button so I don't know if it's a defect of just random errors.

quality product, you have to go out and find your charger and wiggle it around to make it work.

that's not a solution, that's a inconvenience.

a solution is an upgrade or new phone that doesn't have that problem.

Originally posted by Neocrusader
I got the iPhone 4s when it came out,
Up till then I was still using an original 1st gen iPhone, it went through alot and it was still going strong after years of abuse.
You can complain about them all you like, they gave the industry a needed shot in the arm and revolutionised handsets.

Don't get me wrong. In general, I like the apple product. For a hand made peice of technology it is a marvel of engineering. The fact that over 100 small hands worked for around $3 an hour to make it is testament to the jobs legacy. I just wonder sometimes when things like this happen. Maybe it is a design fault as suggested. Maybe not.

reply to post by benrl


The 4S has two sub standard antennas, which is why the reception is such crap on those devices.

Again, Apple has never made high quality product, EVER.

It's always been substandard and over priced, the only reason they are as successfull as they are is because of marketing and Itunes.

I have issues with most manufacturers these days, I use to work in cell phones so I've run the gambit and although Apple has the lowest return rate to manufacturer for defects, (12% in comparison to about 25% average for others) that's only possible because they've really not changed the hardware of the device since the original Iphone launched.

There's no innovation with them.

~Tenth

Originally posted by benrl

Gets annoying, almost sounds like jealousy when you hear it enough.

naw it's not jealousy. how can you be jealous of someone having a product you don't want.

i believe what people do find annoying is the hero worship and idol worship of a phone manufacturer.

and the"look at me, i lined up 18 hrs for a phone." when you could have just went the next day.

at the end of the day, apple isn't curing world hunger and disease, they're selling you a cell phone. not exactly a champion of humanity.

add to fact it's something they didn't even invent, all this fanfare is unwarranted. it's bordering on cult worship which is sad and frustrating for many people and being knocked off your seat with amazement and astonishment over a phone is something you'd expect from a simpleton.

fact is apple iphones have nothing new that a thousand other phones don't have.

reply to post by tothetenthpower

There's no innovation with them.

Yep none at all, thats why every cell phone was a slate before them... Oh right, slates didn't exist period.

Until apple, nothing looked or functioned like the Iphone... Windows CE? please that thing was the worst, and the form function was closet to the iPhone but then that was kinda copy the Newton thing in the first place.

Symbian was cool but nothing like it.

Look up the Android Prototypes before the Iphone, Blackberry imitators at best.

After Iphone every android is a slate.

Reception issues are on the Carrier for the most part, separate ATT from it which Thankfully you can now, even prepaid iphones now. All phones have to meet carrier standards to even be carried on ATT, but their networks still # in places.

The last thing you can call apple is not innovative, for better or worse thats one thing they are.

Hows that Floppy drive treating you? oh right computers dont have those anymore, why because apple showed you could remove them and still have a functioning computer.

Lets see how the optical drive fairs now that apple has dropped that too.

Funny you mention this topic, My 4s has done this vary thing about two weeks ago. I figured it for a glitch myself. Getting back to the topic of Planned Obsolesce. There's a great Documentary about Planned Obsolescence Called "The Light bulb Conspiracy". Goes into great depth about the topic for those who have little knowledge on the why's and how's of this marketing trend that has in the long term destroyed the Economy and wasted much of out limited resources and devastated our environment.

reply to post by randomname


Up until I purchased my iPod classic, I had never owned an Apple product.

I've had nothing but raves about the iPod since. It's the classic so more storage, less gimmicks.

Ditto for my iphone 4s. I love it but I realize that there are some things that my Blackberry did better