Why I’ll Never Trust the Refurb Market Again

A little while ago, I posted another article about why I never trade in my devices. And in that article, I highlighted purchasing a used iPhone 12 Pro Max to put on the front-lines of life, to take all the hits of extreme weather conditions, rain, and just a phone I don’t need to worry about if I want to go to the beach and chuck it in the sand, or leave it sitting by the poolside on vacation.

Well, my first mistake was buying a refurbished phone in the first place. See, when I first acquired the 12 Pro Max, I did notice a few things that got worse over time. First up, the mute switch didn’t have the same clickiness that I was used to with other iPhones. It always felt a little too soft, and I never could tell if I had actually muted or unmuted it without looking at the screen. Initially, that was the only issue I found. Everything else on the surface seemed okay. But after the return window closed, this thing started to rear its ugly head. The screen had a worsening sloppiness to it. To the point that I’d tap the screen and it would sink into the frame and make an audible crunching sound when I tapped on the right side of the display. Then the battery health tanked way too rapidly. I’m talking 100% to 80% speedrun within half a year of use. The third thing I noticed is the LTE modem intermittently would drop to sub 5 Mbps speeds. I thought I resolved this by wiping and resetting all my network settings, but this issue still cropped up intermittently here and there, but never stayed around long enough to really be a major concern.

When I tried taking this phone to the Apple Store, that’s when I got the “we can’t work on this, but we’ll give you trade-in value” spiel. I told them to keep their offer and did my own restoration on this phone. Now, before anyone leaps to conclusions that I made the phone worse, I’ll remind you that this is not my first project that I’ve restored. I revived a non-functioning iPhone 4 from the dead and it works perfectly. I replaced batteries on Pixels, other iPhones, and Motorolas and have never had issues crop up from the work that I have done.

When I took this 12 Pro Max apart, I learned pretty quickly that the refurbisher did a very poor job with this device. First, the entire logic board was covered in some sort of black grease/sludge. The seal around the screen was so shot, it was a wonder the screen didn’t just fall off the body before I took it apart. But the biggest war crime here was the battery. The settings page showed that no service was ever performed on the phone, and claimed it still had the OEM battery. But when I opened the phone up, the battery brand literally said “For:12Promax”. I can’t even make this up, they didn’t even capitalize “Max” which tells me the refurbisher did a sketchy move by tearing the OEM battery sensor off the original battery and hacking it onto this aftermarket replacement. There wasn’t even an Apple logo in sight anywhere on the battery pack.

So, I cleaned the grease off with a microfibre cloth, replaced the seal with a fresh one, blasted it out with some compressed air, and swapped in a fresh battery. A full restoration that made the phone feel like a brand new device again (for the first time since I owned it, anyway). From that point forward, I continued to use the phone daily for about another year. However, within the past couple months, I’ve identified blatant signs of catastrophic logic board failure. First up, the Face ID suddenly stopped registering my face intermittently. Even in direct sunlight with no mask/sunglasses on. Then, around the same time, the phone started dropping battery life HARD. It went from “lasts all day long” to “needs to recharge mid-day to keep going and still dies before EOD”. I’ve literally watched the battery counter tick down like a nuke detonator in real time. I’ve seen it go from 40% to 20% within half an hour, then from 20% to 1% within two minutes (no exaggeration). And when the screen died and the phone wouldn’t power up? I’d plug it in, start it back up almost immediately, and it claimed it was at 15%, and climbed back to 30% within 2-3 minutes total. Initially, I thought this was a battery issue, being that I had put another year of strain on that battery I changed previously. 

So I changed the battery again. Things went smoothly, and I had it swapped within about 15-20 mins. Put the phone back together, everything seemed perfect on the surface. I used the phone for about 20 mins, but it was only at 44% charge out of the box, so I decided to let it charge up overnight. When I picked the phone back up after charging, I noticed the touchscreen stopped registering all touch entirely. There was no physical damage to the display, it still showed colours perfectly fine; no cracks, nothing got shattered. I took the phone back apart, inspected the ribbon cable carefully, and found absolutely nothing wrong with it. Tried rebooting the phone, still nothing. Tried disconnecting everything from the logic board and putting it all back together, again, nothing. I even swapped in another 3rd party panel, which seemed to restore functionality for a little bit. But that third party panel was not long for this world, as the same issues I experienced on my original screen happened intermittently and only got worse over time on the new panel. The new panel worked long enough for me to connect a Bluetooth keyboard and trackball to my 12 Pro Max to initiate a full data backup to my other devices. I also entered diagnostic mode to verify that this was indeed a logic board issue, and found that as soon as I connected diagnostic mode to WiFi, the screen turned black, the phone became a brick for 2-5 minutes, then it would just reboot to the lock screen after being unresponsive. The logic board was so bad that it would not even try to enter diagnostic mode, and that there was my confirmation that no matter how many replacement parts I threw at this device, nothing would get it working again, unless I wanted to roll the dice on a $500 Ebay Logic Board, and likely still need to buy another screen if the logic board fried the data rails in my panel irreparably.

So I did the only thing I could; I finished my data backup, factory reset the device, then I pulled the screen and battery, cleaned it up to look good for an art-display, mounted a privacy glass screen protector on a fresh screen seal, and hung the phone up on an unplugged MagSafe stand, to honour it for its service, and to add some flair to my homelab. Now, if I bring someone in to check it out, from the side, it looks like a still-functional 12 Pro Max (the privacy glass makes it look like a regular black screen), but when you approach it and look at it dead-on, you’ll see the exposed logic board underneath the protector. It’s like an optical illusion, and I’m sure it’ll be quite the conversation piece when people don’t expect it, but take a side glance and go “wait – why am I seeing a bare logic board behind your screen??”. By removing the battery, you can see the actual MagSafe module from inside, and it prevents this phone from ever becoming a fire-hazard, meaning I can just leave it mounted indefinitely.

And because I never get rid of devices? I was able to just roll over to my 14 Pro Max (my weekend / fair-weather phone that I had bought brand new, and was using the 12 Pro Max to protect it from excessive wear & tear) that same day, and start using that as my daily driver without any interruption to my workflow. No going to the store and haggling a deal on some golden-handcuff financing plan that only ever benefits them. No going into work and about my day without a phone, just hoping I won’t need it until I can source a replacement. Just unbroken continuity.

As for the 12 Pro Max? Why did I mount it instead of e-wasting or trying to get whatever I could by selling for parts? Because, I did some heavy research into the refurb industry after this tragedy, and I found out that it’s far too common for these greasy phone refurbishers to buy up a bunch of dead/destroyed iPhones for pennies on the dollar, then they’ll just hack a Frankenstein device together, maybe with a crappy solder job, that’s just “good enough” to pass a quick inspection and get you to the end of the return window. Just like how General Motors engineers vehicles that fail catastrophically just outside the warranty period. And believe me, after the experience I just had? I would be damned if I’m going to let these greasy refurbishers use MY failed components to ruin someone else’s life. Plus, I think it makes quite a display that speaks for itself when it comes to my technical chops, and I feel it would be quite a conversation starter, especially given how subtle that illusion is maintained until you catch it at the right angle and realize it’s been fully torn down.