12/13/2020
my iPhone screen broke. This happened at Paradise Cove at Big Bear Lake, when Anton asked me for the time. Short after that I had bought a repair kit on Amazon for around 26$. This was in August. Since then I still used the phone, but was waiting for the right moment to fix it. Two days ago I bought the fantastic iPhone 12.
Today Anton asked me permanently, if I had time to fix the iPhone, as message had come to him, he should get the iPhone 7. I was worried about the time this might take. I had previously repaired the screen of his school iPad, which he had dropped. This was quite a hassle. Later today he told me, he had thought it would be easy, just open it and replace the screen.
We started by looking up a video on YouTube and began to disassemble right before 6 p.m.
The screen was already broken quite a bit.
In the middle of the disassemble the Tri-Point, i.e. three wing screw driver broke. Luckily I found a Y000 or 0.6 Y in a kit, which I had brought from Santa Barbara.
We finished the most part at 8:20, so 2 guys spent around 2.5 hours on this.
In the end I was getting very tired and I left up the rest to Anton to fix. I had confidence, he could do it, as he memorized the constellation better than me and he was also very quick with finding the right levels for cables.
As I returned, he was already running a test and we could see the apple logo boot up. Then he wanted to test the home button, as the video had mentioned, there were quirks mentioned by users, wondering if Apple might hinder third party repair efforts. The home button worked.
I told Anton, he had earned now, to own the iPhone. He was very pleased with that.
Afterwards, Anton started again to look cross-eyed, which after his surgery he only does, when exhausted. So I promised him to clean up the old glue and we do the rest of the assemble tomorrow.
[... next day after assembling]
12/21/2020 yesterday Anton's sister broke the new glass again, when she smashed the iPhone out of Anton's hand, as he wanted to delete a photo she had taken ... (to be continued)
1/21/2021 the iPhone 7 had some memory quirk. Usually I copy photos from the phone to PC via USB. some videos however couldn't be copied, the phone would always hang up. After I had transferred all data from the 7 to the new 12, I can now easily copy these vids from 12 to PC. btw, the process of data transition from 7 to 12 was a really smooth experience.