My trusty iPhone 15 Pro Max is dead.
Well, not really dead. It works fine. For many hours a day. Except for trying to drag app icons into folders especially between Springboard screens, where it performs miserably slowly. The battery has taken a beating and doesn’t last as long as it once did. You could blame all those hours of use, or you could blame Apple for the ever-increasing number of background processes they install, which I know you can turn off many of them by using Low Power Mode, but then you also get the annoying slow refresh rate and screen going to sleep too quickly.
Anyway, what’s the deal with my Schrödinger phone, being dead and alive simultaneously?
Ever since iOS 26 came out, many mornings I have awoken to a crashed iPhone, stuck on the Apple logo. It’s also warmer than usual, so it’s been trying its CPU heart out but even in this age of AI can’t figure out what to do next. Totally stupefied.
So I try hard-restarting it. Sometimes twice. Sometimes three times. Eventually it gets to this new thing called “Recovery Assistant”. When I contacted Apple about it, two of their support agents hadn’t even heard about it. Which surprised me and makes me wonder if they are getting sufficient training from the head office.
Anyway here are my photos of what most of the screens look like.
It concludes by telling me nothing is wrong, and at last it proceeds to start up normally. Then it works for the rest of the day.
When I contacted Apple, they ran the onboard diagnostics. Something in there told them it had “a hardware fault”. But they wouldn’t say what it was. I mean, it’s not hard to guess, it’s probably either the RAM or the SSD. And the RAM should get a little POST when you turn the device on, so it’s gotta be the SSD.
So I thought maybe when it tries to read that defective area, during an overnight backup, that’s when it kernel panics and gets stuck. But when I trigger an iCloud backup manually, it completes OK. I also did a backup with iMazing and that also worked. So maybe reading from the SSD is fine, but writing fails.
It has just occurred to me that the fault may have developed before May 2026, as that’s when I tried to update to iOS 26 and it failed, rendering the iPhone unbootable (some people call it “bricked” but that’s not the right term for it) and forcing me to do an erase, reinstall and restore from backup. I documented my misadventures in my post The Almost Disastrous Upgrade.
The error shown was (100) 06A6.0064. Some people list low device storage as the cause.
However as you can see, the macOS Finder showed I had many free GB of storage.
At the time I thought the failure was merely due to poorly-written iOS software, but now I am suspicious that the phone hardware was faulty at that time, thus causing the update failure. This means my phone which I paid AU$2,549 worked for around 2 years, 7 months, 16 days before developing a fault, which is well below the three years covered by Australian Consumer Law.
I think I shall purse this with my local Consumer Affairs organization. What happens next… only the iOS gods know.
Sad Mac face used in social sharing image by Leo72 at Italian Wikipedia, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons