Dead iPhone (error 1011)

My iPhone died overnight in its dock, and what I tried to bring it back.

This morning I took my iPhone out of the dock and was greeted by a cheery error message saying that it could not connect and I should go to apple.com/support after digging around there for a while, and pulling the SIM card to see if anything looked obviously weird, I’d had no luck.

Weird thing was I had one missed call at 1am, stored in the phone. So between 1am and 7am, whilst in the dock, my phone just decided it would break.

Finally I called the apple iPhone help line….

1-800-MY-IPHONE (1-800-694-7466)

After going through all the steps I’d already done, it was suggested I do a full restore. So we set the iPhone up in recovery mode and did the full software, firmware restore. At the end of this I was greeted by a more somber message explaining that the restore could not complete due to error 1011.

Seems like lots are having similar issues.

Joy.

So now my iphone is trapped in restore mode.

I was glad that she was able to confirm that I had updated over 2 weeks ago (apple knows when you upgrade), and that I’d used the phone after that, so I wasn’t an obvious iBrick modded phone user (which I am not).

The very nice lady at Apple explained that they would send me a box, I would send them my “broken after only 2 months” iphone, they would then look at it and I should get a replacement within 3-4 days. If I needed a phone in the interim period, for the small fee of $29.99 they would send me a stand in iPhone that I could use.

Sorry, did they just offer that I can pay to have a replacement phone while they try to fix the one that broke 8 weeks after I got it ?? It’s like getting a courtesy car (but having to pay for it), or getting a different room in a hotel because the first one flooded but being charged for both, it doesn’t seem very ‘apple’.

I decline the offer and asked if I could take it to my local Apple store and get a replacement, she said that yes that would be fine, so set me up an appointment at the genius bar for one evening later this week. I asked if she could send me a confirmation so I didn’t drive for 2 hours with a 3 year old only to be told they don’t have any record of my existence, but she said that they didn’t do email confirmation, that doesn’t seem very ‘apple’.

Later Jim was able to show me that apple does in fact have confirmation of your existence, you just have to go to the apple website. A quick login to the ‘concierge‘ and I was able to print out the confirmation of my appointment, in preparation to wave in the face of anyone who dared to challenge my existence as a man in need of help.

Hopefully, I’ll just get a replacement there and then and we can all move on. I’m just waiting for it to be a SIM issue or something unrelated to the iPhone at all (thankfully the AT&T store is across the way at the Mall.

I’ll update once I get everything working again.

First published on jpsykes.com.