SOLVED: iPhone 7 Plus ear speaker eventually stops working after replacement. - iPhone 7 Plus

iPhone 7 Plus ear speaker eventually stops working after replacement.

So I had an iPhone 7 Plus come in for a screen replacement the other day. Customer tested the phone before he left, was able to make a call, use camera, etc. Came back in a couple of days later because he couldn't hear out of the ear speaker. In fact, when he made a call, he didn't even have the option of putting it on speaker phone as that was greyed out. He could however use it on blue tooth. So I ordered a replacement front camera, OEM. Replaced it, the phone was working well again. All components seemed to work. Customer came back in today, same thing had happened. Any suggestions?

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Posted: Jul 17, 2018

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The iPhone 7 series of devices have proven to be very unreliable, suffering from flex-based issues similar to the iPhone 6 Plus (Touch Disease). On the iPhone 7, the fault line runs along the top of the SIM card reader and affects the Baseband CPU and Audio IC. Along this fault line, any short copper traces running perpendicular to the fault line while connecting to micro-BGA pads, is subject to failing.

On the Audio IC, this particularly affects the C12 pad/trace although there are 4 pads/traces along the fault line. Of those four, the C12 pad (I2S_AP_TO_CODEC_MCLK) is the most critical as it is a communication protocol line between the CPU and the Audio IC.

Greyed out Loudspeaker on calls and callers not hearing you are pretty typical symptoms. This requires a micro-soldering repair with a micro-jumper on C12 and the other traces along the fault line.

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iPhone 7 Plus

iPhone 7 Plus ear speaker eventually stops working after replacement.

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