Apple offers free repairs for iPhone glitch

The company says a "small percentage" of iPhone 7 devices may be telling their users there's no cell service when in fact service is available.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor

Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.

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Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.

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Edward Moyer

Feb. 3, 2018 1:51 p.m. PT

2 min read

The repair is free, but we're afraid you'll have to buy your own burger.
Sarah Tew/CNET

Apparently for some iPhone users, seven isn't a lucky number.

Apple is offering free repairs to owners of the "small percentage" of iPhone 7 devices that may be displaying a No Service notice in the status bar even when cell service is available.

In a support page notice late Friday, Apple said the glitch stemmed from a faulty component on the gadget's main logic board.

The problem phones were manufactured between September 2016 and February 2018 and sold in the US, Hong Kong, Japan, China and Macao, Apple said. Three model numbers are eligible for the gratis fix. In the US (including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands), Hong Kong and Macao, the model number to look for on the back of your phone is A1660. In Japan, it's A1779. In China, it's A1660 and A1780.

The iPhone 7 glitch comes on the heels of Apple's controversial handling of battery issues with older iPhones. Without informing users, the company had tuned its iOS software to slow down the performance of the phones in order to prevent sudden shutdowns. It has since apologized for that secretive behavior, updated iOS to give users the option to allow the slowdown or not, and offered owners of its older phones, including the iPhone 7, low-cost battery replacements.

If you think you're the unlucky owner of a prank-playing iPhone 7, you can check out Apple's page to see how to go about making your device behave. Oddly, we're having trouble making a link to the page behave, so we recommend copying and pasting this URL into your browser: https://www.apple.com/support/iphone-7-no-service/

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