Chosen Solution
My phone charger tip broke off inside my phone when I unplugged my phone. We took it the next day to have it looked at. They weren’t so easy at jabbing their object down in the charging port to remove the piece. They claimed it wasn’t charging still and the charging port would need to be replaced. Sure, ok then lets do that! Several hours later when I finally was able to pickup the phone it was overheating. I was getting the notification on the screen it needed to cool down. I questioned why this was happening? The tech didn’t know and said to come back the next day for the tech who replaced the charging port. I took it home and wasn’t able to get a charge above 6% so I turned it off due to it still overheating. Next day I went back up there and was sent to another location to replace the port again to try and fix the issues. It was no help and they let the phone die while they had it. I couldn’t get it to take a charge and come back on after that. We took it to apple where they ran tests which said it had a short. The battery was good but the phone was no longer good they said. So I’m confused at what went wrong?! I had no issues prior to this small tip of the charger in the port. Did they cause worse damage when they tried to remove the tip? Was it possible they messed up when they replaced the charging port? Or was this a freak accident?!
Brittany, That’s a frustrating situation! From your description, the MOST LIKELY problem is that the phone has the common fault of a tristar chip failure. The tristar chip is on the logic board and it is the “listening chip” on the other end of the charging cable circuitry that the charger talks to. Tristar’s job is to negotiate with and authenticate the charger so that charging can happen.
The problem is that tristar is REALLY SENSITIVE to electrical problems. The common way that it fails is use of a non-certified cable—I’m going to guess that the cable you were using that broke off in the port was not a MFI certified or genuine Apple cable bought from an Apple Store. If so, then the likely scenario is that use of that cable allowed a surge voltage to pass through into the phone, possibly during the same event where the cable end broke. If so, your problem all along was a burned tristar chip on the logic board and a new charging port could never have solved.
The reason this is most likely in my opinion is: 1.) It is super common 2.) Changing the charge port itself can’t really cause a short on the logic board itself—-even if that job was botched. The only “live” voltage in the charge port is super low and just goes from the port to tristar—-so even if the problem happened during the charge port you’d have the same effect——bad tristar—-and there is no way to know WHEN tristar was damaged.
Also on your radar screen would be unrelated common problems (such as SDRAM short or 3v0NAND short) that occur in connection with phone drops and it may just be coincidental that the drop that caused one of these shorts due to a bad capacitor happened to also break the charger off.
What to do now? You need to steer clear of the Apple store and the ridiculous “Apple Authorized Service Providers” since as you’ve already seen—they don’t actually do repair. This phone needs to go to a local shop with a good reputation for board level repair and microsoldering—-or mail it out to a good microsolderer that does mail in repair.
