iDust

This post is for the benefit of anyone who, like me, was driven crazy by dust that got under the glass of their iPhone. Welcome, Google travelers.

Not more than a couple of months after I got my iPhone 3G (nearly two years ago now), a large speck of dust settled into residence under the glass. It was soon joined by another similarly sized speck. As time passed, many more flecks of dust made their way under the glass. After I dropped the phone one time, an entire cloud of tiny dust particles lightly powdered half of the screen, as if I had bumped a bottle of talcum powder. The last straw for me was a relatively huge chunk of dust that found its way to the very middle of the camera aperture. At that extremely close focal length, the dust did not prevent me from taking pictures, but it caused some unwanted shading and coloration problems, and killed any hope of low-light (i.e., indoor) photography.

My exploration of Apple message boards on this problem was less than satisfactory. Few people seemed to have experienced the problem to the degree I had, and fewer still had a definitive confirmation of the cause, which seemed obvious enough to me. The data/charger port is a large rectangular opening that collected a ton of dust. I suspected that it was not sealed off from the rest of the innards of the iPhone (since dust seemed to be gathered more heavily at that end of the glass), but nobody online confirmed it. Some speculated that dust could get in around a rubber seal that runs around the entire screen, but that seemed unlikely. The tightly fitting screen or a gaping wide hole? I had a pretty well developed theory about how the dust got in. All it would take was actually opening the case to know for sure.

Opening any Apple product designed in the last decade is a difficult exercise, and one that will almost certainly void any product warranty. The design of Apple’s products has become one of the company’s hallmarks, but with the fabulous form comes an almost complete prohibition on tinkering under the hood. Other than the motherboard and the box that contained it, almost no original parts of my first PC remained by the time I finally discarded it. I frequently changed video cards, sound cards hard drives and monitors as the technology improved, and replaced a hard drive and power supply when they broke down. Modern day Apple devices, in contrast, are not intended to be opened by the consumer. It can be done, however. I have replaced the hard drive in our iMac, and after getting to the point that I could hardly take pictures and could barely see the screen in normal sunlight because of the layer of dust under the glass, I was finally determined to crack open the iPhone as well.

To all those who have had the iPhones for a long time and have become frustrated with the dust: you can solve the problem, if you are willing to open the case. Opening the case and the components inside is not difficult, if you are willing to accept a little cosmetic imperfection on the case thereafter.

To open the iPhone case, I followed the clear directions found here. Everything is as described. Undo the two screws at the base, insert a knife between the top surface and the silver rim (this is where a small amount of cosmetic damage may occur), pry up, and you are in. Disconnect three leads near the top of the phone, and the phone splits into the glass/LCD portion and the battery/phone portion. Great care should be taken when working with the glass and LCD screen. Don’t lose the tiny screws that hold them together, for one thing. Also, the LCD must be pried out of the glass casing. It does not take much pressure, but it must be done delicately. Finally, use extreme care when handling the exposed LCD screen itself. I did not touch the screen with my fingers; I only lightly wiped a lint-free cloth (the kind specially made to clean LCD computer monitors) across the screen. I supplemented that with a blast of compressed air. I cleaned the underside of the glass thoroughly, then mated the glass and LDC together again to prevent any ambient dust from returning. I took on the slightly trickier task of removing the camera lens to clean the aperture, but if you are deft with tiny screws, it can be done relatively easily. Putting the phone back together was as simple as reconnecting the leads and squeezing everything shut again.

Remarkably, the iPhone worked after I put it back together, but not without some drama. For some reason, the screen did not turn on again, even though it made the same noise it always did when I put it on the charger. I stewed on that overnight, and had to shut the phone down using the hard reset technique when my alarm went off the next morning (without a screen, you can’t tell the alarm to stop). When I plugged it back into the iMac, the startup screen reappeared, just like normal. Although I had already started to investigate replacing my phone with a 3GS (I’m going to wait for the next version of the 4G), I was delighted to get my old phone back. Even better, the newly cleaned screen was a revelation. I did not realize how obscured it had become until I saw again how bright and clear it could be. If you are out of warranty and reasonably adept with small screwdrivers and knives, recommend this bit of maintenance highly. Also, back up the phone before you start.

In poking around the case, my suspicions were confirmed. The dust flooded in through massive openings around the charger port, as well as smaller openings in the SIM card dock and perhaps the headphone jack. I consider this a design flaw. There are a couple of solutions. One would be to seal the openings somehow. A simpler solution would be to use something that Apple appears to favor in its machines: black electrical tape. I found large quantities of it in the iMac to seal seams, which is a problem for the do-it-yourselfer because tape does not return to its original position the way a screw will; every invasion weakens it. Very thin strips of the stuff were also inside the iPhone, but not one place it could do some good: the seam between the outer glass and the LCD. If I get inside the phone again, I will lay in strips of tape along the top and bottom edges of the glass to prevent anything from getting between the glass and the LCD. Unless the glass itself were to crack, there would be no need to separate the two in the future.

Poking around inside Apple products is not necessarily recommended, but it can be done, with significant benefits to the user.