Ecky-Thump

maestro64 said:

Ecky-Thump said:

One common practice is as follows.

iPhones are purchased using stolen credit cards.  These phones  now need to be laundered.

The phone is opened up and air is injected into the battery between the black covering and the battery internals, giving it the appearance of an expanded battery.

It is then taken into an Apple store.  Phones with expanded batteries are not opened by techs for safety reasons, so the phone is replaced and the customer now has a fully working phone with a clean serial number.

The damaged phones have always been purchased in a different country, so the SN is not on any local police database.  The person bringing the phone in is always Chinese.

sounds like you have lots of experience with this...

12 years an Apple Genius.  Seen it all.

One common practice is as follows.

iPhones are purchased using stolen credit cards.  These phones  now need to be laundered.

The phone is opened up and air is injected into the battery between the black covering and the battery internals, giving it the appearance of an expanded battery.

It is then taken into an Apple store.  Phones with expanded batteries are not opened by techs for safety reasons, so the phone is replaced and the customer now has a fully working phone with a clean serial number.

The damaged phones have always been purchased in a different country, so the SN is not on any local police database.  The person bringing the phone in is always Chinese.

Paid obscene amounts of money to add a bit of fashion to the stores. Still not as bad as John Browett, paid obscene amounts of money to make every retail employees working life a nightmare. I've never worked somewhere, where seeing employees in tears was a weekly experience. Thank's John you jerk.

“like horn-loaded tweeters and a custom amplification system into its smart speaker. Further, HomePod includes high-end features like dynamic audio processing, beamforming, automatic bass calibration and other exotic niceties.”

high end end features that don’t cost much to manufacture.  “Horn-loaded tweeters” are just tweeters with 10c worth of plastic in front of them.  It’s basically an old mass produced apple processor with some speakers, microphones and a networking chip.  All the smarts are just done in software.  Sure it cost a bit to design, but I doubt the parts cost more than $100.

kiowavt said:

 Finally the fan. So far, for me, runs 100% of the time. Pretty loud. I have tried closing apps, etc, but now just try to tune it out.

That's not normal.  You can use Activity Monitor in the utilities folder to see what is causing the issue, there will be some process that's running over 100%.  make sure you select "all processes" in the view menu and select the CPU button in the window.  If the issue is with kernel task, then maybe  SMC and PRAM resets might resolve, or there might be a 3rd-party extension that's loading up.  Also if the issue is in a web browser, some websites are poorly designed or have crappy flash adverts that are causing the issue.  I would also suggest installing iStat Menus, it's a great little app that allows you to see what's going on.

Call AppleCare if you can't resolve it yourself.