Chosen Solution
Hi, I dropped my iPhone X in the lake a couple of days ago and it died on me. I figured it wouldn’t be too bad since it is water resistant so I left it for 2 days and it turned on and died in 10 minutes. I wanted to see if I could clean/dry the phone and after opening it up I noticed very little water around the camera. I took the camera out and cleaned everything with isopropyl. Reassembled the phone and everything worked again Today, after using the phone for 2 days without any issues since I first opened it, I noticed fog in my camera lens (I guess I didn’t get all the moisture out) so I opened up my phone again to clean the camera. When everything was done and I was ready to close the phone up, I test booted it and it got stuck on the apple logo. Now the phone wont even get to the apple logo and when I have the battery and screen connected, the logic board is getting hot. No new parts were put in and I’m confident that it’s not the water damage. Is there anything I can do or am I out of luck?
Iphone X logic board is a sandwich of two boards overlying and soldered with each other and it’s easy any droplet of water that gets inside the structure is there to stay for a long time, going to short something up sooner or later. It’s basically useless even to suggest the normal procedure of soaking the board in IPA unless the two boards are separated first. Also the screen today has a bunch of passives and ICs in different areas, making things even more complicated than earlier. The only reasonable thing is to try to boot up the phone with bare minimum components and plugging it to a PC to check if the phone gets recognized by iTunes at least. If phone is still alive reattach parts one by one until you identify the part shorting the phone and replace it, if not a very reputable microsoldering lab is the only chance to get it fixed as very few have tools and skills to work on such boards.
