Repair Stories

An Ode to Rick Astley and iPhone Battery Replacements

Drained batteries are a drag. Drained batteries on an iPhone—especially when it won’t hold a charge for more than a couple of hours—is a super-mucho-grande drag.

Dan Delany, a New York City resident and web developer at Spotify, has had his iPhone 4 for about 5 years—a pretty impressive run for a smartphone. Except lately, his aging iPhone hasn’t been performing quite like it used to.

“I’ve been putting off replacing my iPhone 4 because I hear the new iPhone 6SuperExtra will be made of a ridiculously-durable aluminum/unobtainium alloy that they use on spaceships and stuff,” Dan told us. “But the battery [in my iPhone 4] has gotten so worn out that it shuts off more often than Rufio, my narcoleptic cat.”

Dan’s phone is always like, “I’m gonna sleep right here.”

Time for a battery replacement. Of course, iPhone batteries aren’t designed to be user-replaceable. That’s never stopped us, though. Pretty much anything is user-replaceable if you try hard enough. Dan’s always been of the tinkering persuasion—so he decided to break the seal on his iPhone and replace that bad battery himself.

“I’ve been taking electronic stuff apart since I was a little kid, but putting them back together again is a pretty recent skill,” Dan tells us. “[I] decided to go DIY because the battery was really my only problem. I knew Apple would charge me a limb or two to replace it, and I don’t have any to spare.”

Dan used our iPhone 4 Replacement Battery Fix Kit—which comes with everything you need for the repair—and watched the video repair guide. Then he got to work pulling his phone apart—carefully, of course.

“My iPhone had lots of adhesive but I was eventually able to pop the battery with a bit of prying around the edges. Besides that, it was a textbook replacement,” Dan said. The whole repair took Dan about 20 minutes—“half of which was spent just looking at the cool iPhone guts.”

Rick Astley after battery replacements
Day is done and Dan’s phone still has all the power.

No sweat at all. And with a brand new battery, I guess you could say that Dan’s iPhone is never gonna give him up, never gonna let him down, never gonna run around and desert him. At least, not anymore.

Now instead of plugging his iPhone into an outlet every couple of hours, Dan can get back to the important stuff in life—like petting his narcoleptic cat Rufio.

And Dan has some advice for all you fixers out there:

“Wear sunscreen. Watch the how-to video a couple of times. Have it open and paused during the repair so you can refer to it if needed. You’ll also want Rick Astley open in another tab in case you run low on confidence and need a quick pick-me-up in the middle. Always pay your bills on time, be nice to your friends, call your parents, and never drop your phone in the toilet. And trust me on the sunscreen.”

Check out Dan’s repair story—and others—on our Stories page.