Apple Replacing Faulty iPhone 5 Sleep/Wake Buttons
Has the Sleep/Wake button on your iPhone 5 stopped working, or does it work only occasionally? Apple is now offering a replacement program. Enter your iPhone’s serial number to see if it’s eligible, and if so, you can either take it to an authorized service provider or call Apple for a free shipping box. It will take 4–6 days for Apple to repair your iPhone, but participating authorized service providers will have 16 GB iPhone 5 loaners available.
My sleep/wake button has just recently gone bad. How do I know if my phone is elegible for a replacement?
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310-993-9007
Nick, click Follow Link above to go to the Apple page where you can see if your phone is eligible.
After owning it for about a year my iPhone 5's power button developed a similar problem as one half of the button wouldn't work (I was told by the Apple Genius that the button has 2 switches). I was able to get a new phone under Apple Care. At the time they said this was a common problem, but this announcement suggests it's every more prevalent.
So, if the serial number check shows that one of the defective batch of switches was installed in your iPhone 5, you can't have the switch replaced with a known good switch until the original switch actually breaks? How many times do I have to operate the switch before this happens?
Just because a switch was in a defective batch doesn't mean that individual switch is bad. It's most likely that that batch had a higher than normal failure rate, but higher than normal may mean only 5% or 10%, making it easy to have a switch that's perfectly fine. My iPhone 5 hasn't had any troubles with its switch.