⚠ Battery — critical at 8 years

At eight years old, iPhone X batteries are severely degraded. Most units are at 60–70% health — well below Apple's 80% threshold. Throttling is aggressive, daily battery life is very short, and unexpected shutdowns at 20–30% are common. Battery replacement is the single most impactful repair on this device.

Check Settings → Battery → Battery Health. Same-day replacement at our Silvamonte centre.

⚠ OLED burn-in — common at 8 years

The first-generation iPhone OLED panel in the iPhone X is showing significant burn-in on heavily used devices at this age. The most common patterns: a faint ghost of the status bar visible on white backgrounds, keyboard ghost at the bottom of the screen, and home indicator ghost. Burn-in is a permanent change to the OLED organic compounds and cannot be corrected by software or settings. Screen replacement with a new or used original OLED resolves it. Glass-only refurbishment is available where the panel is working but burn-in is minimal.

⚠ Touch failure after drops — Meson touch IC fault

The iPhone X has a known touch fault pattern after drop impacts. The Meson touch IC on the logic board manages all touch input from the OLED digitiser. The Meson chip uses Ball Grid Array (BGA) solder connections. When the iPhone X is dropped — especially on a hard surface — the impact can cause the BGA solder balls underneath the Meson chip to crack or lose contact with the board. The result is partial or complete loss of touch response that a new screen does not fix.

Key diagnostic clue: If a brand new replacement screen shows the same touch problem as the original — no touch, intermittent touch, or ghost touches — the fault is the Meson IC on the board, not the screen.

The repair: The Meson IC is removed under microscope, the board pads are cleaned of the original lead-free solder (which is more brittle than leaded solder and prone to this failure), and the chip is reballed and resoldered with fresh balls. Where the chip itself is damaged, a replacement Meson is fitted.

If your iPhone X lost touch after a drop and a screen replacement did not fix it — the Meson IC is almost certainly the cause. Bring it in for a free board-level diagnostic.

⚠ Face ID / TrueDepth — JCID repair, R1,500 if fixable

The iPhone X has the first-generation TrueDepth camera. Face ID failures are common at this age — from earpiece flex degradation, TrueDepth connector corrosion, or component failure. We use the JCID tag on flex method to restore Face ID where the fault is a repairable component. If the IR camera has failed, Face ID cannot be recovered — we diagnose specifically and advise before any charge.

Price: R1,500 if repairable via JCID method. No charge if IR camera failure means Face ID is unrecoverable.

⚠ Hydra charging IC — Lightning charging fault at this age

Eight years of cheap Lightning cable use takes its toll on the Hydra charging IC. Won't charge on Lightning while wireless charging continues — 80% Hydra IC, 20% Lightning port. Free diagnostic confirms which.

⚠ NAND storage failure — stuck in iTunes mode, slow performance, micro-soldering repair

After eight years of daily read and write operations, the NAND flash storage chip on the iPhone 8 and iPhone X logic board is increasingly showing wear-related failure. The NAND is the chip that stores iOS, all your apps, photos, messages, and every piece of data on the device. Unlike SSDs in computers, smartphone NAND chips have a finite number of write cycles — and after 8 years of intensive use, many are worn to the point of developing bad blocks, degraded write speeds, and read errors that the bootloader cannot tolerate.

Common symptoms of NAND wear on the iPhone 8 and X:

• Stuck in iTunes / recovery mode — the iPhone enters recovery mode (lightning cable and iTunes/Finder logo on screen) and cannot complete a restore. iTunes or Finder shows error codes 4013, 9, 14, or 21 during the restore attempt. The restore starts, the progress bar appears, then fails. This is one of the clearest indicators of a NAND timing issue — the bootloader cannot read or write to the chip fast enough to complete the iOS installation.
• Extremely slow performance — even with a brand new battery fitted, the device is inexplicably slow. Apps take 30–60 seconds to open. Every operation involves long waits. This is the NAND struggling to serve read requests at speed.
• Bootloop that does not resolve with a software restore — the device restarts continuously and DFU restore fails or produces the same error codes repeatedly.
• Data corruption — apps crash, the OS itself becomes unstable, files become unreadable.

The repair — NAND chip replacement (micro-soldering): The original NAND chip must be removed under microscope, the board pads cleaned, and a replacement NAND chip programmed and installed. This requires not just soldering skill but also the ability to correctly program the new chip with the device's unique identifiers (serial number, Wi-Fi address, and baseband data) that are stored on the original NAND. Without correct programming the device will not activate. This is one of the most complex board-level repairs available.

Our recommendation when replacing NAND — upgrade to 256GB: If your iPhone 8 or iPhone X is having its NAND replaced, we strongly recommend taking the opportunity to upgrade the storage to 256GB at the same time. The cost of the NAND chip itself is the primary expense — and since the board is already open and the micro-soldering work is already being performed, upgrading from 64GB or 128GB to 256GB adds minimal extra cost relative to the total repair. The result is a device with significantly more storage capacity and a fresh NAND chip with maximum remaining write cycles — effectively extending the useful life of the device considerably.

If your iPhone 8 or iPhone X is stuck in iTunes mode and restore keeps failing — bring it in for a free board diagnostic. We assess the NAND, discuss the repair options and the 256GB upgrade, and quote before any work begins.