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We thought you might be interested to find out just exactly what you’re getting when you buy a refurb device or do an out of warranty swap with Apple.

A customer handed this iPhone to us because it wasn’t powering up- the battery icon wouldn’t even appear. During the original email exchange, we explained that the cause of the problem might be something simple like physical damage to the dock connector, or something more complex like the charging IC.

Imagine how surprised we were to open it up and find the dock connector had come off. Even more surprisingly, the plate on top of the dock connector (which is supposed to stop this happening!) was nowhere to be seen. We also noticed marker ink had been used to hide the serial and part numbers on the battery.

Our first assumption was this had been worked on previously and incorrectly reassembled.

But here’s the thing- the tape being used to hold the screen on was 100% original, so we can only assume it came out of the factory like this.