I have an old iPhone 4 that I was keeping around since it’s the only way I could play a lot of the old 32-bit iOS games that I bought long ago. I kept it hooked up to a USB port to charge, and today I heard it make a sound and reset, which it does once in a while. Upon picking it up and taking a closer look, though, I noticed that the case had cracked open. Yup, the battery was swelling (the ol’ “spicy pillow” as some people call it) and had pushed the case apart.
Honestly, I’d rarely ever gone back and actually played any of those games, so at this point it’s not really worth replacing the battery and getting it repaired. So, I just did a factory reset to wipe it and put it aside to be taken down for recycling at some point.
That reminded me that I still needed to finish cleaning up my old MacBook Pro, which had been sitting languishing in a corner ever since I replaced it. It’s broken in various ways, but I still wanted to at least wipe the drive. I fired it up…and found that I couldn’t log in because I couldn’t remember the password. I thought it was the same one I’m still using on the new system, but I guess not! The other option is to boot from one of the install DVDs and run Disk Utility from there, but I found the discs, put one in, booted, and it ground away for a bit and then just spit the disc out. Guess I can add the DVD drive to the list of parts broken on this thing…
Fine, as a last resort I can just open it up, take the drive out, and ‘dd’ it full of zeroes from my Linux box. I popped it open, managed to get the drive out, and in the process I noticed that the battery in it is also swelling a bit! Which might explain why the trackpad was feeling so stiff since the battery’s right underneath it.
And this is all in addition to my old Android tablet, which also developed a spicy battery and cracked the case earlier this year. Now I just have to get around to actually taking these in somewhere…