There is growing public anger over increasing incidents in which users of iPhones are losing the functionality of their phones following the occurrence of an error referred to as ‘error 53′. Error 53 is a message that an increasing number of users of iPhone are getting after they decide to upgrade their software to the latest version of iOS 9. Apparently, there have been growing complaints from iPhone owners that whenever the message appears on their phones, it marks the sudden end of the useful life of their devices.
But what seems to annoy many owners of iPhone is the origin of the error, what it means and how Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has reacted to the issue so far. According to Mark Wehner, who writes about technology, the error has the potential of killing your iPhone completely. When it appears, it makes it impossible for you to even access the data that you have stored in your device. It also makes it impossible for you to use your phone in any other way, thus suddenly throwing you into darkness. And in what appears to be a case of adding insult to injury, the only solution to the problem seems to lie in getting a replacement phone from Apple at a fee.
The cause of the dreadful error is simple. For long, Apple has strongly discouraged its customers from having their phones repaired by third-party repairers. The company has been insisting that customers have their faulty mobile phones repaired by Apple-authorized technicians only. Therefore, when one takes an iPhone for repair to a technician who is not recognized by Apple and then upgrades the software of the phone, as it is the routine, the error automatically occurs and this marks the end of the useful life of the phone.
One distraught victim is Antonio Olmos, a journalist who confesses to being an ardent user of Apple products. He says that he has been using his iPhone for some years now. However, while in the Balkans recently, he said that he dropped his phone by mistake. Knowing that he could not easily locate an Apple store in the region, he decided to have it repaired by a local technician. He says that the phone resumed working pretty well but that all hell broke loose when he was prompted to update his software. That is when he encountered the “error 53” message.
Responding to the issues raised, a spokesperson of Apple said that the problem is related to the manner in which the home button of the phone is tied to a complex security network. If a repair is made by someone else other than Apple, the components that are used are not original. This triggers a rigorous security check by the operating system of the phone and when it finds that non-original components are included in the hardware of the phone, it automatically shuts down.
