Your phone dying on you, as in completely giving out, is not only annoying but costly. It’s only made worse if the many photos and memories you have on there get lost in the ether, too.
One woman had to go through this recently with her iPhone, and the Apple Store wasn’t much help. To make matters worse, her tech made a comment that stuck with her, and not for a good reason.
Things Get Weird At The Apple Store
In a TikTok, Merisa Jernigan (@heymerisa) said her iPhone 15 Plus suddenly blacked out while she was scrolling on the couch. There was no warning, no low battery alert; it was just gone, and she couldn’t get it to turn back on.
“I had the weirdest experience at the Apple Store,” she shares in the text overlay.
She made an appointment and rushed out the door in a panic, crying, convinced her photos and videos were gone forever. She gets to the store, links up with an Apple Genius, and immediately gets a comment about her driver’s license photo.
The tech takes one look at it, then at her, and says, “Oh wow, people really get done up for their driver’s license photos.”
“I was like, excuse me, sorry, like I normally don’t look this bad. Like I’m obviously upset, I’ve been crying,” she points out.
They Couldn’t Do Anything
The employee couldn’t fix the phone. He did, however, find her a replacement in pink like her current phone. But when she got to checkout, she noticed the color wasn’t quite right.
“I’m really sorry, but no,” she says. “That is neon magenta. That is not baby dainty pastel whimsical pink that I had before.”
She acknowledges she probably should have checked the display model. But she also said she’d told him repeatedly how much she loved the phone, how much she loved the color and thought he should have mentioned it was a different shade.
“I’m overestimating a man,” she says.
Then, wrapping up, the employee started walking her through the new phone’s Apple Intelligence features, specifically that it can summarize text messages, but she wasn’t impressed.
“So you’re telling me that you’ll read a summary of a text message instead of like reading an actual text message?” The whole table started laughing. The worker mentioned his girlfriend sends really long messages. She cut him off: “No, don’t finish that sentence.”
“Cherry on top was losing 2 years of photos/videos,” she shared in the caption.
Can An iPhone Black Out Just Like That?
It’s more common than Apple would probably like to admit. According to Cleverfiles, iPhones can suddenly stop working for several reasons:
- Internal component failure
- An operating system error, especially if storage is nearly full
- Charging failure that damages the circuitry
- Dropping the phone at the wrong angle
The iPhone is generally sturdy, but none of those things are particularly rare.
Can You Get The Data Back?
It depends almost entirely on whether you had a backup. Gbyte lays out the realistic options: if iCloud Backup was enabled before the phone died, the data is already in the cloud and can be restored to a replacement device during setup. If the phone was regularly synced with iTunes or Finder on a computer, a local backup exists and can be restored the same way. Either route gets you back most, if not all, of what was on the phone.
The harder situation is when there’s no backup at all. In that case, options include third-party recovery software that works through your Apple ID and iCloud account, or professional data recovery services, though the latter can get expensive fast, and success isn’t guaranteed.
Viewers Criticize Apple
“I hateeeee the summary function. Half the time it doesn’t get the context of the messages right,” a top comment read.
“Why would you think you could get the same color 2 phones later? Apple always changes colors with each model release,” a person said.
“Mine did this too trash phone. I loved the color of the 15 but the camera quality and everything else was terrible,” another wrote.
@heymerisa Cherry on top was losing 2 years of photos/videos 😭😔 #applestore #iphone #blackscreen #men @apple
BroBible reached out to Merisa Jernigan for comment via email and TikTok direct message and to Apple for comment.