I don’t know if it applies to all phones, but if you have an iPhone with the lightning cable jack and you’re having trouble getting it to charge, take a minute to clean out the pocket lint which has accumulated in the port.
Pictured is somewhere around a third of the lint I found in my phone port. Just shy of enough material to make a t-shirt I think.
By the time I realized this was the issue, my cable simply would not stay in the port to charge. I was having the worst time trying to get power into my phone and I was dreading the idea that I’d need to replace an internal component on an old phone. Discovering the lint issue felt like quite a victorious moment in my little life.
Let’s invent a new term: Time to Lint-based Failure (TLBF)
TLBF is a unit of time defined by: initiates on the first day you start carrying a new phone and ends on the day you simply can’t charge it due to pocket lint accumulation in the charging port.
It turns out, my TLBF is about 15 months.
Do you know your TLBF score?
Proprietary USB port. One of the many reasons I don’t iPhone, why I don’t really like Apple as a company. Also, they charge developers $99 a year which is wrong in principal. They only accept apps that were compiled on a fruit box. They remove apps from their store if they directly compete with the Apple brand in some way. They have fragmented the snot out of the internet. I used to be an apple fan boy. Not any more. They are NOT the underdog any more.
Pocket lint or starry sky?
Yeah. It’s the Pleiades star cluster.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Pleiades_large.jpg
I just reached my limit but sadly, my phone was passed down to me from a friend so I don’t have an exact TLBF. luckily, I’ll have this as an exact reference point for when I get all linted-up again.
Oooh a combo TLBF! How interesting… Can you contact your friend and figure this out?
I totally ran into this issue big time.
It was last December and I was helping organize a big conference and my iPhone wouldn’t consistently accept and acknowledge the charging cable. In desperation, I popped into a store, fully prepared to buy a new phone if needed (you can’t organize any events these days without some smartphone), when to my happy amazement, the store clerk cleaned all the lint out of the port. He used a paperclip and was done in about three minutes.
Could it be that the proprietary USB connector that the iPhone has is just dumb. I’ve never had this problem with micro-USB. I also don’t have the problem of not having a charger. Micro-USB being a standard is everywhere.
Great point Jordan! Has anyone has this issue with a non Apple charger?