Jump to content

Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab

Member
  • Posts

    5
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Reputation Activity

  1. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from sub68 in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  2. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Zodiark1593 in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  3. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from zeusthemoose in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  4. Informative
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from JustWantTech in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  5. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from jyao6429 in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  6. Informative
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from ifconfig in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  7. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from ifconfig in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Yes—that’s the iPad fiery plane crash cpu job.  Here it is screenshot from Rico’s IG.  

  8. Informative
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from ifconfig in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  9. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from bmx6454 in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  10. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from sazrocks in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  11. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from asquirrel in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Yes—that’s the iPad fiery plane crash cpu job.  Here it is screenshot from Rico’s IG.  

  12. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from GDRRiley in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  13. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Gegger in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  14. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from AndreiArgeanu in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  15. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from WkdPaul in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  16. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Dracarris in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  17. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Blademaster91 in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  18. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from JeremiahChub in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  19. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from raf42 in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  20. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Kruno in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    I sent Linus an email with some extra background details regarding our point of contention in the DriveSavers video.  
     
    Linus suggested that I share with the community, so copy/paste.  Sorry for the length! 
     
    Im curious to see how this story strikes your own personal credibility meter.
     
    For the sake of our community, I would appreciate it if you posted the details you've provided to me on our forum as well. It'll give me an easy reference when we follow up on this week's live stream. I would post it myself, but I think it would be better coming from you directly.   Linus            
    On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:26 PM Jessa Jones wrote:  
  21. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Kruno in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  22. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Energycore in Iphone 6 plus stuck updating   
    If you like to tinker with things, you can get a pentalobe driver and unscrew the two bottom screws.  Then open the device (a guide at iFixit.com can help if you haven't done it before).  Use a philips head #000 to unscrew the battery screws and disconnect the battery.   Then reconnect--and prompt to boot with home button held down and usb inserted.   That will force it to boot into recovery mode.
  23. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from Mark Kaine in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  24. Like
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from The_russian in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
  25. Agree
    Jessa Jones_iPad Rehab got a reaction from raf42 in Louis Rossmann points out some facts LTT got wrong in DriveSavers video   
    Hey guys—-are girls allowed in here?  Even moms?  This is my first time at LTT forum and wow—this will be a great Community resource as my kids get old enough to start building PCs.  
     
    I love the skepticism that many of you have about this DriveSavers speaker amp issue.  I’m happy to add detail, and you can decide what seems right to you.  
     
    First—why do we care about this petty squabble?  
     
    1–While inexperienced iPhone Microsoldering is often a disaster, there are many capable shops out there doing the EXACT same thing as DriveSavers for a common market price of $300-$600.  DriveSavers iPhone recovery looks NO DIFFERENT than anyone else.   Same benches, tools, same type of people, same frustrations with error 14 and corrupted data, same inability to get data from an encrypted NAND.....Source? Personal communication with DriveSavers team.  
     
    The only difference is PRICE.   DriveSavers can charge whatever they want, but when you set a price of $2000, that is prohibitive and I think they have to own that.   Their customers are often families just like everyone else.   To a mom grieving the baby pictures, $2000 is not much different than Apple saying “it can’t be done at all”  Heck, we charge $2000 to come out for five days and learn to recover your data yourself! 
     
    So how can they get away with it?  Why doesn’t the free market work here? I think it will eventually, and that’s why these conversations are important.
     
    Right now, though, they are doing a great job using those stacks of $2000 bills to perpetuate their perceived expertise stereotype here via Linus.   Similarly, they can afford to buy influence from repair shops with fat referral kickbacks.   And they have inherited a dubious Apple referral despite having no significant relationship with Apple for iPhones.  
     
    How is a customer supposed to know that that $300-$500 options even exist, when the rest of the internet is loaded with spammy “data recovery software” that will never work to clear corrosion from under a chip.
     
    It’s an elegant and successful strategy—kudos to DriveSavers, well played!   But it does feel like an injustice to all the families giving up on their data because of the 10x market value price tag.  
     
    It shouldn’t be surprising for them to get pushback from the thousands of folks working in the $300-$500 data recovery Community who are the ones working in the trenches.  We are the ones working with China to build the tools that DS showcases on the fancy videos.  We are the ones collaboratively sharing information on our own low production value videos.   That doesn’t make DS “bad guys” or even bad at data recovery.  It doesn’t make the rest of us “have a vendetta”.  It is just a natural consequence of the peer response to one group consistently getting away with selling the content of another at 10x markup.  
     
    2–Who deserves credit for the speaker amp thing?
    It’s confusing because it has two pieces.
    A—Credit for Discovery of the fact that Hanging phones corrupted after update to iOS13 could boot with REMOVAL of the speaker amp chip belongs Independently  to Raj Paul, Roy Samarra, and Aaron Harrington, and possibly others out there, unlikely DriveSavers.  
     
    I do not believe DriveSavers knew about this solution previously.  Evidence—documentation of a private conversation where a DriveSavers contractor offered to pay $2000 for the information.  That was one week prior to my video.  Even if they did, the Removal technique is not the one in question. 
     
    B—I spent that one week trying to figure out if there was a way to DISABLE the offending speaker chip without actually removing it.   It was a weird project and not typical of how we work in this field.  We take chips off.  We replace chips.  Heck—I even SELL chips, so why would I be motivated to come up with a way to Creatively solve that problem that did not involved replacing the chip?
     
    I looked into it because I know that people would be trying to get speaker amp off left and right, and it’s an 8/10 difficulty chip to work with—adjacent to CPU.  If there was an easier way it would be better for the community.  And it is was fun. It was straight up fun to see if it could be done, and I thought would be a fun story to share if it worked because it would be cool.   That’s why I did it.  To make people say “oh wow, that’s cool!”
     
    I studied the chip and tried to figure out a way to temporarily deactivate it.  This was completely a waste of time—the world already had a perfectly viable solution.  Remove the chip.  I tried a few things and then—holy crap—it worked!   I could short the speaker amp RESET line to ground and get the phone to boot as if the chip was gone.  Get data, then relieve short on reset and it was a normal phone again.  I made a video and texted a contact at DriveSavers.  
     
    I knew they would have already likely heard about REMOVING speaker amp, but just in case—I didn’t want them to tell any mom out there that her pictures were unrecoverable when that was no longer the case.
     
    This Quirky Temporary Disable solution is the one featured in the LTT video and it was 100% my work (only possible because of the prior work of others, if not for them then none of us would have ever recovered any of these).  The reason it’s in the video —is because it is cool.  It is meant to make you say “oh wow! That’s really neat”. Simply removing the chip would be boring.  
     
    What is the chance that DriveSavers heard about the speaker amp REMOVAL solution and instead of spending that week churning out jobs by taking off the chip to recover—they ALSO decided to see if they could disable the chip and magically happened to arrive at the exact same disable solution, and they even chose the exact same line to pull down? 

    Of course not.  They saw my video and realized they could do the jumper with tweezers and then forgot all about where or how the technique came from—they just started using it to print $2000 bills.
     
    When making the sponsored video, LTT asked for an example of creativity in data recovery, this old little trick from last year came to mind, and they were happy to pass it off as part of the 2020 perceived expertise package.   
     
    Sheesh.  That was a book.  Thanks for letting me vent here.
     
    I don’t know much about how the LTT community works, but what would it take to shine a light on the real spirit of the issue?
     
    How can we let customers know that affordable data recovery is possible, and that they don’t need to spend $2000 for most cases, and they don’t need to take Apple’s word that it can’t be done at all?
     
    Could we crowdsource funds to buy a sponsored video from LTT and feature a number of different independent shops that do great microsoldering?   
     
    I’d love to invite Linus to come to Practical Board Repair School and help us help people to understand—where is the line between DIY IPhone repair and when should you seek a professional and how?  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
×