I helped a customer at MacMedics on Friday with this badly bent iPhone. She has just come from her cell phone carrier, who has no idea how to help. I was able to spend 5-minutes with her, and we got it all ironed out.
It was bent so severely that the SIM card wouldn’t work, and its Wi-Fi was offline. So, the first thing I did was to get her to watch unpaired from this phone so that it could be paired to her new phone. We used iCloud.com/find to remove the Watch from her account. She will then have to reset the watch to re-pair it with her new phone.
To ensure that this iPhone could be sent back to Apple in exchange for a new AppleCare replacement. We had to ensure that Find my iPhone was turned off. The customer has already removed it from her account. Since the phone could not access WiFi or Cell, we could not erase the device from itself. It also could not be put into recovery mode to erase it on a computer either because the bend was right at one of the buttons, and it was frozen. So instead, we locked it with a secure password to ensure that nobody could access her data. By the way, this bent iPhone had been shut in the door of an SUV.
