We all know what it’s like – the charging cable that Apple provide to charge your iPhone or iPad are hardly the most sturdy pieces of equipment, and sooner or later it’s necessary to buy a replacement. So you go online and see that Apple want to charge you somewhere in the region of £25 for a piece of wire… next you go to Amazon and see you can get the same thing, unbranded for less than £10. The problem is though, that they are not the same thing.
In this example we have an iPhone 8 that stopped charging. Obviously once the battery had run down the customer was unable to charge their phone. The cable that had been using was an unbranded non-Apple product.
There is a chip on the iPhone motherboard that controls charge to the device. This is known as the Hydra IC and on older iPhones it was known as the “Tristar” chip. This chip will develop a fault when the user has non-genuine (non-MFI [Made For iPhone / iPad / iDevice]) charging cables. i.e. cheap chargers.
The genuine MFI cables have surge protection built in to the cable but non-MFI cables don’t – hence they wear the charging IC out.
In the photos below we identify and remove the Hydra IC charging chip prior to replacing it. It’s worth noting that this does not always solve the problem and further work is necessary before data recovery is possible.
