On Thursday the power button on my wife's iPhone 4S got stuck in the downward position, apparently permanently, so that she couldn't turn the phone on. This seems to be a common problem (if memory serves there was even an unsuccessful lawsuit attempt a year ago) and is one that seems well within my capability to fix.

The phone's out of warranty so why not, right? Well, a good argument against DIY is latency for parts acquisition. Having my phone not work for a couple of days sounds like a mini-vacation to me, but Kim wasn't hearing any of that. So we started looking around for places to get it repaired locally.

The Apple Store was right out. Too expensive. Living outside a small town an hour by car from an international city like DC cuts both ways. If I needed another Category 1 top link pin I can think of four places within a 15 minute drive to pick one up. Not so much for my friends who live downtown, but then again they can probably have their choice of places only a possibly inconvenient Metro ride away.

As usual Google provided though, and there's a place called WiGoClinic stashed away in the back of an indy cell phone store in South Riding, presumably to conceal its existence from the notorious South Riding HOA. After a quick call to confirm that they were (a) open, and (b) had the parts on hand, off Kim went to get the phone repaired.

I asked about batteries but they only had one in stock not two. My phone's battery has been showing its age lately at almost 3 years old and Kim's is not far behind mine. I figured I could wait until they had a new shipment in (perhaps meanwhile praying for that mini vacation) but we decided to have Kim's swapped on spec since waiting for it to actually fail seemed like a bad idea.

They quoted 3 hours and were done in 2.5. That seemed a little long to me but what do I know about fixing iPhones or what their queue looked like? Kim hung out at Panera. Hooray, phone works again!

Cost for the new button and a battery swap? $70 all in. Not bad at all. Two thumbs up for the WiGoClinic folks.