Yesterday I had the horrible realization that my iPhone 11 was suddenly a brick. It was completely off and could not recharge. There was no real warning about this being imminent – I had noticed the day before that it sometimes bounced in and out of charging but I figured that was just a wonky cable – apparently not. It had been working 100% fine prior to that.
So I went to the Apple website to order a new phone. After entering my payment info and selecting my carrier (AT&T) I was taken to a page where Apple was trying to send a text message to my old phone (presumably to validate that I owned that number). But with my old phone being bricked, I couldn’t receive it. And since they weren’t sending it via iMessage I couldn’t get it on any other device. It is literally impossible to set up a new phone via their site because of that – at least for AT&T, and maybe other carriers too.
So I went over to the AT&T site. I went through the same purchase process there, and fortunately was able to confirm my identity via a text to a secondary phone number that was still active. I bought the phone and picked it up at the store a few hours later. I was assured by the sales rep that I just needed to turn it on and it would be automatically activated.
At home, I turned it on and restored it via a backup of my old phone. But strangely it was not connecting to the AT&T network, nor could I use Wifi Calling since it gave an error message that that feature wasn’t enabled. Umm, I have had Wifi Calling for years.
I gave it a few hours, thinking there was just a delay on AT&T’s end. Still nothing. So I called the AT&T support line from my Google Voice account, and the rep there was very understanding. It turns out that there was another step needed first, where AT&T had to enter in some IDs tied to the phone hardware. The guy in the store must have been completely unaware of that. 15 minutes later I finally had a working phone.
At that point I finally received a text message from AT&T that had a link with a link with instructions to activate my phone. Of course you’d only receive this message if you could already receive messages on the old phone, which I could not! It is inexplicable that this was not emailed to me like all the other communication to that point. If it had been I could have activated the phone myself, despite the bad advice of the guy at the store.
Hopefully someone at AT&T sees this. It’s plainly stupid to expect that someone upgrading a phone will always have a working phone already that can receive text messages. Just send an email with the activation link!