Chosen Solution
Background: bought iPhone 7 second hand in Feb 2020. Repaired screen August 2020 and again in September 2020. Same screen is now 2 years old. Occasionally had periods of “glitch out” where phone goes mad and starts detecting non-existent touches. Dropped phone many times, many cracks and some dead pixel patches appear. About 2 months ago the top right corner of screen stopped responding to touch. Not a problem. This week, the top half of the screen stopped responding to touch. A pain, but bearable using assistive touch to navigate the phone. Today, enough of the screen cut off so I can no long input passcode. A problem. I’ve tested the phone with a spare screen (known to be working) and now it doesn’t respond to touch at all. Still lights up fine and boots to my lock screen and passcode entrance. Any ideas? Is this the dreaded touch disease and if so, is there any way to retrieve my data (only important thing is the photos)? Got a new (second hand) phone on the way but I really don’t want to lose some previous photos.
“Touch disease” as it is known is not possible in the same way on iPhone 7 that it was in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Cumulus and Meson, the chips responsible for the issues described in Touch Disease moved from the logic board, to the display. Touch disease was almost exclusively referring to the weakening of contacts in a very specific area of the board, which sees more flexion than other parts, making it subject to cracked or torn solder connections. Touch related issues may still be occurring on a board level, but that would require much more granular troubleshooting, Due to the likely repeat attempts at plugging the display back in it could be damage to the connector itself. Or damage to one of the components in this area. Sadly, you will need working touch to get data off the phone. But there are almost certainly ways to fix this. Attach some pictures of the board and connectors to your question. :)
