Chosen Solution
I just got this iPhone 7 to repair. It was boot looping, so I put in a different battery. It was still boot looping, so I put it in recovery mode and plugged it into my computer and updated it. I eventually got to the iPhone Unavailable screen, so I put it back in recovery mode and restored it. It went to the usual “hello” screen and I got to the part where the it tries to activate, and all it says is “Unable to Activate an update is required to activate your iPhone. Learn more at apple.com/support” I already updated it, so this error isn’t making sense to me… Could this be an issue with the carrier or a hardware issue? I had another iPhone 7 previously that had a damaged chip that made it so that you couldn’t connect to cellular or activate the device. Could that be the issue here? Or is it simply iCloud locked? Thank you for the help!
If you got this phone to repair it is likely that there has been a previous repair attempt on the Audio IC resulting in too much heat being applied to the board causing the baseband CPU to become faulty. Take the logic board out and check if this is the case. If it is you will need to re-ball the baseband CPU.
