Hi, I got an Error 23 when trying to restore my phone. Apple support centre says its a hardware issue without doing anything to come to this conclusion. They will not tell me how to escalate this case. Please let me know if there is a way to escalate.

Question

One day when tried to restart my iphone 4, I got a screen asking me to connect to itunes. Itunes asked me to restore my phone. When I tried to restore, I got an Error 23 saying it cannot be restored. I tried the phone support. They asked to contact the service centre. I then tried the service centre guys. They clearly did not know what Error 23 was. They asked to contact the apple support again. After 2-3 guys tried to blow me off saying it is a hardware issue, I asked for a senior analyst. Apple support assigned a senior guy who said he will contact the engineering team. After 2 days, I was told that the engineering team has confirmed that this is a hardware issue.
What I am surprised about is that no one seems to have done any analysis or debugging to figure this out. How do they decide that this is a hardware issue?
The first time I tried it from my laptop and got this message. The support guy told me that my laptop may have an antivirus software which may be causing this issue. So I took it to the service centre. They tried the same restore from their machine and got the exact same error.
The senior analyst that was later assigned to my case, again asked me to restore from my machine. I got the same error.
Basically what they had verified in all these activities was that I was getting error 23. I dont know how they decided that this was due to hardware issues?
Online documentation on Error 23 is vague. It is bunched long with other error codes. There is no clear explanation of what Error 23 is.
But most importantly It says 'In rare cases, this may be a hardware issue'.
So if it is a hardware issue in rare case, how was my case deemed to be a 'rare case'?
When I asked them to escalate this, they said that there is no way to escalate.
I have had a horrible experience with Apple support. Till this point I used to think of Apple as a class apart. But now I am totally disillusioned.
My phone was about a year and a half old. I dont mind it if it actually turns out to be a hardware issue. I will take it as my bad luck.
But I dont see how the support guys decided that this is a hardware issue. I need to know.
And secondly I am shocked that Apple has no escalation path.
Can anyone please help?

Answer 1

Hi @imobl,
You sound like an Apple support guy who hasn't been able to answer my questions.
To respond to some of the points you made,
- I did not ignore Ocean20's suggestion. If you has read my post, you would have known that I took my phone to the apple service centre where they tried this restore on THEIR machines. I am assuming that Apple guys know how not to block iTunes. So I actually do not understand your point about me trying the hosts file changes on my machine. Do you not believe that apple tested this issue with the correct settings?
- you also give a flawed logic of why the issue is a hardware issue. You mentioned that If I thought that the issue was with the software, i should try a restore and getting it to work. The problem is that my error (23), and many others comes up when the restore fails. And you would be astonished to know that not all errors are hardware errors. Sometimes even software errors prevent restores. Funnily enough Apple itself mention that 'in rare cases, error 23 could be hardware related'.
- all Apple has done so far is replicate the issue. I don not know how anyone can conclude that the issue is a hardware issue.
And by the way, I am not certain that this is a software bug. Again if you read my Posts, you will notice I only want a confirmation,/proof that the issue is hardware related as they mention..
Please refrain do. Responding if there is nothing to add.