New iPhone Secured. I love the Apple Store. no more iTunes error 1013.

So, after my iPhone 4 bricked with a BaseBand update error, I made an appointment at the domain apple store here in Austin.

I explained the situation, which was kind of hard for them because they don’t have access to the same set of tools that we developers do. Their setups don’t have the ability to deal with developer software images, so they were kind of at a loss as to what to do.

The very courteous genius that I was talking to went in the back to talk to the head genius, then came out and referred me to developer support. I told him that I really didn’t want to have to go back and forth with someone in California, so I asked if there was something else I could do or someone else I could talk to.

He brought the head genius out and we talked for a while. I got my laptop out and explained that I had updated my iPad and my iPod touch 3g to the 4.2 gold master without any problems and only my iPhone 4 was having an issue, so I didn’t think it was my setup. I plugged my iPhone in and did try to restore to 4.2 and 4.1 and got the same error every time. He told me he would get the first genius to prep a new iPhone for me.

He brought the new iPhone out, and I plugged it in. I did do one bad thing, though. While I was waiting for the new iPhone, I found this article (translated by google from here via Twitter @iKorich) , and I updated my payment options in iTunes before I did the restore to 4.2 (and verified apple.com wasn’t changed in /etc/hosts). I can’t imagine that changing payment info would have mattered (although bugs do happen), but I did change more than one thing at a time (the hardware and the iTunes account payment info). Also, when the new iPhone came out I didn’t do a restore of my old data, but set it up as a new iPhone (because I didn’t want to wait for the copy), so it’s possible but unlikely that there was something corrupted in my old preferences that had caused the update to brick the iPhone (it had been through several betas of 2.x and 3.x while it was still on my 3G, and then it got migrated to my 4, and went through several 4.1 betas (but no 4.2 betas) there).

But in any case, the new iPhone 4 upgraded, and now it’s on 4.2 master and I can test my apps against the Gold Master on the most common hardware (or at least the hardware that is most often mentioned when I get feedback email from the users of my apps). I will have to set my new iPhone up as a development device and get it re-provisioned, but at least that’s much easier since XCode 3.2+ than it used to be.

Thanks very much to the folks at the Domain Apple Store in Austin TX!!