Random OLED panel failure on IPhone 15PM
As you can see in the photo, I’ve developed the purple line to death on my screen despite them being no damage to the screen, it was not dropped, cracked or exposed to water. It’s a clear random hardware failure that occurred, I’ve had the phone since launch day basically and replace the battery back in December after it exceeded 1000 cycles and started to throttle the GPU significantly, limiting refresh rate etc even though in battery health it said it was still at 87% and performing fine- it wasn’t, and Apple tried to talk me into just upgrading, but luckily I didn’t trust them and spent $100 to pop a new battery in it and got the phone working like new. But now unfortunately this has happened, and I believe a new screen replacement from Apple is ~$400 USD. I don’t have AppleCare+, and obviously it is now out of warranty however I believe since it was not user error and a clear hardware failure that Apple should replace this for free on a Goodwill basis. I’ve had luck with them doing that in the past with a MacBook a few years back but it took hours on the phone and escalating it to multiple supervisors before they agreed to basically make a one time exception and replace the device. I’m wondering if anyone has had a similar experience and was able to get Apple to cover their repairs, considering I did nothing to damage the phone and this just happened randomly and to me it is a clear indicator of OLED panel failure. It’s clearly hardware related I’ve tried everything from restarts to resets and the issue persists. I’ve called some shops that quote only $149 but that’s for a non-genuine Apple display which I do not want, either an a cheap LCD or an aftermarket cheap OLED that is not up to standards and may cause issues down the line. I’m just not sure what to do here, I love the 15 Pro Max the design and it still works great in 2026 and I do not want to upgrade to the 17 Pro Max which is, imo, unsightly and I don’t wanna spend all that money when I have a perfectly working phone that I prefer. Also the 18 is coming out in just a few months so part of me doesn’t want to upgrade until then if I had to but the purple line of death is bothering me severely every time I look at it, it agitates my OCD and I’ve heard the issue can worsen with time. So I’m not sure what the right course of action is here, ideally Apple will recognize that it was not user error and do a Goodwill repair for free but spending almost $400 to repair the display on a device that’s approaching the three-year-old mark is also hard to swallow. Any advice? Anyone had something similar like this happen and was able to get Apple to do the right thing???