In February, I swapped the Taptic Engine and then moved the NFC chip from Tina’s old (broken) Apple Watch Series 4 display to a new display. The NFC transfer had me on edge, but Circuit Trama’s instructions and technique were fabulous. One improvement to Circuit Trama’s approach, like this video I placed droplets of alcohol on a razor blade and gradually slid it in, no heat, and it worked so much better and it was much faster. I’ve got some pics I can post later.

Prior to these improvements, the watch entered a recovery mode and I figured I’d make the improvements before restoring it, since it was mostly broken anyway. After the hardware improvements the watch refused to restore, instead erupting with a “Failed to setup Apple Watch” alert. There are several options to get past this:

Option 1: Access the hidden lightning port where the watch band slides in and complete a wired restore. Unfortunately, the adapter fetches $100 or more plus more time, bleh.

Option 2 (failed approach): the trade-in value for the Series 4 is $60 and mine appeared to meet all the requirements, so I decided to take Apple up on the offer and FedEx took it off my hands. I replaced it with an Apple Watch Series 8 in Product Red that was heavily discounted by Amazon Prime Days. I looked at iFixit’s battery replacement guide and it appears battery replacements will be easier in the future and I should have all the tools to do it. Let’s hope the first battery lasts at least 3 years. Unfortunately, several days later, Apple returned the Series 4 to me, because they said they couldn’t restore it! What a joke. They obviously didn’t try Option 3, below.

Option 3 (worked for me): I wished I had learned of this before trying Option 1 and 2. During a hard restore, I put my iPhone on the older 802.11b network in our house and then the Apple Watch Series 4 properly restored! I didn’t record all the steps I used to implement this, as I’m writing this a couple months later, but it ultimately worked and my daughter is now rocking the Apple Watch Series 4.

The only side effect of my NFC transfer, was that I used a bit too much heat during the soldering process and now the side of the screen no longer responds to touch. The portion that doesn’t work isn’t required for most interface tasks and my daughter doesn’t mind – we also enabled Assistive Touch, so she can always get past interface hitches if the screen doesn’t respond to touches. If I have extra time on my hands, I may replace the layers between the screen and the glass to correct this unresponsive touch issue, but for now I’m moving on.

I also still have a bag of parts for one more Apple Watch 4. It needs a new battery connector soldered to the board, a new screen, and its NFC soldered to a new screen. If used parts dip low enough, I may give it a whirl or dump the parts on eBay while they still have value to others.