Don’t Panic About Your IPhone 12’s Green Tint (Yet)
If you’re lucky, you have a brand new iPhone 12 to play with. If you’re out of luck, your device’s OLED screen has a mysterious green tint . You can check if this is the case by turning off the lights in your room and restarting your iPhone, viewing a darker image, or bringing up a completely black background. If your device has a strange green glow, you will know.
What if you get hurt? You can contact Apple who can send you a new iPhone, but there is no guarantee that what you receive will actually fix any problem some of those iPhone 12s are experiencing. As one person wrote on the Apple forums:
I have the same problem, Apple [sent] me a new iPhone twice, I guess they don’t know what to do. I am still hoping for a software problem.
Apple is actively investigating the issue right now, and it’s too early to tell if this is a hardware issue (hopefully not) or some quirk that can be fixed with a future software update (hooray).
Try not to head to the Apple Store for advice or replace your iPhone – after all, a pandemic is raging there. While you can always contact Apple Support virtually , the best they can do is send you a new iPhone. That means you’ll have to ship your green tinted back, which is likely another trip to the FedEx or UPS store (which will likely get busier as the holidays get closer). And there is no guarantee that the replacement you receive will actually fix the problem. Not to mention, while setting up a new iPhone is fast, especially if you’re copying from another , it’s still time for you to waste repeating what you’ve done before.
Even Apple itself is telling its authorized service providers to refrain from replacing those iPhones 12, MacRumors reports. It pretends to be something that will be easier to fix with a software update. There is also a separate yellow coloration issue and it is unclear if this is a hardware issue that Apple can only fix with a replacement, or something that the software will fix in time.
(You can test this by turning off True Tone in Settings> Display & Brightness and opening up white screens and websites. If your iPhone looks unnaturally yellow – again, you’ll know if it is – then it might influence you.)
So the best course of action for now is to wait. However, if you’re still within their 14-day return window for your iPhone 12 and any screen tint issue really bothers you, you might need to contact Apple to see what they can do, if anything else. … You can always initiate this refund and re-buy the iPhone 12 when you’re done, or if Apple offers a lean Black Friday deal to sweeten the deal.