On our product (air quality monitor[1]) we made the concious decision to design it for long life and repairability by e.g.:
- using no glue or snaps
- all components on one PCB, no thin cables that can break
- standard philips/torx screws
- four screws to open the enclosure, four screws to take out the pcb
- expensive sensor modules on pin sockets for easy reaplacement
- only using components that are certified for longe lifetime -even if they cost a few dollars more (e.g. DC to DC converter)
- not using plastic for packaging and we ask our supplier to not use plastic when sending us the parts (e.g. no bag around the USB cable etc)
We wrote about this [2] and often do presentations for customers and have a slide about this and it gets a great response and I believe gives us an advantage compared to competing products on the market. As the market more and more appreciates this, Apple probably also realized that this can be a competitive advantage and give them positive press.
Imagine if, after criticising the panel gaps on a Tesla, a representative from Lego points out that Lego cars don't have this problem and that Lego has a steadfast commitment to precise tolerances. As someone who uses (and is continually appreciative of) multiple AirGradient-derived devices throughout my house, my immediate reaction was one of confusion given how monstrously incomparable your product is to an iPhone.
AirGradient hardware is little more than a plastic box and a relatively basic PCB which makes around a dozen connections between few off-the-shelf prototyping components which need direct exposure to room air — they can't be sealed or weatherproofed. Repairability is literally the default state for this class of product; making it less repairable would have required more effort.
Apple devices weren't made difficult to repair because Apple actively despised repairers. They were difficult to repair because Apple lacked sufficient concern over repairability and had other priorities such as as thickness, weight, simplification and efficiency of manufacturing.
I believe you are having our DIY air quality kits that are as you describe very simple. Our commercial product AirGradient ONE has a much more complex PCB with tons of additional components e.g. DC DC converter to run it from 12-36v, modbus chip, external hardware watchdogs etc.
We have made a lot of comparisons to other air quality monitors and there is a significance difference in the repaiarbility, e.g. I broke an enclosure of a competitor because it was glued together and just couldn't be opened easily.
Yes, iPhones are by a magnitude more complex products but I think a lot also boils down to attitude. I believe for a long time (and probably still), Apple made it conciously very difficult to repair/upgrade their product e.g. with proprietory screws, glued batteries, etc.
Look at the Fairphone that is a phone and also allows easy replacement of components. If they can do it, why not Apple? Maybe because so far they did not want to?
For the most part phone consumers don't really care about this though, at least not at the point of purchase. If you're going to offer a choice between easier repair and the newest feature, say a new camera sensor, and that makes it harder to repair, they're going to pick the better camera. (I accept that Apple is actively hostile to repairers as well)
If it was a hugely important element, the Fairphone would be the market leader vs Samsung/Apple.
As you no doubt know, it varies depending on the audience. If you have a nerdy DIY audience, or a technical enterprise tech audience they're going to come with different requirements.
Your reply makes no sense in the context of the article. They have just now shown that they do want to.
Proprietary/security screws don’t inhibit anyone from opening a phone other than those who would have no hope of doing anything beyond causing further damage with 100% certainty. Anyone with a sufficiently curious ten-year-old ought to be particularly thankful here.
Obscure security screws are common throughout the industry and are rarely ever the reason why a device is difficult to repair by anyone for whom success is within the set of possible outcomes.
> Your reply makes no sense in the context of the article. They have just now shown that they do want to.
This is the iphone 14. It's been a long time since the original iphone. I'm glad to see that they are changing things, but them making it better now does not cancel out all of the problems with their previous line (or the current issues with the macs).
> Obscure security screws are common throughout the industry and are rarely ever the reason why a device is difficult to repair by anyone for whom success is within the set of possible outcomes.
I think this misses the point. Even for a insignificant choice such as the screw head, Apple chose to use the option less friendly for repairs. This is a symptom of the fact that repairability has not been high on their priority list.
"Security" is an excuse that Apple (and other anti-repair companies) love to use and it disappoints me to see people fall for it on a technical forum like this one.
It is debatable whether the devices that are restricted have any security impact to begin with (the fingerprint or face recognition sensors should just be untrusted input devices with the actual comparison happening inside the secure element of the CPU - compromising this device wouldn't give you anything you don't already have), but either way, even if there was a security impact, you can always let the user choose by giving them the (per-device) keys to override said security.
0.002% of our customers need security against sophisticated hackers who have the capability to hijack a repair service and replace it with a spying custom made iphone screen replacement.
Let’s make screen repairs 5-7x more expensive for 100% of our customers !
That will get the hackers !
Yea, right....
If you’re that paranoid about your security, go to an authorized apple repair centre which doesn’t bother repairing the parts and just charges you to replace the entire circuitry.
No one’s stopping you.
Leave the rest of us, alone from this.
My opinion of this dismissive attitude towards security, were I to express it with sufficient honesty, would probably get me banned from Hacker News. It is the hardware equivalent of “only people with something to hide need encryption”.
> Companies dont get to excuse away freedom and choice
Companies don't owe you freedom and choice. If you don't like their product, if you don't like their concern for your freedom and choice, don't buy it.
We were critiquing a product, now you’re saying, companies dont owe us the right to criticise their product, and that we must move elsewhere instead of complaining.
one second you’re saying “it’s for our benefit”, the next, you want us to stop using the product, because we aren’t “owed anything”.
But this doesn't add any real security because it addresses a made up threat scenario.
If people with that kind of resources are out to get you, they can simply lift your fingerprints from elsewhere. A transparent tape on the home button would probably be enough.
Please explain to me how pairing a screen, vibration motor and battery to the motherboard keeps me secure... I'd understand faceid (which is paired of course), sure. But not these.
I really have a strong feeling that some folks have Stockholm syndrome or something.
For the record, I don't think Apple does this entirely for security. I think they do it to stop the illegal distribution of items which leak from Apple's supply chain, as well as counterfeit goods sold as though equal in quality to Apple parts. (I know multiple people who have had non-genuine screen replacements and they've always been low quality fragile glass.)
If someone tried to sell whole iPhones assembled entirely from parts leaked from Apple's supply chain, it ought to seem obvious to anyone that this is wrong. Why is the principle any different when it's not an entire iPhone?
I agree that spare parts should be more widely available, but I take issue with your broader assertion. Are you seriously arguing that when something is too expensive, theft is justified?
Wow that strawman is really quite poor. I really hope you can do better than that...
If you want a Ferrari, go buy one. They have quite long waiting lists from what I've heard.
edit:
In order not to be completely off topic: Apple might have just the same problems with parts stolen from their suppliers but since every single iPhone needs to be activated, I'm very sure they would be able to catch "iPhones made entirely from stolen parts". So this is clearly not it. The fact that they don't sell anything will probably make this whole thing quite worse because if you could buy a genuine display for 250$ from Apple, why would you really buy from anyone else? That market would of course exist but it would be much much smaller.
I would not expect them to sell motherboards or for exampe face id sensors without some kind of pairing. But batteries and LCDs? Come on!
They are doing it just to stick it to anyone who wants to repair their device. Quite sad when you think about the origins of that company :-(
It makes your phone a much less ripe target for thieves who sell it for parts. Depending on where you live, this might greatly increase your personal security.
Apple does not do this for security but just to piss user off - hence disabling the TrueTone & autobacklight features. These features are hardly anything that could be argued is "security relevant". I mean would you really velieve that vibration motor or battery could compromise security of your phone? One has to (unfortunately) stay in the realm of possible and feasible despite all the James Bond & CSI Miami & Bones TV shows...
Apple does somewhat care about users privacy (I like that very much) but this is really not it. And it goes for the battery as well. And vibration motor. And rear facing camera. All these are just plain and simple middle finger to third party repair shops. You could argue about FaceID sensor and motherboard and I would agree with security concerns, but that's pretty much it.
Yes it's probably easier to design but there are no reasons why a phone needs so many glued parts inside and the latest iPhone demonstrates that there are ways to design for maintainability.
> there are no reasons why a phone needs so many glued parts
There are numerous reasons (some very good reasons) why adhesives are used in smartphone assembly. Sometimes these reasons can sometimes come into conflict with repairability, but that doesn't render their usage completely devoid of any valid reason.
For example, many uses of adhesive are to improve water resistance. And improved water resistance reduces the likelihood of a product needing repair, which is equally virtuous (in my opinion) as repairability.
As a business owner I would never buy the DIY kit, I would want it fully assembled and have an appropriate warranty, factory testing/calibration and fast replacement - doubly so if I needed the sensor data for compliance or safety reasons.
However as a tinkerer I probably wouldn't buy a $200 air sensor... but $70 and get a bit of a project out of it? Sure!
Perfect example of broadening reach without cannibalising core business IMO.
I think it should be illegal to have product names containing "One" or "Plus" in them, unless there is another product offered in the same product line containing "Zero" (or "Two" I suppose) or "Minus".
Your scrutiny stopped at the hardware. Your first link showed a white page for 31 seconds while it was running javascript and using up to 50% of my M1 Mac's power. All that, for a page 2 MB page.
They are hardware guys, they probably wrote some good firmware but their expertise falls short of cutting edge web stuff. I would cut them some slack and hope they are successful enough they can pay someone else to do web stuff at some stage. :)
There’s speculation that offering the kits is an attempt to head off right-to-repair legislation. But seeing this redesign, I wonder to what degree the repair program is incentivizing repairability within apple’s corporate structure. Now that “profit/loss per self service repair” is tracked in a spreadsheet - does repairability matter more?
Anyways - it’s great to see some improvement here, for whatever motivation.
That dude is looking for problem when there's none. He starts off the article with this
> For people like me who have little experience repairing electronics, the self-repair setup was so intimidating that I nearly wussed out.
Did he expect Ikea like instruction manual to repair an advanced consumer electronic gadgets? That kit is clearly meant for professional (or at the very least hobbyists) repairers who clearly have experience, and know what they are doing.
To be fair he does call out Apple's recommendation and that this repair kit is better used by experts. I also feel that faced with increased regulation and public scrutiny Apple threw the entire kitchen sink as a cruel joke. I mean that 75pound repair equipment requiring $1200 hold on a card should is a big signal to retail users "do not even dream of attempting repair"
I also found the tone of that article annoying. The author is talking about repairing one of the–if not the– most advanced things ever mass-assembled. No shit, it's not easy.
What I mean is Fairphone isn’t really comparable to an iPhone 14 pro. Not yet anyway. I’m all for more sustainable smartphones and even laws backing this up, so I don’t know if I’m disagreeing with you. Apple is making enough margin to focus more on sustainability at this point without sacrificing anything else.
They gave him three machines to use for replacing his battery.
1. A machine to melt the glue holding the battery in place
2. A machine to apply even pressure to the new battery to ensure it’s properly adhered
3. A machine to apply heat and even pressure to the entire phone to properly give the phone with a watertight seal.
That seems like exactly what I’d expect has to happen to repair the phone back to original spec. I’m actually impressed that Apple gives this out to consumers to use.
Any modern iPhone has its battery held by pull tabs (double sided tape that lets go when you pull on it sideways). They are sometimes PITA to remove but you just need tweezers, fingers and bit of luck to remove it :-)
Adhering the battery is the same - just press in place.
Heat is only needed for opening/closing the phone.
I got my iPhone X’s battery replaced by an authorized repair center. You can’t tell whether the phone has opened or not. They worked that cleanly (no, it’s my phone. The serial number is the same). It’s waterproof and has no witness marks telling about the repair.
Moreover, they changed my speaker for free, because it was defective or damaged. I didn’t know that. I only learned after getting my phone with service summary report.
Honestly anyone can screw up during re-sealing step. It is not really that hard to do correctly but if you don't follow the procedure correctly, new adhesive will stick somewhat but will not be as strong as before.
The thing is that even if you screw this up, it will probably look OK for quite some time without being really water tight.
Yeah, but you can do the whole repair without it, if you’re confident that you won’t set the existing battery on fire removing it, and don’t mind some small risk of the new one exploding in your pocket after you sit down, and waterproofing isn’t important to you…
Those are three pretty big "if" statements to get past. Maybe it is OK that some items aren't easily repairable at home.
It would be awesome if Apple also offered a lower cost model with an easily replaceable battery (like an old Android), more easily repairable, and not necessarily water proof. But, if there really was a market for that, some Android manufacturer would have something for it. Maybe there is one and I haven't looked.
Meanwhile I've had to change the oil in cars where it's more of a chore than changing the screen on an iPhone. Just because you have the right to repair doesn't mean you have the expertise to do it.
I've rented all the items you've listed, plus construction equipment and hotel rooms, and none had this absurd cost:hold ratio. Notably, only the powertools were cheaper than the repair equipment in absolute terms.
Having a difference of 2 orders of magnitude between card hold and actual fee is absurd and atypical. I cant imagine a $7,500 hotel room stay placing a $120,000 hold
The $1200 amount comes from it being what the tools actually cost if you wanted to buy them. The hold is to bypass the whole “charge $1200, then return for $1150 credit” rigamarole. Doing that would affect your credit usage and could kill your score if it wasn’t returned before the card due date; A hold doesn’t.
That ~$1200 was the maximum payable amount for the transaction. That's the price of buying everything, in the case that you don't return the rented equipment.
It's not so much opening it, it's holding the back while you use heat and force to excavate the battery from the backshell. Apple appears to have fixed that issue with the iPhone 14.
iPhones had adhesive pull tabs for years now. You really did not need heat and force for that unless you ripped it.
And even if you did rip those tabs IPA does much better job of un-adhering the battery as you really don't want to use excessive force on lithium pouch cells unless you like your repair job to get "fast & furious" :-)
Well, I've done several, and one of the pull tabs generally breaks no matter how slow and careful you are. Then, it's on to reheating everything and dragging a monofilament under the battery. Without a vacuum hold-down stage, it is difficult and annoying. I don't recollect iFixit recommending IPA, does that work?
I've found out that you really need to gut that thing like a fish before trying to pull on those :-) Unless you take out vibrator etc from the bottom you almost always break atleast one off.
Yeah, IPA and thin plastic shim card. These are often sold in lockpicking shops for door shimming - costs few bucks. Or directly from iFixit site (/products/plastic-cards). Just snip it in half so it is not as wide (careful not to leave sharp corner that coud tear up that battery!). Then slip it under the battery and use it to guide few drops of IPA under there. Worked for me every time with almost no hassle.
Just be careful because IPA is of course flammable. If you would puncture the battery or make it spark, you could end up having quite a bad day. But that probably applies for the monofilament-under-the-battery approach too.
Then don’t rent their tools. Say they only put a $100 hold, and you didn’t return them. Now they charge you $1100 but you can’t pay it or your credit limit would prevent it. Oops. As another commenter mentioned, car/van rentals are the same way.
The tools are not required, despite what inflammatory articles like the Verge’s try/tried to claim. iFixIt’s guides makes it very clear that it’s possible to do the whole repair without them, and I’ve done it quite a few times in the past.
I suspect that the driving force behind Apple’s new desire to be repairable is legislative.
IMO:
Not profit of the “self-service” repairs, nor the improvement to the bottom line when they refurbish their own devices.
Not some future goal of selling people the parts and/or tools.
Not the goal of being ecologically sustainable (though IMO they do very well at this).
I think they are working very hard to steer the Right to Repair ship so that it avoids successfully docking.
If Right to Repair gets everything that it could in the interests of the public, Apple will lose a lot of things. They will lose exclusivity contracts that lock in the manufacturers (it will be almost impossible to stop 3rd party duplicates of parts). They will lose a portion of the income from users who would would repair instead of upgrading. They will lose the illusion of security that they enjoy currently (unrestricted repair communities uncover every tiny detail, especially those ones that are security holes). They will lose the ability to lock people in to the Apple cloud (Jailbreaking will be inevitably easier). And they might even lose the pristine brand image they have built.
If Apple continued on the path of unrepairable iPhones, at some point they would be one of the examples that got Right to Repair signed in to law. However, they might be banking on the idea of saying “we’re making steps” for long enough that legislators will have space to stand down and the public will lose momentum.
> I suspect that the driving force behind Apple’s new desire to be repairable is legislative.
I disagree. It's all about customer LTV.
Apple is increasingly seeing a larger percentage of their revenue come from services e.g. Music, TV+ and iPhone-centric devices e.g. Apple Watch.
Keeping users in the ecosystem is incredibly important to Apple so much that they are happy to have users use older phones for longer. Just as long as they don't switch to Google or Samsung.
My rebuttal is that Apple can only make system API changes through releasing new iOS versions and there have been many cases where they make an API change to kill competition.
Does YouTube music have the same system-wide integration that Apple Music does? No. Look at Dropbox even: Some versions ago Apple took away iOS app’s ability to upload in the background while Apple’s Photos app is free to do it 24/7. A user who takes a lot of photos and likes to store them in the cloud is either an iCloud user where everything works automatically, or a non-iCloud user where files are stalled until the app is on-screen for however long it takes to transfer them.
Apologies for getting ranty there. It’s hard to watch big tech these days, especially as someone who sees how much has been taken from us already.
That assumes they didn’t care about reparability in the first place.
Have a look at JerryRigEverything videos of any iphone, they are beautifully constructed on the inside. They don’t do no-gos like cheaper phones building basically on top of the screen a battery and a cover, which would cause an insane price for screen replacement, they don’t use special screws to fuck with you, but because they literally use the same physical space as one screw by screwing a screw with an opposing direction into another.
I agree but Apple does not. If Right to Repair gets, as I say; “everything that it could in the interests of the public”, it would mean that software would not be able to restrict hardware.
No vendor-controlled unique IDs that need to be whitelisted in order to connect between chips or boards, no intrusive warnings about 3rd party parts that are installed, no undocumented protocols for basic functionality, and so-on.
And if they say they have to because of security that claim would be heavily scrutinized.
Way back in the day Microsoft tied IE in to Windows and leveraged it’s OS dominance to try to win the browser wars. Browsers, like hardware, are based on vendor-agnostic technologies and so MS felt it had to play dirty since there was no way for them to win a war where browsers are commodities. Back then the government stepped in as they recognized the fact that browsers are commodities and that paved the way for the majority of the web standards we rely on today.
Who knows what sort of fragmented web we would have if MS had been allowed to lock users in with their proprietary “improvements”. We may be at the same crossroads here with Right to Repair.
Apple started offering home repair kits for iPhone this year, but they’re super difficult to use: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/technology/personaltech/a...
There’s speculation that offering the kits is an attempt to head off right-to-repair legislation.
This comment, and those like it, are proof to me that there’s a large contingent of folks who don’t actually care about the repairability of iPhones, they just want to take shots at BigCos.
So it’s not enough that Apple is doing what y’all asked for. It has to be for the right reasons, too. Anything less than ideological purity —- to be defined and re-defined endlessly —- no sale.
That’s a fine take in itself, but I’d wish we could dispense with the disingenuousness once and for all.
FWIW, Apple didn't actually address any of the problems their real critics (eg. third-party repair shops) espoused. The redesign in the linked article will only benefit Apple until they walk-back their asinine hardware-DRM (and ostensibly, their grip on OEM components).
What is the negative impact to users of the hardware DRM? I am only familiar with a dialogue box that warns users that a specific part might not be authentic. I have also read about issues with those parts not performing correctly with software updates.
Are there instances of DRM’d hardware being totally unsupported, or just not available at all? If so, what parts?
For example swapped LCD will disable truetone and in iPhone 14 reportedly auto brightness.
Battery will lock out "battery health".
Rear facing camera will glitch out (I think it will not do video and it will reduce framerate dramatically) and front camera will not work correctly at all.
All accompanied with constant nagging about non-genuine parts - regardless if you use parts from another iPhone (100% genuine).
It’s just “find my iPhone” extended to individual parts to reduce theft. If you own the other iPhone you will have no problem getting rid of the “unauthorized parts” screen.
Reducing iPhone theft is an extremely worthy goal, especially for people who live in high theft countries.
A stolen iPhone is less usable for parts if they show “unauthorized hardware” warnings when installed, no? Consumers don’t want to see warnings like that.
Do you honestly think Apple does not want you to repair your own device? They would absolutely sh*t kittens to have you buy replacement parts from them!
The problem is that smartphones are super complex devices, able to withstand dust, rain, drops, and more. In order to do that, they have complex internals, which AMONG OTHER THINGS (like heat dissipation and RF I/O) are designed to support mentioned goals.
Current gen iPhones can be dropped onto concrete at arms-length and not suffer from a broken screen or back. Think about that for a moment. Could you build a smartphone that could do that, and have amazing battery life along with desktop performance?
Note that I'm absolutely not affiliated with Apple, or a shareholder.
I feel like some folks downplay the amount of engineering that goes into the iPhone, and to a somewhat lesser extent, ANY mobile device. For many of us, these things live in our pockets and our hands. They are expected to have many hours of screen time, play games, let us read books, etc. They aren't simple devices, especially the current gen iPhones Apple has been pushing out.
> I feel like some folks downplay the amount of engineering that goes into the iPhone,
There's a huge amount of engineering that goes into making cars as well, but independent mechanic can and do thankfully exist.
The automobile market is going a similar direction to Apple and it's considered a bad thing by many.
Apple do not want to sell you spare parts if they can sell you a new yearly model phone instead. Imagine how awful it would be if you're forced to buy a new car when the propriety tires get a puncture and it's a discontinued model.
"Well this is already happens, besides I never lifted a finger to fix anything in my life" - yes, but it's not a good thing to make this the status quo.
People need to have the freedom to get cheaper parts and / or better services from other places. Otherwise we're all chained to Apple and not lifting our own fingers.
I don't know why this doesn't make sense to people, except for cases where people believe the hype of little old ladies blowing themselves up because they tried to replace batteries.
> independent mechanic can and do thankfully exist.
Yet they can’t and are not expected to do anything when the engine itself fails, which can more realistically be compared to a mobile phone in terms of (useful) miniaturization, increase of precision, etc. This is the price of the orders of magnitude more efficient operation compared to the first engines, increased complexity. It’s a tradeoff (and I would say it is worth it in both cases).
You can take apart and rebuild an engine just fine. In fact most auto manufacturers (still) sell individual parts. You don't scrap an entire engine because a camshaft, injector or VVT actuator fails. Even in case of catastrophic timing belt/chain failure, it can be repaired, though not always economically viable.
Last time I checked it was not like that - those kits are actually quite easy to use.
The catch is that in order to buy it, you need to give them SN of the device in advance. Meaning you cannot have stock and thus you cannot offer any reasonably fast repair service. And even after that you have to contact their support in order to "pair" the newly installed parts to that device.
Most of the people I know use 3rd party repair shop because they can change battery/screen in 1-2 hours and they will not wipe your data. Apple takes 2 weeks and wipes your phone.
I don't think those really relate to each other that way. The lead time and design time for a complex device, especially one with such high vertical integration is much longer than the whole debate on repairs has gone public.
Switching a product from a front-to-back stack to a mid frame design with nearly no interchangeable structures between those designs takes multiple years.
I can't read the link as it's paywalled: but my understanding of the Apple tools is that they're hilariously over-engineered; not that they're hard to use.
The tools are made to guarantee a factory-quality repair, complete with stock levels of part fit and water resistance, regardless of the skill level of who’s using it. That can’t really be done in a way that’s not overengineered and bulky.
I’d argue that they’re not over engineered at all. They’re engineered for a particular purpose. Which is: Apple doing warranty repair.
I love how people used to complain that Apple didn’t make their tools available, and now people complain that their tools are too nice. Well duh, did people think that Apple was using hairdryers and guitar picks for warranty work?
Yeah I really wonder what people's expectations are here.
"First step by putting a hair dryer to the front face of the phone and turning it up to max. We don't really know what temperature that will be, but hopefully it's enough to loosen the adhesive. Now improvise a tool for lifting the screen off, hopefully you won't cut the ribbon cables underneath while doing that - maybe a guitar pick? Ok then, when reassembling the device try to get the new screen on as evenly as possible. Who knows if you've done it right - but if you did it wrong your phone will definitely bork if you get it wet!"
Like, you can still do all of the above. There's nothing preventing you from doing a phone repair cheaply (and poorly) - but to expect a company to support that officially seems nuts?
It turns out repairing modern consumer electronics at a high quality bar is expensive! And it's equipment intensive!
The actual critics are mostly mad at the way Apple prevents them from using legal donor boards to make less-wasteful repairs. Apple heard this, and their response is an 80-lb rent-able flight-case of random equipment.
Admittedly, it made for some great free PR on YouTube. As for addressing the concerns of the right-to-repair community... they would have been better off just uploading board schematics for the M1 Air and calling it a day. Most repair shops would probably feel less offended if they did.
There are legitimate issues with enabling pieces-and-parts repairs.
The first is that shoddy repairs or repairs with substandard parts screws the consumer and it does so with Apple's name on it. When someone buys a "New! (refurbished)" device from their favorite online marketplace and it comes with garbage components that break, it is a headache both for Apple when the customer comes to complain, and it's a PR headache for them when people think their phones are crap due to something completely out of their control.
The second is that there are significant security compromises that are facilitated by swapping parts from a stolen or secondhand phone.
The third is that phone theft is a serious issue, and the only way to solve it is to make stolen phones useless. Activation lock helped a good bit, but there was still a significant market for stolen phones to sell as parts. Phone theft was a huge issue in the early 2010s, but has seen significant declines due to this.
Many, many years ago I had an apple laptop that I took into a shop to get cleaned up and the fans replaced (it had gotten gunky and one of the fans would stop periodically).
Upon getting the laptop back, I got memory errors occasionally. When those memory errors became more common than coincidence could ascribe, my brother (more mechanically inclined than I) opened it up to check on the fan (maybe it was getting too hot again?) only to find that the memory had been replaced with 3rd party memory (this was the first time the laptop had been taken anywhere to get fixed).
Think back to the decade and more ago and all the fly by night phone and laptop repair places that existed.
I would be surprised if mine was a unique story.
And so, here's the question - how do you prevent a disreputable repair shop from swapping parts? If I hadn't had my brother open it up and look to see if the fans were gunking up again or loose wire or something, would I be blaming Apple for the memory errors on my laptop?
I have a family member who just bought a Dell laptop listed as new on Amazon. It seemed a suspiciously slow when I used it to look something up. (a new $600 laptop shouldn't take 10+ seconds to open a web browser) I looked up the service tag; the memory and storage had both been swapped with dirt cheap replacements. Turns out it came from a third party seller who does "upgrades" to all of their laptops before they reseal the package and send them out.
They just seem engineered to a different market, their own repair techs. Bulky doesn’t matter, expensive doesn’t matter. Being absolutely completely foolproof when used by non-expert techs with a few weeks training and having as little risk of damaging the device at possible does matter.
Also they need to work day in, day out, for years, not just a couple of times.
Which can sometimes end up in James Webbification, as the more expensive and robust it gets, the more likely it's the only one and the higher the stakes if it breaks. So you make it more over-engineered and expensive.
> They just seem engineered to a different market, their own repair techs
I would hope and expect that third party repair techs (and to a slightly lesser extent ordinary people) would be repairing devices with the same level of quality as Apple's techs.
I mean I can take pictures underwater with a freakin phone. I guess you could call that "over engineering" but I also understand that means maintaining that type of device integrity would require some heavy lifting to service the device after it's been sealed up.
> I also understand that means maintaining that type of device integrity would require some heavy lifting to service the device after it's been sealed up.
Wel;l... it did require heavy lifting but according to this article that is no longer the case! Sure you'll still need a bunch of specialized tools for handling super small components but it is miles ahead of what it once was.
It took me a while to come around to the idea of "right to repair" because I had the same concerns many people here have. To make it repairable would mean to sacrifice a bunch of stuff like waterproofing and weight. But I guess with this new iphone it's "game on" for repairability. Which is awesome.
This has got to be one extremely expensive toolchain and supply chain redesign to do, but since they have done it a few times before (instead of incremental changes) I suppose the money department has worked out when it is feasible to do that kind of thing while keeping the people in charge happy.
I'm curious to see if this is a 'test' to see if this doesn't have too many downsides, I imagine ingress area increasing this much might be a point of worry (well, there are flexible seals for that now), and instead of having a one-way stack you now have a two-way stack so tooling and workstations around that (even if we just think in terms of assembly and rework) are going to be a PITA to convert or completely replace.
Either this will be a success and allow for the architectural change to be applied to other products, or it's a medium-success in which this only works for specific parts/antenna/power envelope configurations and we won't see this design in other form factors.
What does itch a little is iFixit whining about the parts needing be a signed set to work together. Nobody has come up with a better integrity protection method, and no-protection isn't an option either for the ecosystem. Besides, instead of having a 'safe' and 'unsafe' option for which practically no user will ever be able to make an informed decision, you can simply choose not to buy it if this is a feature you seriously despise.
I disagree that integrity protection is necessary across many components of the phone.
There should be integrity protection on the SoC, and then all other components should be untrusted.
Sure, that means someone can proxy the fingerprint sensor or put on a fake screen that shows a fake consent dialogue. But I think that is an acceptable risk - after all, you can never protect against someone making an entirely new device that just happens to look like an iPhone.
That doesn't mean that you also have to think the same thing, but I would rather not have that option taken away from me. I also don't think that you have made a case for any similar-security implementation for integrity protection.
I think distributed trust is the only way to make trustworthy components, and the only known-good way to do that is using PKI, and the only proven way to do that is to have a CA.
> [..] after all, you can never protect against [..]
That's the kind of thinking that gets you stuck in "we have already lost so we should stop trying".
If you can make sure that your finger print never leaves the secure enclave, and you can make sure that the Secure Enclave cannot be replaced, you can trust the device a whole lot more than a fake security measure that can be circumvented at every stage. What is the point of an insecure security control? You don't send your passwords plain-text over the internet, do you? Just because TLS is imperfect, and your CA store can be compromised, and your screen might be recorded using a camera and a telescope doesn't mean that therefore we should stop improving TLS...
If you're uncomfortable with the idea of buying potentially backdoored hardware, what makes you comfortable using backdoored software? I don't understand the "hardware matters but software doesn't" threat model. It certainly doesn't benefit you in any pragmatic sense, the best it will do is give you warm fuzzies while Apple adds your OCSP data to a running tab for your iCloud account.
Because unless you go collect some sand and make your own wafers etc. you have to put some trust somewhere. I trust a relationship between me and a manufacturer of choice more than an adversary. Keep in mind that trust does not equal blind trust. I trust an Apple SoC and Apple SEP more than say, a RockChip SoC or a MediaTek SEP. And I trust a finger print reader that does not transmit actual fingerprints to the application processor more than a finger print reader that does.
If you are really on the spectrum of 'trust nobody', then what are you doing here on the internet? You had to trust your GPU, your window manager, your browser, the network stack, your internet provider, the server this site runs on, the people who own it etc.
> after all, you can never protect against someone making an entirely new device that just happens to look like an iPhone.
The specific threat being protected against (leaving aside the increased safety of iPhone users by making the stolen parts market untenable) is your phone, that you recognize and use as your phone and which contains your confidential material and credentials, having internal components swapped out while unattended.
It is indeed a protection against evil maid attacks as well as the industrialised version of shipment interception.
It's probably also some form of PR and brand protection, and part of platform security as a whole.
I doubt that any commercial company would find the side-effect of less end-user tampering a true downside; if the device says "I have been tampered with", that's a very clear signal that someone coming in for some warranty repair has some explaining to do.
Redesigning iPhone to be repairable means that Apple can have a higher tolerance for part failure. That in turn means that they can reduce quality controls and put cheaper parts into their phones. It probably pays for itself
Really happy to see this write up. I’m probably in the tank, but I genuinely believe that Apple strives to do right by its customers, and to be a good company. it’s not a nonprofit, and I don’t expect them to act like one.
Sometimes I feel like people enjoy piling on because they are the big
dog.
Again, please don’t mistake this comment for a blindness to some of its operations. But it’s nice to see them get credit for the good stuff.
This is kind of a weird take. If everyone is driven by profit, but some get it by evil means and others get it by doing things that benefit their customers, can’t we simply say that the people who do evil stuff are evil, and the ones who don’t aren’t?
I don’t know, is a paper clip AI evil of not? I think your problem is anthropomorphizing a non-human entity — companies after a certain size are simply trying to maximize profits at all costs. It is just so happens that people like to look at companies in a human way and thus playing “good” has a monetary advantage.
For a more direct example look at all the companies putting up pro-LGBT flags.
> companies after a certain size are simply trying to maximize profits at all costs.
This is an ideological claim that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Obviously if you hold this as an axiom, you won’t be able to see that companies are made up of people.
Are you aware that Tim Cook is gay? Could it be that his personal experience has something to do with Apple supporting gay rights?
If your claim has any truth, then all companies above a certain size would be putting up pro-LGBT flags.
Not that they are completely evil, just that they know how to play the public and shareholders to come off as future-oriented, sustainable, humane, etc., which gives them some leeway to deal with their issues in China for example.
Again the innuendo. You are agreeing that they are behaving in a sustainable, future-oriented, sustainable, humane way, but presenting this as if it’s not actually true.
The fact that China hasn’t improved on human rights the way everyone expected them to do over the last two decades is indeed a problem for Apple, and everyone else who does business there, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are in fact making their phones more repairable, which is beneficial to the environment and consumers in reality, and not just in appearance.
> the fact that they are in fact making their phones more repairable, which is beneficial to the environment and consumers in reality, and not just in appearance.
The pure fact that they aren't advertising such obvious user-benefiting feature corroborates my hypothesis that they only virtue-signal what they find milkable. Fundamentally, they are making iPhones more repairable a result of the US and the EU being on their asses with various legislation; it's a mere compliance. Advertising it would likely affect their AppleCare+ revenue, which is why I presume they simply didn't.
If they actually cared about being a better company for the sake of being a better company, they would absolutely point out that obvious benefit even at the risk of diminishing their future AppleCare+ revenue.
So, in short, those repairability improvements are mostly to comply and save their own expenses when fixing AppleCare-insured phones. Which is what I meant by it being mostly for the looks. They just know how to play their cards well.
> which is beneficial to the environment and consumers in reality, and not just in appearance.
Nobody said it wasn't, that wasn't the point I was arguing.
Do they have to pass an ideology test? When I buy a phone off them, it’s a financial transaction: I give them money and they give me a device. As long as they don’t go out of their way to make the world a worse place and as long as their incentive to make good devices (because that’s how they make money, yes) aligns with my interests as a customer, that’s fine.
That’s why I am much more annoyed by their push to services, because there I am less convinced that our interests are convergent in the long run.
They are one of the most profitable companies in the world.. basically the opposite of a non-profit, and they do generally act like it. It's not unexpected, but it isn't good for me as a consumer.
I am Anti-Apple with their recent change in politics, but generally speaking I do agree they do a decent job. It is also sad their competitors does't give a damn about anything.
I’m not suggesting an alternative material. I’m suggesting a more sane way of replacing the backside. For the iPhone 13 Pro it’s so expensive and hard to do they even just hand you a new phone rather than fixing it.
So after however many years since iCloud was offered, I finally broke down and decided to subscribe. It's way more than just a switch that can be accidentally flipped. I had to agree to terms (yes, not a show stopper), and I had to authorize payment. Are people as cavalier with authorizing payments as they are to accepting ToS?
> Forget satellite SOS and the larger camera, the headline is this: Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair.
This made me chuckle. I'm willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of users care far more about the camera than the repairability. The latter is hardly even something they consider. It will probably help them in unseen ways, like improving resale value.
It would matter if it was highlighted. People care about repairability of expensive items. Admittedly, it is a secondary concern, but I would say it is probably the top secondary concern
A secondary concern is resale value. Repairability isn't even that. To put it one way, even if you could repair an iPhone with legos, I think it'd sway few to zero buyers from an alternative.
While I somewhat agree, the big repair that most people are going to want to do pre- or post- sale is replacing the battery. If that's something that anyone can do now, it'll improve resale value.
I used to think this, but then all the Android phone-makers that used to tout user-removable batteries started gluing them in like Apple does, which sounded like the market speaking.
Maybe it's not all that hard to replace the glued-in batteries anyway. Seems every mall has two tiny mid-hallway shops that can do it.
If I have to choose between easy-to-replace batteries and water resistance, I will go with the latter. Of course if both are possible, I would be very happy, but I just don’t see an engineering way for that in such a compact body as phones. Also, batteries are no longer 1-2 inches heigh, they are often odd-shaped to fill all the rest of the phone body.
Samsung still manages to do both removable batteries and water resistance in their Galaxy XCover line but I suppose thickness, weight, etc. are more important for the average consumer.
Samsung mocked Apple for removing the 3.5mm jack, but a few months later, did it themselves. Because the majority of consumers don’t care enough to do anything about it.
Is it? Most people that might be concerned just pay for Apple Care, and then let Apple repair it. Only the 1% of people that are techy/nerdy enough to even try this are even bothered by this.
This is about speed, not cost of repair. The selling point of Apple Care is that it takes the stress out of your phone breaking.
When my sister's iPhone's screen broke, she took it to the Apple Store at the mall to use her Apple Care benefits. When they gave her some enormous time estimate, she marched to the iFixUrPhone stand and they did it in an hour. I believe Apple knows that this is a problem and is taking some preliminary steps to fix it. That's what this play is about.
Yeah, you kind of need to make an appointment through their app. When you do that, you walk in, they find you a person, then it takes about the same hour.
I'm honestly surprised they even accepted you as a walk-in
This still follows my point that when you buy Apple Care, you are paying for your phone breaking to be a non-stressful event. Having to find a working device, make an appointment, wait for your appointment (while your anxiety about being phoneless builds up), remember the appointment, and be on time is not nearly as nice an experience as walking up to a table at the mall you've never talked to before and getting it fixed right there for cash.
Side note: I don't remember saying she was a walk-in. I don't know if she was; I'll have to ask her.
>(while your anxiety about being phoneless builds up)
This is a truly terrifying thing to me about today's younger generations that have "always had" a device and have use the social platforms just as long. I don't mean for that to sound patronizing or belittling. It is just so out of my own experience it is hard for me to empathize, but I do sympathize as I realize that some of that dependancy was/is intentionally juiced by the social platforms.
Maybe not at first, but a million Apple users who break their devices having a good experience with the repair vs. a bad one is a good thing for Apple.
I don't see how. What are they going to do, be more likely to be repeat customers? They were going to be repeat customers anyway, even after breaking their phones and not being able to repair them.
The only possible benefit I see here is Apple saving money on repair technician time. But I still suspect it'll cause lost profits, because many people will be able to repair their phones instead of just buying new ones when they break.
ifixit is a repair site after all and thats their primary concern :)
Ofcourse it's not a primary concern for us... but having upgraded my Samsung Galaxy, it feels good that I can easily service the phone and replace components. It's so simple inside once you learn how to unglue the back glass.
> We are hearing reports that Apple is continuing their hostile path of pairing parts to the phone, requiring activation of the back glass after installation.
On the other hand, this makes stealing an iPhone more and more pointless, as more and more parts cannot be parted out and sold. After activation lock was added, thieves started parting out screens and batteries to sell them and get at least some value out of an otherwise useless stolen iPhone. Want to see how useless an activation locked iPhone is? Check eBay. I assume that for iP14+ it'll be even less. I welcome this move.
That goal could presumably also be accomplished by enabling the owner to check a "stolen" box in their iCloud and after that all serialized parts of that phone go on a blacklist. An iPhone checks every day or something if any of it's parts are blacklisted and refuses to work if true.
To prevent a massive attack on Apple by corrupting the blacklist, the phones would only perform this check if any of the factory parts have been replaced.
I did actually think of that but decided it would be a net good.
People would learn to buy from trusted sources (which would probably work in Apple's favour) and also it would out the thieves in a rather unfortunate way for them, so they'd probably get the reputation they deserve rather quickly.
You miss the point. I do not care what "the people" learn. I care that my car window is not smashed if some low-life sees an iPhone inside, cause it is known that it holds no value if stolen.
You are missing step 6, which is for iphone B to stop working after step 5. And part 6 would also include some kind of nasty "your phone has stolen parts in it" message to the user.
Just like the "don't boot with non-registered hardware", this is all software and can be changed. Maybe in future releases of iOS they change how this "check for legit parts" process works.
I saw a video of two thieves doing exactly that in Chicago (or Detroit I don't remember) they kept hitting the guy over the head until he gave them the password and then shot him like 5 times.
>Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair HN: <crickets>
Easier for who? Quote from the video:
"We're hearing reports of Apple continuing on the hostile path of pairing parts to the phone, requiring activation of the back glass after installation. Why in the world would you need permission to install a sheet of glass?! Using software to prevent the replacement of components with aftermarket parts gets a big thumbs-dwon from us."
Let's call it like it is. Apple is not doing you a favor for easier repairability, they're doing their bottom line a favor. If they actually cared, they wouldn't be so hostile to software lock you out of replacing a bloody glass panel.
The internal design is still greatly thought out though. I've been asking myself for years: why can't phone makers make phones with a mid frame that allow both sides to be easily swapped out, instead of one or another. Seems like Apple has cracked it. I hope other phone makers copy this minus the SW locks.
Apple’s Activation Lock lead to a substantial drop in smartphone theft worldwide. That’s something worthy of consideration. Apple must not re-incentivize phone theft to harvest parts.
I got mugged a couple years ago, or attempted to: The thief asked for my phone, saw it was an iPhone and just gave it back.
That to me is worth the whole phone bricking thing. And it's also not like I've gone through a bunch of them, I got a 6S on release and a 12 pro when I felt it couldn't play video games anymore.
For ~$90 I can buy a screen programmer online to transfer serial numbers between screens and bypass the locking thing. If I buy a phone with a broken screen online for cheap, I can put your good one on it (by writing the serial number from the cracked screen onto the stolen screen) and then resell it as a fully functional refurbished/used iPhone for a decent profit.
...and if I'm too lazy to do that, I can still sell it for parts online since less lazy people who know how to do that will buy it for the same reason.
This is a really good point. Thanks for sharing. I'm highly critical of Apple for their practices, but this is great food for thought. I'm gonna have to marinade that for a bit and re-evaluate my position.
Could they still do it for Apple official parts without locking out 3rd parties? i.e. if an official screen that was previously registered to a different phone, then lock it out. If it's never been registered, then allow it?
It also considerably reduces the ability of nation-state attackers to replace parts with modified hardware without your knowledge, as Apple can detect and terminate misuse of the tool that creates new cryptographic signing keys for the pairing of phone and part. We saw signed-pairing appear with the Touch ID system in response to Apple learning of nation-state attacks on the iPhone that used hardware modifications.
To date, no HN discussion of this crypto-pairing of the phone to its parts has revealed an alternative solution that would be effective at Apple’s scale for preventing phones from being hacked by a parts swap while also allowing any part to be swapped in — not to mention while providing the anti-theft benefits described upthread. I’d love to see a viable alternative solution described, if anyone has one.
> To date, no HN discussion of this crypto-pairing of the phone to its parts has revealed an alternative solution that would be effective at Apple’s scale for preventing phones from being hacked by a parts swap while also allowing any part to be swapped in
Random-ass repair shops are not going to expend the effort of putting in fake parts to hack you to.. hack a couple of thousand dollars off of your account and then get caught due to it easily being traceable to the repair shop?
The only people who need protection from hardware-swap hacks are people like journalists. And if you are one, you shouldn’t be giving people physical access to your device regardless.
Here is a simple solution: give the normal user (after a passcode unlock) a pop-up: ‘your X has been replaced. Do you wish to authorize this new part for use with your iPhone?’.
Make it so that if your phone is set to the new Lockdown mode, you cannot authorize any new parts.
The "your X has been replaced" pop-up doesn't handle the situation where an attacker knows your passcode.
I think you might also be failing to account for situations where you aren't in possession of your phone for an hour or two. Imagine if police in a foreign country take your phone for a couple of hours and then give it back to you. Or you leave your phone in a hotel room to charge for a few hours. Or your phone gets "misplaced" for an hour after going through the airport x-ray machine.
There are many targets other than journalists too, such as people in the USA who develop export controlled technologies, certain tech company employees, defense contractor employees, other government employees, etc. I don't think you can expect every potential target to constantly set their iphone to lockdown mode.
> The "your X has been replaced" pop-up doesn't handle the situation where an attacker knows your passcode.
If this is the case, they can add their own fingerprint or face (alternate look feature) to your iPhone. You’re thoroughly pwned at that point, no hardware swaps necessary.
> I think you might also be failing to account for situations where you aren't in possession of your phone for an hour or two
If I came back to my unattended phone after 2 hours and it was giving me a pop-up about a swapped part, I would never trust that phone again.
> I don't think you can expect every potential target to constantly set their iphone to lockdown mode.
If they are that much of an attractive target, their organizations would be stupid not to enforce it. I know that Lockheed used to give personnel that was China-bound a throwaway laptop and would shred it the moment they returned to the USA.
>You’re thoroughly pwned at that point, no hardware swaps necessary.
Exactly. It boggles my mind the amount of mental gymnastics Apple apologetics will go through to try to justify Apple's anti-consumer anti-repair practices of software locking replacement parts.
Anyone crossing a border where a nation state takes physical possession of their device is, currently, protected. The US border authorities have a very awful policy of storing data they’ve stolen for up to 15 years, and other US federal authorities have been previously caught using hardware modifications to hack devices. Anyone within 100 miles of a US border is subject to seizure and search under US law, which is approximately one-fifth of the country, including SF tech workers and NYC fintech workers.
These protections apply to considerably more of one country’s populace than would benefit from off-market parts being usable at third-party repair shops. I appreciate Apple’s choice to prioritize in this regard, but I’d still like to see if tech can overcome this barrier without sacrificing that safety.
> Anyone crossing a border where a nation state takes physical possession of their device is, currently, protected.
Assuming you are a normal person, you already are. Rapidly click the lock button 5 times and they cannot extract any data with normal means. If you are someone worthy of nation-state attention, why are you crossing the border without a wiped device, as has been the adviced standard practice for years?
Again: these draconian repair protections should be tied to Lockdown mode. There is no reason to destroy repairability to protect a tiny group that isn’t giving their device out for repairs anyway if they’re following opsec.
I have no faith in the ability of nation-states to accurately determine that I am not a criminal, and the authorities in my home nation-state are known around the world for both their excessive violence and their unannounced home invasions, in which (for example) scenario reaching for my phone would result in me being killed. Those protections benefit me and others like me especially, and I’m comfortable paying a few more dollars for authorized repairs to retain them. I appreciate that you do not see the need for those protections for yourself, but the convenience you seek comes at the cost of the safety it provides others. I remain unpersuaded.
> I have no faith in the ability of nation-states to accurately determine that I am not a criminal
No state will burn extremely expensive tools like Pegasus on a garden-variety criminal.
I’m very conscious of my privacy and device security myself, but I’m also aware that I do not warrant high-cost surveillance. Most people are in that boat. You can model your threats accordingly.
But what if I want to transplant a part from my old phone to a phone same model that I both legitimately own? Why should Apple be the one to stop me? Why not let the user enable/disable the SW lock, like a lo-jack?
Do you live in an area where phone theft is rampant? Ok, then leave SW lock enabled on your phone's parts.
Do you want to legitimately transplant parts off your old phone to your new phone? Then let the user disable the SW lock after entering their PIN or Face-ID or whatever.
It's not like this is some super-complex problem Apple couldn't solve with a few line of code to have the best of bot worlds if they really wanted to.
Sort of. You can still buy replacement parts from Apple as part of the repair program. This would, in theory, make repairing the iPhone 14 a lot easier than it has been in the past.
No, this still doesn't mean you can go get the cheapest replacement option you can on Alibaba but the repair is STILL easier, even if you still have to buy from Apple. For certain replacement parts I can see this being important, like anything involved in Face ID or Touch ID.
Credit where credit is due, let's hope it continues in the right direction.
>For certain replacement parts I can see this being important, like anything involved in Face ID or Touch ID.
Those are secure elements. The back glass is not a secure element. That's just vendor lock-in malice for the sake of profiteering.
Edit: Since I can reply to your comments below, your argument fails flat because:
1) SW lock-outs also apply to genuine apple parts, not just aftermarket ones
2) If the user's ability to verify the originality of the parts installed in their phone was the real reason, they Apple could just have a prompt for the user that the new part is not genuine instead of completely locking it out.
I wasn't arguing that the back glass was a secure element. I said it makes sense for certain replacement parts and then gave examples of those surrounding Face ID and Touch ID.
I would agree with you that the back glass is not one of those things. But as another person said, it is nice to know that they're official Apple products as that does matter to some people.
> why can't phone makers make phones with a mid frame that allow both sides to be easily swapped out,
Midframe based based construction was standard for most premium smartphones 2010-2015, after that two piece construction, and "bathtub" took over for economic reasons, and because of MBA people wanting to parrot Apple's engineering in everything.
I mean yeah, it is nice to be able to open it from front and rear. But what good does it make when they pair every single component to the motherboard? Yeah, technically parts are more accessible (physically) but thats only the beginning of the repair process. And unless you can buy genuine parts without hassle and put them in, you are still SOL.
To me it is like cheering that murderer did not also litter I mean I guess it is kinda nice of him, but...
Yeah. And I'd like to get to the same state with iPhones :-) So they let me connect another monitor to my phone without hardwiring it together.
Honestly, if they cared about "best user experience", they would have done digital signature of the LCD/cable and if OEM was detected, they could display something like "Hey, someone tampered with your phone and changed the screen using OEM parts". If not, they coud say "Hey, someone tampered with your phone and replaced screen with an unoriginal one. You might see some degradation in quality because of that".
We're also constantly moving the goalposts on Apple. The iPhone 11 had no public repair manuals and only special authorized repair centers could purchase genuine parts or perform the "System Configuration" pairing step.
With the iPhone 12, 13, and SE we suddenly we got public repair manuals[0] and public access to genuine parts[1]. The "System Configuration" step still exists, but it's accessible to anyone and requires chating[2] with Apple/SPOT (their self repair subcontractor).
Now the new iPhone 14 has been expensively re-engineered to make self repair easier. But you're saying because the same self-serve "System Configuration" step is required for some components it's all moot? Let's take a win when we get one. It could still be better, but the trend is definitely moving in the right direction.
edit: Also not all repairs require motherboard pairing step, albeit the most common ones do. But you can replace the iPhone SE camera, taptic engine, SIM tray, and speaker without any System Configuration step. See the the SE repair manual [0].
I'm not moving goalposts at all. All I'd want is a way to get most of the parts from OEM & be able to install them. At the very least I'd expect to be able to swap:
1) Battery (consumable)
2) Front (LCD)
3) Back (either just the glass or the whole frame)
But we have to be honest with ourselves here: what good is it to have a repair manual when you cannot buy genuine parts? I mean yeah, this is a small-ish win, but it will not help to say it is "good enough". Sorry, but that is just not good enough.
The thing that pisses me the most is that I genuinely think that iPhones are amazing phones. They are quite nicely engineered and they easily could last you 5-8 years. Why put so much engineering effort to artificially cripple the device? Most of us will buy the new model anyway. And those who cannot (or don't want) should be able to keep theirs for as long as possible. It seems wastefull and unnecessary to fight it.
> what good is it to have a repair manual when you cannot buy genuine parts?
You can absolutely buy genuine parts for recent iPhones: https://selfservicerepair.com/order (that website looks random, but it's actually Apple's official self repair supplier)
Yes, the System Configuration step is still required to pair many of those parts. This has been discussed ad nauseum. Perspectives vary between it being a necessary security precaution and an entirely self-interested move by Apple to control their supply chain. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.
I've never done the System Configuration step, but it requires chatting with a support agent and it sounds much easier than the repairs themselves. I absolutely agree things could still improve. But I also think we should recognize this new iPhone 14 re-design as a huge improvement that shows a promising trend.
The last time I tried it I had to put in the SN of the device I wanted to repair in advance to get the part. Maybe they fixed it from then, have not checked.
If you cannot get parts in stock (meaning in advance), you might as well send it to the Apple and not bother with repair shop at all. I also think this is the main reason for making it like that. Display, battery and vibration motor has absolutely no security implications.
I would be very happy to see Apple not screwing with individual repair shops. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of their HW (be it iPhones or MBPs). But I'm not a fanboy and I'm not going to bend backwards to praise this corporate entity when it is not deserved. If you compare the ease of getting part for Samsung and Apple, it is like night and day.
That System Configuration step is also a middle finger. Having to chat with some support agent just for changing a consumable item like a battery? Or a vibration motor? What the actual f?
edit: Checked and they still want the SN of a target device before selling you anything - even a battery! From the site: The serial number is required and will be shared with Apple. This number must be from the device that is being repaired or you may encounter issues that prevent the completion of the repair.
> If you cannot get parts in stock (meaning in advance), you might as well send it to the Apple and not bother with repair shop at all.
Because that idea is BS, designed just to block 3rd party repair shops from doing quick repairs leaving you with the same (or worse) level of service that Apple itself offers.
Why on Earth would anyone need to provide SN of the phone to buy consumable such as battery? Makes no sense at all. Even the display is stupid because most of the time people come to the repair shop is because Apple takes 2 weeks & wipes data from device. Which is kinda problem for many people since they often don't have another $$$ for spare phone and also forgot to backup.
Almost any other vendor lets you buy parts such as LCD or battery and just swap it. And for most of the phones you can do that kind of work in under an hour.
As I said somewhere else, it probably depends on your location.
This also applies not only to the battery replacement but for screen as well. I've had to do that also and it also was not a 30 minute repair unfortunately. If it was, I would be quite happy and would not be so frustrated over this stuff.
Is it? That honestly doesn’t seem remotely credible.
You are claiming that there is a ‘location’ where Apple themselves in general need to send off a phone for a battery replacement, one of the most common repairs.
Which Apple Store was that? Where is it located? We can easily enough ask them what the general turnaround time for a battery replacement is.
Yes, it is. For both batteries and displays - across many different ocasions over the years. Unfortunately. That's why I let company I work for to buy me some nice repair equipment so I can atleast extract the data & do some things by myself.
Are you an actual Apple employee with some power to help me (or help the situation in general)? If so I'd be really glad and more than willing to share all my information with you! Let me know. We buy Apple products worth roughly ~$10-30k every year depending on the stuff we are getting so I'm afraid that we are not that big to be interesting by ourselves but we are certainly bigger than 3 iPhones a year :-)
I'd be the first person to actually celebrate having some official way to either repair my stuff or at the very least a way to get genuine parts without having to jump through multiple artificial hoops designed just to piss me off.
I can but unless you can help me, what's the point? Just to convince you? I have no vested interest in Apple - emotional or financial and thus I have no interest in fighting for (or against) Apple (or Android) fans.
By your own indirect admission you cannot change anything so why bother? I don't really care if you personally believe me or not. Sorry.
I think the point is that you’ve publicly claimed that this location exists and used it as part of an argument against Apple, but when asked to name it, you can’t.
An honest person would have no reason to hide the location. I think it’s fairly clear that you’ve been caught in a lie.
The good ol' "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear".
Your offer is that I should disclose information about my whereabouts so you can do nothing to help me. Well thank you for this opportunity but I think I will politely decline. :-D
As I said earlier: If you cannot help me at all, I have no interest in proving anything to you. Sorry.
Because the rear glass was very common to break and Apple would not replace it because its borderline impossible. Now it seems very likely that they will offer it as a reasonably priced repair.
Odd article considering everything is still software locked to the phone. Sure it's easier to repair, but if you get your parts from anywhere else than apple's program directly, a lot of features will stop working.
Hugh Jeffreys made a video interchanging parts on two brand new iphone's and it disabled a lot of things including auto-brightness.
This makes it easier for my technicians when customers lie by omission when they have had their device repaired someplace else and they bring it back to us for repair. It's not until we get into the repair and find out someone has stripped screws that can't be removed without extraction tools and replaced LSI's.
It's also nice for consumers who get their devices stolen strictly for parts. Preventing someone from basically chop shopping phones. I don't use iphone's but it's a nice feature. If the parts are serialized they could prevent your stolen iphone's camera from working in someone else's stolen iphone. Essentially locking the parts to a iphone that locked by an appleid.
The other thing is that Apple is trying to make things harder for people with large amounts of resources (think nation states) to exfiltrate data by using pwned components. Like when you take it into a repair shop, how do you know that the replacement part isn't compromised?
If I was replacing the front facing FaceID complex I sure as hell would want verifiable Apple gear and it to be paired to the phone. Why would I want some random person to be able to put something in my phone's biometric authentication path?
This exactly. To have a more secure device this is one of the trade offs. Can you imagine the articles if you could swap out faceID systems to unlock an encrypted iphone?
AFAIK face ID generates a key used to decrypt the data. Swapping the system wouldn't let you unlock it, unless it was performing a MitM against the user of the phone. Honestly most of the TPM and trusted enclave stuff Apple does is mostly to prevent that kind of MitM situation. For most users, I don't see it as a threat to worry about.
It’s even more impressive than that — the infrared dot pattern of every Face ID sensor is also physically unique. You can’t swap out Face ID sensors and keep the same enrolment data as a result because the replacement sensor will produce a slightly different pattern.
> Can you imagine the articles if you could swap out faceID systems to unlock an encrypted iphone?
Yes, the articles would go something like this: "WTF is wrong with Apple, did they intentionally implement 'security' in the worst possible way, by leaving the phone unencrypted and just using faceID as a lock screen?!"
That is what they'd have to do for your statement to make any sense, they'd have to leave the data unencrypted and just use a removable component as a pass or fail doorman. So the system would have always been unsecure, it would just be more obvious in this scenario.
I mean.. they could just show a pop-up after required passcode unlock: ‘your iPhone recently had its FaceID/brightness/battery/whatever swapped - do you wish to fully enable the replacement part for this iPhone?’
I do like both security and freedom. How do we get both in this scenario?
Have the iOS device ask the user for permission to allow unverified hardware to work? Also have a periodic reminder that unverified hardware is installed and the possible consequences?
> Have the iOS device ask the user for permission to allow unverified hardware to work?
Why is 'asking the user' out of the question? If Apple detects a non-OEM component, then give me a modal when I power the device on asking me if I want to enable it. I certainly don't trust Apple to make that decision for me, everything they've done in the past suggests that they're primarily motivated by increasing profit margins.
yeah, let the logged-in user re-pair (pun not entirely intended) their swapped-out components and log it somewhere for future technicians. Apple can also go an extra step to register stolen components to also show that once it is inserted into another devices. ofc there then needs to be some core to pair with but apple will figure it out.
Dont worry I do, the problem is all the other companies play "Follow the Apple"
The solution is never just "dont by apple if you do not like it" the solution is highlighting why it is bad, and getting people to pressure companies like Apple to change.
Right to Repair is movement, and it is winning. Part of right to repair includes resistance to parts serialization, and/or ensuring that approving new parts that are serialized is free and open to all end users not locked down to only "Authorized repair"
>the problem is all the other companies play "Follow the Apple"
Then blame the companies you buy from. You are not an Apple customer so they don't owe you anything. Frankly I'm tired of people that don't even buy the products constantly trying to dictate what those products should be.
You don't have to be an Apple customer to be affected by Apple's anticompetitive business practices. Apple's actions affect the whole market and all consumers in that market, that's the point behind antitrust law and litigation.
Easily, Apple and Google collude to maintain dominance in the mobile OS markets and leverage that duopoly to dominate other markets like mobile app distribution and mobile app payments. Google's app payments policy is now nearly identical to Apple's, you must use their payment platform to distribute apps on their app store. Just like Apple's policy to prevent competition in the mobile app payments market prevents app developers from even mentioning alternative payment methods in apps or app store listings, Google quickly followed suit and implemented the exact same anticompetitive policy.
Yes, it's just a coincidence that Apple and Google's anticompetitive policies in the mobile OS and app distribution markets have converged such that they are both practically identical and also allow them to leverage their dominance in those markets to dominate other markets like mobile app payments, as well.
Your "solution" to people buying products they love is "unrestrained ridicule"? Who hurt you that you have such disdain for people choosing to live the way the want? Look inside yourself and seek help dude.
> How much higher do the walls need to become before it's no longer reasonable to live outside Apple's garden?
Do you mean "How much longer do I have to watch people enjoy their cake before I give in and want to eat the cake too?"
I find it pretty absurd that people demand Apple do things differently because their choice of alternative feels the need to follow Apple instead of leading themselves.
You know, I bet somebody responded very similarly to a complaint about the first game studio to put loot boxes in their games. Now we are plagued by them.
"Don't like it? Well just make your own ____!" is another classic.
Weird, I have never played a game with lootboxes nor have I had to even think about avoiding it. Only supports my point that your fear of it affecting you is unfounded in reality.
Except I didn't say make your own, I said pick from the variety of competitors. Who are you to dictate what a third party does, especially when that third party's decisions are well liked by their customers? I don't want the "freedom" to put in cheap aftermarket parts in my high end device, I want it to work extremely well and it does.
No, that is what comes next - after somebody mentions Apple's part in the herpes like spread of chicklet keyboards.
> Who are you to dictate what a third party does...
Who are you to put words in my mouth? I've counseled something other than compulsion, I've suggested that you and apologists like you should be openly mocked for reasons that I can't list - because it would be bullying, run afoul of various codes of conduct, etc.
I don't understand your point, which effectively seems to be "not all games!"
This is actually a zero sum scenario, games that are pay-to-win would have been something else had the concept not been popularized. Even games that are completely structured around these gambling mechanics... no, they wouldn't necessarily be different games in an alternate reality - they'd just be a different use of the dev's time. So maybe a birdhouse. Also, if this was a derail attempt - well done, I'm now thinking about carpentry instead of how much I dislike Apple.
I don't see how bringing up a right wing conspiracy meme adds anything to what your parent said. Your biometrics should be processed and gathered by the most secure parts of the device, which means going through more hoops to get a replacement.
It is neither right wing nor a conspiracy, the fact that you believe both of those things seems to be commentary on your sources of news content more than anything
>Your biometrics should be processed and gathered by the most secure parts of the device, which means going through more hoops to get a replacement.
The problem here is not just limited to biometrics but even if it where many many many many people have posted long commentary on how it could be implemented in a way that is friendly to right to repair, nothing about security is in compatible with repair. NOTHING
Everyone keeps parroting this like it's 1995 but infinite resources doesn't really help you. In the US FBI case they happened to chain a few now patched exploits in the lightning port that did nothing except allow them the ability to brute force the password. Had the password been strong it would have been game over.
Regular, run of the mill encryption you can download at every corner store can withstand attacks from nation states.
> The other thing is that Apple is trying to make things harder for people with large amounts of resources (think nation states) to exfiltrate data by using pwned components.
Reflashing serial numbers of common i2c chips is routine, and not "harder."
It basically only deters self-taught repair shop owners, without electronics background.
Tracking serial numbers to black-list stolen parts (too much effort for too little value IMO but I'm not a bean counter for a nation-state-sized corporation so what do I know?) is very different from white-listing ordained parts.
Independent shops should be able to buy broken phones from individuals and part them out for repairs without jumping through Apple's hoops.
> Independent shops should be able to buy broken phones from individuals and part them out for repairs without jumping through Apple's hoops.
I assume in this scenario that all independent shops are trustworthy entities that won't use stolen, reclaimed, or third-party parts in order to save money, without informing the customer?
Apple could provide a genuine parts and stolen parts tracking tool for the most valuable parts: screen, camera, motherboard.
The goal is to make stolen iPhones worth nearly zero to thieves, which makes iPhones more valuable to all iPhone owners. Otherwise stolen iPhones are worth enough to incentivise a stolen iPhone economy. https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/iPhone_13/Screens Not having your phone stolen is worth your replacement cost to you.
I am much more likely to need a phone serviced than have a phone stolen.
Apple should protect me from a repair monopoly overcharging just enough such that a new device (also sold by said monopoly) looks more appealing than a repair.
Probably a combination of missing calibrations and the software locking. It seems better to fail visibly than to have a device silently phoning home that it is non-genuine.
> It's also nice for consumers who get their devices stolen strictly for parts. Preventing someone from basically chop shopping phones. I don't use iphone's but it's a nice feature. If the parts are serialized they could prevent your stolen iphone's camera from working in someone else's stolen iphone. Essentially locking the parts to a iphone that locked by an appleid.
A notification that says "this iPhone has stolen parts", some cooperation with the police, etc. could all work without locking down the part. There are a million ways to do it that don't involve destroying the planet and stomping on consumer rights.
Also, getting past the serial number lock isn't that hard. It's hard for the typical random asshole who steals phones, but not for someone knowledgeable enough to buy stolen phones to do repairs. Just search for "iphone screen programmer" on eBay and you'll find them selling for around ~$90.
$90 + an aftermarket screen is still less than what Apple charges for a repair, DIY or not.
You can sign things without locking them though. The utility you're speaking of is identification, what's the utility for a user in locking a device against repair?
Apple probably report way more data than a list of part IDs already.
> interchanging parts on two brand new iphone's and it disabled a lot of things including auto-brightness.
I think one problem is not being discussed enough is iPhones being stolen for parts (since in most cases they can't be reactivated). I strongly suspect inability to simply switch parts without remote authorisation is Apple's way to address the problem.
Okay, let's discuss it then. Why do I need Apple's consent to repair the device I paid for? Why is there no way for me to (even temporarily) disable this feature if I actually want to fix my phone?
All parts are 'potentially stolen', that's just a scary thing that John Deere and Apple says to justify their first-party stranglehold on repairs. Louis Rossmann and co. use donor parts for repairs all the time. If they own and can unlock the donor Macbook/iPhone, they should be able to attest that the device is being used for parts/repair and disable the protection. I see no potential for abuse here, and it prevents more iPhones from becoming landfill. Win/win, since Apple cares about the environment so much!
If I own my device and can enter the password on it, I should be able to decide which software features are enabled and disabled. That shouldn't be a controversial opinion.
The amount of uncritical comments in any post around apple on HN is usually quite something, I wouldn't get too excited about that. Its mainly US website so that's to be expected.
That being said, there are some good points raised here by folks. If you don't like how Apple does things overall, there are mighty fine competitors that provide even more in some areas and are not Chinese, but they do charge premium for their quality too. Just expect some similar/other limitations there too.
The problem is that we should be able to choose, not Apple. Overriding Apple's software choices should not necessitate leaving the ecosystem, period. Especially considering Apple is the largest company in the world, it shouldn't be a problem for them to add a few toggles. We need regulation to hold them accountable for these simple options, but knowing Apple (and how deep in bed they are with the US government) this won't happen.
I agree though, and I've been moving myself away from Apple products since Catalina. The water is now lukewarm, and this little frog doesn't intend to be around when they put the lid on the pot.
You chose to buy it knowing that's how it works. As a user I find this an extremely compelling feature that my phone is close to worthless to anyone who would try to steal it.
I suspect if you gave most users the choice between theft proof and aftermarket part swapping, they would pick theft proof. Considering you can buy parts from Apple or take the phone in to a store to have it fixed at a very fair price.
Theft resistant would be more accurate, as it's certainly not theft proof. An iphone screen can be trivially reprogrammed to bypass that serial number check with a ~$90 device on ebay.
> Considering you can buy parts from Apple or take the phone in to a store to have it fixed at a very fair price.
What is a "fair" price? After market screens can be found online for incredibly cheap. I replaced my XS Max display myself in 10 minutes using a kit I bought for ~$50 on Amazon with free 2 day shipping.
Sure, I don't have "true tone" anymore, and the display is an inferior LCD rather than an IPS, but I don't care. It looks great, works great, and it beats paying Apple $329.
Really this just means that the implementation needs more work, not that the idea is wrong. With more secure hardware, you realistically could make stolen parts useless. Combined with the ability to track a turned off phone with the Find My network, theft keeps getting harder while the potential payout does not get any higher.
The main problem with after market parts is there is often not informed choice. These parts very frequently advertise themselves official or equivalent to official. With fake specs, fake labels, and fake brands. And then these phones get resold on to others who have no way of knowing that the reason their experience is compromised is due to fake parts.
Ideally Apple would present some kind of UI to the user which allows them to unregister the parts of their phone and allow them to be used in another phone for genuine swaps of owned devices. And allowing the installation of non genuine parts with some on boot message explaining exactly which parts are not genuine. So on sale the new owner knows what they are getting.
> With more secure hardware, you realistically could make stolen parts useless.
I really doubt that. People always find a way around these types of things, especially for something as popular as an iPhone. It's all effectively DRM, which has never been fool-proof in any implementation as far as I know, whether it be hardware or software. It's not like Apple has some magic super secure supply chain. Internal manuals get leaked and parts stolen off assembly lines all the time.
> The main problem with after market parts is there is often not informed choice. These parts very frequently advertise themselves official or equivalent to official. With fake specs, fake labels, and fake brands.
The same could be said about literally everything. Counterfeits are not a new phenomenon, it's just a fact of life (especially on the internet, and particularly on Amazon)
> ...And then these phones get resold on to others who have no way of knowing that the reason their experience is compromised is due to fake parts.
> ... And allowing the installation of non genuine parts with some on boot message explaining exactly which parts are not genuine. So on sale the new owner knows what they are getting.
The argument you're making here is that Apple should inflict major harms on consumers in order to marginally improve their business. By preventing independent repairs via serial number locking, Apple is able to ensure that second-hand iPhones are higher quality, and the people who buy them are more likely to be impressed and will want to buy a brand new iPhone in the future. That minor benefit to Apple's business/brand should be more important than the damage to consumers' wallets, rights, and the planet.
Everyone has their own view of the world and value systems. This reasoning just seems bonkers to me, but I understand that we're probably completely different people with polar opposite viewpoints on this, and you probably think my views are insane. I can respect that. I'm not going to change your mind about it, and you're not going to change mine. So I think the conclusion here is to end this discussion on mutual disagreement.
As a customer you don't need "Apple's consent". Just drop the phone to a repair shop of your choosing. As a repair servicemen, you need Apple's consent presumably because they don't want you buying stolen iPhones for parts.
This does coincide with Apple changing Applecare+ to cover an unlimited number of incidents. Their motivation was simply to streamline their own internal repairs?
That "unlimited" thing only impacts a very small number of devices. It is a better headline than reality. Previously you could have two accidental damage incidents PER YEAR, which means four for a standard Applecare+ 24 months plan.
How many people, realistically, had over four accidental damage incidents in a two-year period wherein they benefit from this "unlimited" change? As I said, it is good marketing, a very niche change in reality.
I don't even have a case on my phone (and never have on any phone in the past) and have never had an incident. I know at least 5 people that have broken their phones more than 4 times per year and they all use cases. Some people just do not treat their electronics like the expensive devices they are.
I do not use cases, and have dropped my naked iPhone 13 Pro Max many many times (with $29 screen replacements via AppleCare, I'm fine taking the risk). This phone has literally hit concrete and has yet to crack, a testament to the durability improvements.
Not to mention I've dropped mine a LOT. scratched up screen, dings in the sides, everything. (No case/protection at all too) It definitely withstands daily use. Dropping it 4-5 times a day every day however probably slowly chips away at the sturdiness of the device.
> Some people just do not treat their electronics like the expensive devices they are
Phones hit the floor sometimes. It just happens and it is normal in daily use.
You aren't wrong that phones are expensive devices but your comment oozes a toxic elitist "PEBCAK" attitude similar to something like "The antennas are VERY well designed you're just holding it wrong"*
Of course they do. Most phones, iPhones included, can withstand the occasional drop without any issue. That's clearly not what we're talking about here.
That's fair - but "the rigors of daily use" as parent post wrote absolutely include resilience and resistance to physical damage if/when a fall happens.
I agree dropping a phone every day is not accurate, but the risk exists with "the rigors of daily use".
Well, anecdotally, I've had every other iPhone since the original and use it daily and have never had it break or otherwise needed to replace/repair it. People who use terms like "rigors of daily use" typically always mean wanton abuse.
Absolutely, and I've said as much in earlier replies. My point is that the iPhone is one of the most durable phones on the market and easily handles daily wear and tear. The issue is that most people who say things like that, though, seem to think that "daily wear and tear" means constantly and regularly dropping your phone, corner first, on concrete. Physics has its limits.
I've been thinking about a future where deepfakes/AI are more everyday (which is soon).
I can imagine Apple doing some kind of hardware-level signing of camera and video data, so that any image shot by an iPhone/iPad would have a signature declaring that is was not edited by the user in any way. Details on whether RAW or any kind of auto-cleanup could be included.
In other words, a chain-of-custody kind of thing so that images can be asserted as real vs. created by a computer.
Depending on how such a system would be implemented, this would require "real Apple hardware" from the ground up.
I can imagine Apple doing some kind of hardware-level signing of camera and video data, so that any image shot by an iPhone/iPad would have a signature declaring that is was not edited by the user in any way.
This exists, and is why the (Canon?) cameras used by police departments at crime scenes are so expensive.
Cryptographic signatures are _meant_ to be decoded and verified.
If you want to take a signature you need to extract a secret key from an iPhone in this scenario, which would be probably stored in the secure enclave.
I think that what you are saying is valid, but this should still be celebrated as a win for consumers. You don't have to see something as all good or all bad.
Rooting even those easily fixable Android, with unlocked bootloader and coming with Android One still voids the warranty and might break cameras. Unlocking more potential of a software, breaks hardware.
Exactly! One important argument for Right to Repair is the environment. If I cannot salvage parts from a dead phone then it'll be e-waste. This doesn't help the consumer nor the environment, but it will definitely affect Apple's pockets in a positive way.
Yeah I've done this. It somehow keeps getting turned back on wether it gets grazed by my finger, an update happens and resets the setting, or whatever else.
I'm saying i want a way that disables it and then prevents it from ever being re-enabled.
I have replaced screens an a couple different models of Motorola phones, and the screens popped off the front. Just looking at my Pixel 5a, the screen clearly pops off the front.
This wouldn't bother me as much, except it is on the ifixit web site, which posts videos on screens repairs, that clearly show any number of Android phones being opened from the front.
Apple Care + is going to become an insane profit center and an absolute no brainer when purchasing a new Apple device.
This puts Apple’s recent “no limit to accidental repairs” policy update in perspective. When I saw that I said, “well I guess this is how they are going to use their cash reserves, because no way will this be net profitable”
To boot, I always wondered why it was so cheap - $200 for AC+ then $29 per screen or back replacement. When considering the employee time and equipment, that’s absolutely a loss.
As someone that just wants good things in the world, this makes my heart flutter. It’s wonderfully aligned with customers and does good for the bottom line.
Sorry to all my fellow repair brethren still slogging it out there. Accuse me of being a fanboy - but this is amazing.
[Edit]: This may potentially eat into the phone case market as well. The feel of a bare iPhone is that much better and you can put the cost of the case toward AC+.
$200 per year plus $30 per repair is still a lot. How often do you smash your phone?
Generally insurance is never positive-EV for the buyer unless peace of mind is considered, and to that I say, it's cheaper to find peace with the risk of breaking your phone.
Until it doesn't. I also gamble with this because I've never damaged my phone ever and I've had an iPhone since the OG. I'm not under any delusion, though, that this streak will last forever. I think I would currently need to damage/replace my phone twice to come out in the negative but that's still a possibility. I've been extremely careful and/or lucky.
That doesn't mean that everyone has the same experience as you, though. All it takes is for you to damage your device 1 more time than usual for it to be worth it.
Yeah but Apple has probably found that on average the insurance isn't worth buying, otherwise they wouldn't offer it at this price. I guess it's worth buying if you know you're gonna break your phone even more frequently than the average AppleCare+ user does (which is likely more than the average iPhone user), but those $30 fees and the waiting time to repair a phone aren't free.
AppleCare has always been a loss for Apple. The entire repair division is a loss for them. They don't make a profit from repairs. This update is partially marketing spin but, for a lot of users, it was worth buying before and is now even more of a value. If you look at the things that Apple prioritizes, they want to disincentivize self-repair because any quality variations reflect on them whether they did the repair or not.
Do you have a source for this? AppleCare+ for a MacBook Air is $250. You can get a 4 year 3rd party extended warranty for a similarly priced laptop off Amazon for $170. Presumably they make money off this but don't have advantages that Apple does like at cost repair parts.
Are Apple products such garbage or so hard to repair that shorter more expensive warranties lose money? Seriously?
I’ve been a Mac service technician at an Apple Store for almost a decade. I’ve had an extremely competitive wage for the entire time vs other jobs of this level, I get RSUs, and a very comprehensive benefits package even though I’m currently part-time. me and my team are expensive for what we are (essentially, just retail workers).
The majority of appointments I take on the Genius Bar in a day have no charge; software/iCloud issues, data migrations, or just how-to questions are free and unlimited. Most, though certainly not all, repairs are done in warranty.
Yes, repairs are often expensive, but when I think about the daily operating costs and salaries of my entire team vs how much revenue we bring in per paid repair transaction, I can’t see how repair costs & AC sales cover even half of it. That’s to say nothing of the extremely busy call centres that Apple waived the per-call fees for over five years ago.
Take that for what it’s worth, but when you see how much traffic flows to and from the Genius Bar every day with no money ever changing hands, it would take a lot to convince me that AC is a profit centre, and not a huge loss leader.
Yes. You can look at every earnings statement they've released for the last 10 years or so. There are also articles that made a stink about it a while ago. Here's one but there are plenty more like it: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/11/20/apple-says-repair...
3rd party extended warranties don't work the same way as the repair program. With a 3rd party warranty, they don't have to fix it with an equal part and they can also swap out the machine for a refurbished one.
Not if they're swapping with a machine that they refurbished. They can keep swapping them ad infinitum. That's what Asurion does with cell phone warranty claims. You pay a $150 deductible and you get a refurbished phone in exchange. They fix the part that was broken on your phone that you're returning to them and it gets refurbed to the next person.
Yes, but they don't have to use genuine Apple parts or verify any of it through Apple's services. With Apple's repairs, they disassemble the devices and re-use the parts for service. With these third parties, they don't have to use parts that are at parity with the originals.
I don't buy that Apple repairs are a loss given that third-party repairs can still be profitable at lower prices, but even if they are, it doesn't mean AppleCare is a loss vs making users pay per repair.
It's not clear there what counts towards the revenue and towards costs, since third-party repair shops are involved. I want to know if one user taking a phone to Apple for repair costs them more than the user pays, and they don't really say, nor is it a simple answer with all the fixed costs and shared resources involved (like, stores have footprints, and geniuses do other stuff too). Third-party repair shops are a much simpler situation since they only repair stuff, and at moderate scale. They're somehow profitable on their own, unless Apple is subsidizing them.
Also, the title is from Apple's PR in one of those congressional hearings where they're responding to (often over-simplified) complaints of anti-competitive behavior. It's going to be spun like none other. Apple also claims a way higher effective tax rate in Europe than what they're regularly accused of, and calculated some way they're probably technically correct.
Surely those responses would be under such intense scrutiny, from several different angles, to say that it's simply nonsense being spun to its maximum.
It’s exactly my point that everyone has to make their own decision based on their risk profile. It’s far from a clear case that AC+ always makes sense.
Then, in that case, I agree. I just felt like you were downplaying the number of people that actually do benefit from it and would benefit more with the recent change.
I don't know, the amount of people who aren't tech savvy that I know who contact me because they know I'm tech savvy tells me that a lot more "normal people" can find advantages in AC+ than us tech savvy people who take better care of our devices.
I know since meeting my gf who is tech dumb, my device is more beaten up than it ever had been before due to just her using it randomly here and there.
This is my experience as well. As I've stated elsewhere, I've never needed to use an AppleCare repair myself but I know at least 5 people that have had multiple repairs done within a single year.
It's definitely easy to imagine breaking even if you have the more expensive "AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss" plan where you can replace your phone twice a year for a $149 deductible.
In 13 years of using smartphones, I've needed exactly one out-of-warranty screen repair. And I don't even use a case. Not buying AppleCare+ has definitely saved me money.
I can't see how Apple really loses money on this move unless people just start throwing their $1,000 pocket computers on the ground.
Maybe not for iphones, but macbooks have a habit of dying on me. My 10 day old macbook pro's logic board died and the replacement new macbook's palm rest started giving clicking sound within 10 days again. How can i be so unlucky. Apple certainly is overlooking QC with macbooks.
I qualified my statement with "out of warranty". I have had to take <12 month old devices that had defects crop up and have them repaired, but those repairs were free and did not require me to have AppleCare+.
A logic board randomly dying 10 days after purchase would certainly be covered under the factory warranty.
What I wanted to convey with the extreme examples was that macbooks die more often due to QC issue or something. They have died after the first year of warranty thrice on me.
Due to this it is certainly mandatory to buy applecare+ for macbooks. I have not used iphones after the 5s so can't comment on that but it seems they have less problem than Macs.
You can even pay it monthly, which probably costs $9.99 per month. Anecdote: I was on my seventh monthly payment when I accidentally smashed unassembled IKEA furniture on my phone at an IKEA store and broke the entire back glass and cameras. The technician noticed small cracks on the screen too that didn't actually bother me, but bothered him enough to swap the entire device.
It doesn't cost Apple $1000 to make a new phone, but they miss out on $1000 of revenue if that person would otherwise buy a new iPhone.
But maybe the person doesn't buy a new one. The cost of the consumer replacing a years-old iPhone is the used price. Personally I would never buy a used iPhone from eBay or something anymore, since there are too many gotchas with SIM locking and whatnot, but Apple also sells older models at a discounted price.
Totally speculating here. I wonder if this is preparing for a future where Apple encounters supply issues or pricing pressure caused by environmental and political turmoil. I could see the average lifespan of devices continuing to increase and more people using repair services. It also makes it easier to refurb devices for second hand use.
This design isn't more resilient vs supply chain problems in any obvious way but my guess is the next iPhone SE will be a derivative of the iPhone 14. Lowering repair costs paves the way to Apple offering leased phones and is directly aligned with a shift towards services revenue.
Now is probably a good time because it seems like there is less pressure for new features. Apple is so far ahead of the rest right now that they can afford to release almost exactly the same phone a second time and it wont hurt.
I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way.
I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly integrate with the hardware. Repairing a broken part with a third-party is exactly the opposite of tight integration. If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product. It’s not like the phone and computer markets are monopolies either. Androids and PCs of all form factors and OSes exist.
It would make more sense to me to call for regulation against pricing abuse for the repairs of tightly integrated products. The Right to Repair movement as it stands just doesn’t resonate much with me, nor do I agree with it, because integrated products that come with everything you need make for great user experiences.
Apple has proven with this iPhone (as have other manufacturers) that these goals don't need to be mutually exclusive. You can have wild products designed in all manner of ways (with satellite connectivity!!!), they just need to be user-servicable. That's not an unreasonable request for a company with 200 billion dollars sitting in their R&D coffers.
Right-to-repair regulation isn't about stifling innovation, it's about giving the consumer leverage in the lifecycle of the product they own. Before now, Apple has gone out of their way to make life as hard as possible on third-party repair shops - that shouldn't be an engineering incentive. Regulation gives us the power to force Apple to put consumers before profit margins, and innovation somewhere in between.
So if our goal is to prolong the lifecycle of consumer electronics, then repairability isn’t a necessary metric.
If regulators instead went after service pricing abuse, that would force companies like Apple to drive down their repair prices—which might force them to design their hardware in a more modular manner, but not necessarily, so that if it becomes negligibly cheap to manufacture and replace the entire part of a less modular architecture, then they still have the freedom to design electronics in a less modular architecture. Repairability, considering the arbitrariness of the level of modularity that it stops, really does seem like a constraint on innovation.
User-serviceability is another unnecessary requirement, in my opinion, and in this regard, regulators can go after service availability. Electronics manufacturers who insist on tight integration of their products should make their repair services highly available, which seems like a fair trade-off.
The most obvious option to me seems to be price controls, which historically have been a very blunt instrument and as far as I know, most economists recommend against them.
Err… it doesn’t have to be price controls? It could be as simple as an investigation to their pricing strategy and seeing whether the markup is obscene or not. Of course what is obscene is relative, but that’s why you investigate, so that you can see abuse on a case-to-case basis.
Also, how is this level of regulatory inspection invasive? The architectural tight integration almost guarantees that the device manufacturer has a monopoly on servicing their products—it’s just that the monopoly is being allowed because it’s the kind that allows for innovation. The regulatory crackdown would be fair and justifiable.
Now that is moving the goalpost, and hard. A senate inquiry or a class action suit (that Apple doesn’t have to lose by the way) is not how “price control” is defined, and even if such cases swing in the way of consumers, there’s no general rule that specifies how much Apple should lower their service pricing.
>Apple has gone out of their way to make life as hard as possible on third-party repair shops
No they haven't. They just had no reason to prioritize or put effort into making sure that third-party repair shops had an easy time to do this. Not putting effort into something isn't the same as actively putting effort into making things more difficult.
That is an incredibly ignorant statement. Pairing parts with the SOC is a security feature. The intent is to increase security with the side-effect being a more difficult repair process. You're acting like they did it with the purpose of trying to hinder self-repair. If that was the case, they wouldn't be taking any measures to make self-repair easier.
> You're acting like they did it with the purpose of trying to hinder self-repair.
That’s certainly one interpretation. What’s the security rationale behind disabling functions if you don’t pair the phone’s replacement glass panel? Or if you take a genuine battery from another phone (since Apple doesn’t sell them for most models directly) and put it in your phone? It’s a genuine battery but it’ll nag you and disable functionality because you didn’t pair it with your phone using software Apple didn’t release.
This goes beyond security and is downright hostile to user repair.
Both of those questions are easily answerable with a simple Google search.
1. >disabling functions if you don’t pair the phone’s replacement glass panel?
That's not what's happening. The "glass panel", as you put it, is the same part as the FaceID and TouchID sensors. They're cryptographically paired so that someone doesn't replace that part with a compromised sensor that would allow them access to the device. If you're referring to the back glass, then it needs to be paired to the hardware only on newer devices because of the Magsafe functionality and the fact that the cameras are built into the back. Compromising the back panel could allow an attacker access to any photos taken with the camera or, in some cases, access to data on the phone via the Magsafe connection.
2. >take a genuine battery from another phone (since Apple doesn’t sell them for most models directly) and put it in your phone
The only functionality that's disabled when this happens is the health measurement of the battery because there's no way to tell if the battery being installed is brand new unless the chain of trust for the hardware is intact. It doesn't nag you at all. It simply says on the battery health screen that the battery that's installed can't be verified. It doesn't affect the usage of the phone at all outside of the battery health display.
You're either being disingenuous or just outright lying here.
Alright, sure, putting a genuine battery and disabling some functionality is perfectly reasonable, let’s say. The battery fully knows it’s health, the number of cycles and charge levels are tracked by the chip inside the battery itself. The phone can and 100% does know exactly the condition of the battery. But you replaced it without involving Apple so the battery health functionality is disabled. Perfectly reasonable.
Just in case, what about auto brightness on the iPhone 14? If you swap the display with a genuine one from another iPhone 14, auto brightness is now disabled which means that your screen is black every time you unlock the phone and you have to manually go and crank the brightness up again (without actually seeing anything in the display) every time you unlock the phone.
I’m sure this makes the phone way safer too and is actually intended for your own good rather than being actively hostile to self repair by making the phone obnoxious to use as a result.
Design is a balancing of constraints, some of which are constraints of the product of the design, and some of which are constraints of the process. Repairability is a constraint, and when that constraint becomes stricter something else has to give. Maybe this is more expensive to manufacture (and given the massive price hike in europe it wouldn’t surprise me), maybe this design took up a lot of designer hours, which held up other products. Whatever the trade-off is, it must be real.
My point is: improved repairability always comes at the expense of something else.
Seems to me like Apple was more innovative when they had fewer employees and fewer resources, so perhaps we should break up the company in order to increase innovation.
I think this is kind of a strange position to take when the article is demonstrating you wouldn’t even notice the increased repairability as a consumer. What tight integrations were lost in Apple’s redesign?
Increased repairability != enough repairability, as per the comments here. Beyond the article, Apple products still aren’t as repairable as the Right to Repair Movement would like, because people still have to peruse thousand-page highly technical manuals and buy specialized equipment if they wanted to fix certain parts of their Apple devices.
You're conflating multiple issues. Having the right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair. I think we've gone too far down the road of not owning anything we buy, and thus having no rights to use things outside of narrow legal agreements nobody even reads.
Making the device easier to repair is also desirable, both for Apple and for third parties, because these things break all the time and need to be repaired. It saves everyone time and reduces waste.
> right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair
Huh? If the act of repairing is difficult (and extremely, in Apple’s case), then do you actually have the right, or is it only a right on paper? Is Right to Repair nothing more than printing out manuals no matter how difficult the process of repair itself is?
No, it's an important distinction. Right to repair is more about a company a) not being legally entitled to punish you for repairing yourself , and b) not making design or manufacturing choices specifically to make it harder (e.g. sealing a component against water ingress may make it harder to repair but is an acceptable trade off, sealing it just to make it hard to repair isn't).
The nature of the device itself may make for difficult repairs, but that's a different issue.
Nobody actively wants it to be difficult, but if you don't even have the actual legal right to modify the hardware or software it doesn't matter how easy it is.
> If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product.
This, a million times. I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product.
And because many of us are hackers/makers/programmers/tinkerers, one of those priorities is the ability to have all of the above, but also unfettered access to the internals to modify it as we please.
It’s like… this car is perfect for my needs in every way, and far and above the best in its class. But I want it to run on hydrogen, so if they could just do that, it’d be perfect. Why are they forcing me to run on electric?
> I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product.
Just because a product is a runaway success does not mean it's also not a potential environmental disaster waiting to happen. Cars were also a runaway success. So were plastic bags and straws. So was snake oil and so are various sugary fizzy drinks that destroy your health.
We can't just leave everything to the free market and the uninformed preferences of the consumers and watch everything around us burn because $THING is successful because $CORPORATION advertises it and consumers love it, otherwise we end up in the dystopian Idiocracy scenario of "Brawndo is what plants crave because it has electrolytes and is the no. 1 thirst mutilator".
That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us.
> That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us.
Yes, I agree completely. But I wasn't talking about regulation, I was talking about tinkerer users not understanding how the delicate balance achieved by a product is the reason that it is successful and good.
To note, it would be a waste of everyone’s time to scrutinize a product that has almost no users; it would need to have a really atrocious effect to make it worth considering.
It’s exactly because it’s a runaway success that people care about repairability, environmental impact etc.
Even if that was entirely true, I am fine with regulation leaning on manufacturers to make products that aren't full of soldered ram and storage, glued shut so even their own techs have trouble repairing them, because of the implications for generating mountains of avoidable e-waste. The ability to fix to fix your own gear is just a nice plus of that arrangement, I agree it won't be of use to most people, but it's still a plus.
I have been of the same opinion (and I guess I still am, albeit less strongly). However, user wants aside, easily repairable products are better ecology-wise.
I want Apple to be allowed to create any device they want, but I think iPhone and Mac repairability can be currently improved without noticably hurting features. Prioritizing it would be the right trade off to do. In that case they should go for it (as they apparently decided to do).
Even without fighting for regulation, we can still celebrate companies when they decide to create repairable products with long term software support and complain about them when they don't.
A regulation that I would like to see would be to perhaps force 'makers' to sell genuine spare parts to anyone (same goes for Tesla and others).
Repairability and device thinness are by no means mutually exclusive IMO.
When LTT did a review of the Framework laptop for example they also did a size comparison with a similarly specced Dell laptop and found that the framework both thinner and sturdier than the Dell laptop, next to being obviously more repairable ¯\_( ツ )_/¯
If any company can figure out how to do it and be a tight integrated product that works amazingly, it's Apple.
Let's not forget, this is also about reducing e-waste and it's not an option anymore to dump new phones because one part broke and you can't repair yourself.
If there's any company that cares about e-waste and could do this, it would be Apple. They're the only company, from what I can see, that does any kind of changes with regard to an eye on environmental sustainability.
Third parties are perfectly capable of making replacement parts that match the OEM parts in functionality and quality. This has no effect on integration. The other parts of the phone don't care who manufactured the part, unless they were programmed to, as long as they are functionally equivalent. The user certainly doesn't care who manufactured the part as it does not effect the user experience.
3rd parties are very much not able to match. Just do a side by side of screen quality and battery life. That is what upsets a customer more than anything - but they never know exactly why.
(Old 3rd party repair shop; thousands of data points)
I think when you look at it from a profit-driven lens, though, third-parties are always going to have to compromise on something to keep costs down in order to make a profit. Apple, historically, overcompensates on its parts and has higher tolerances so, in order for a third-party to be able to make replacement parts at significant enough profits, they need to be parts that don't match the OEM in quality or function, by definition.
Just look at screen repairs. Apple checks in software to verify the integrity of some of the hardware in screens and, in the past, it led to people being locked out of their devices when they were repaired with screens that had dummy FaceID/TouchID sensors.
There are substantial externalities to commercializing products that cannot be repaired. Fantastic amounts of non-biodegradable waste, overconsumption of nonrenewable material resources, and of course financial loss to consumers and opportunity cost to the secondary market. "Just choose not to buy the product" is only sensible if choosing not to buy the product fully insulates you from the effects of its existence.
Regulation places the cost of those externalities and/or the responsibility to prevent them back in the lap of the manufacturer.
Couldn’t recyclability and repairability be mutually independent, though? It sounds possible to me that a product that is not highly repairable could still be highly recyclable just because its shattered parts can still be reprocessed into new products.
Repairability and reusability precede recyclability in effectiveness. Anything you can take to a shop to swap a broken part, or list on a secondary market as a "fixer upper phone" beat out whatever Apple's internal recycling process does.
The iPhone 14 more or less proves that you can build a device as thin and sleek as Apple and still have it reasonably repairable.
I think the same is true of Macbooks. There is no real reason that the SSD has to be soldered to the motherboard, Apple could easily put the NAND chips on a slim socketed daughterboard (they already do this on the Mac Studio).
I won't say that every laptop needs to be built like the Framework, but I do think that any component that could be considered a "wear item" (batteries, NAND flash, OLED screens) should be designed to be replaced.
Right to repair is a societal and environmental topic. You personally not seeing a benefit to it is mostly beside the point: think about battery disposal laws, toxic material regulations, wireless power limitations, available frequencies, etc. These mostly matter at scale, taking input from single individuals would probably not land on the right trade-offs for the society as a whole.
"Right to repair" laws don't require manufacturers to design their products to be easy to repair. It is about mandating the selling of replacement components to third parties. Just because they sell replacement components doesn't mean the products need to be designed to have their components easily replaced.
I think for me repairability comes down to: how long do you think this phone is supposed to be usable? Even if you don't own it (have gifted or sold it). Probably an ecological argument there.
Primarily, given there is no up-to-date free/opensource phone OS (not to mention baseband software updates) after Apple iOS support ends... the phone can realistically only last till then unless you want to use legacy software (I have one relative who has such a device - but I'd not want one myself).
Imho you're missing the point, or at least, you've stated a valid conclusion but the point lies below.
Sure, by tightly integrating you are getting material benefits (size, consumption, optimization, etc). But by doing this, you go further down into high-tech, which means complexity and energy intensive build/repair/dispose [1]. At this point i'm reformulating your tradeoff, in which you choose the material benefits.
Now, one part of the right-to-repair movement comes from "low-tech" underpinning and objects the material benefits. Indeed, the point of a smartphone is not to crunch some machine instructions, it's to communicate with friends/family/world, interact with network services etc. Crunching code is just a byproduct of reaching this goal. It's even the same with supercomputers which one could think as performance-oriented: their goal is not to do the peta-flops, it's to solve some simulations at a given precision level. Nothing is built just for fun (or should): if you build a tool you better have a problem. And if you forget the goal, your tool will most likely be garbage. This is the objection of the r2r/lowtech movement: it's an assertion that a lot of high-tech has lost the sight of it's actual use and hence is hindering progress more than anything else.
This is a direct opposition with the pov which is widespread in modern western tech thinking that "if you build the tool they will use it". Obviously this pov has some depth to it, it's not completely nonsense (in the sense that creative and explorative processes are useful, i know i'm myself doing research in foundations of math). But this pov is also very extreme, and is in fact a corner-stone of the offer-driven production that is hegemonic today (with market economies). This same offer-driven production is also posing many social problems because of the need for aggressive marketing, problems with long-term stable availability of basic goods, with the focus on big/fast/shiny. We've gone too far into that direction and that a part of the reason for the pollution and resource exhaustion crisis (being themselves big parts of the climate and biosphere crisis going on rn).
The position of r2r/lowtech is obviously not to go to the other extreme which would be completely planned production based on somehow knowing what needs to be done (which we already see cannot really work and is very conservative by nature). But there has to be a balance. My position: the bulk of the energy-intensive and stable mass-manufacturing of basic known-to-be-useful-and-desirable goods should be done by planning, with open standards, user-groups, cheap repair, and some fraction of the resources should be reserved to the free-for-all market-driven exploratory research. Obviously this poses a couple problem with the fat cats running mass-manufacturing and other commodity services.
Hope this was a balanced explanation of the position.
[1] The matter will be ordered on a smaller scale so: (1) to build it you need to put a lot of energy into putting everything in order (entropy!); (2) to repair you both have to diagnose a complex thing and then act on it precisely; (3) to dispose of properly you need to put a lot of energy into separating everything again (entropy again!). Here i say "energy" in a large sense, this energy might be embodied as direct energy put into the process but also as human time, dependency on high-tech tooling (hence cost), etc. Another concept linked to this is "capital intensity".
> I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish.
No one should have the "right" to create products that turn to garbage when any part of it breaks. A clean planet is more important than "great user experiences". The second thing that they did it only for profit, is ergonomics of new repairable iphone any worse?
Also "software locked" parts should be banned by EU regulators.
The EU preserving the rights of people to steal your phone and sell it for parts would go well with their trying to preserve the rights of people installing malware on it.
Feels like the real reason to not allow alt browsers would be because it results in Chrome being the only browser anyone uses. Firefox is already effectively dead and Safari can't be ignored because having a website broken on safari means ios users can't use it, rather than being able to tell them to install chrome for the "best experience"
Pretending like there's a healthy market for browsers because one monopoly is standing in front of the other monopoly is not ideal. If Chrome finally gets that 90% market share, maybe regulators will finally start doing something.
...well, except for Edge which is a third monopoly in this equation forcing itself onto unsuspecting consumers. Even if it's still Chrome under the hood, that probably looks like "healthy competition" from the clueless people at the FTC.
Web browsers, like communism, is a red herring. There would be absolutely no point to using alternative browser engines on an iPhone unless they got super special second party access. Not being able to run any downloaded code, no JIT, or extensions would make them useless, and allowing those things effectively breaks the iOS security model. Most obviously with screen time, and parental control, but Apple also disables their JIT in lockdown mode.
I think the sanest compromise would be adopting Firefox, Chrome, and/or Edge as second party browsers. I guess we will see what happens in 2024 because I doubt it will be opening the floodgates.
Apple's own code also implements all the security of the device. The mechanism Apple has to run arbitrary untrusted code on the device is their JavaScript engine. Whatever you want to replace JSC with, like V8, isn't the thing that's constrained by the sandbox, it's the thing that implements the sandbox.
Everyone who's like "just sandbox it" -- yeah that's exactly what JSC is for.
Sorta kinda, iOS apps are jailed using all the normal stuff you might find in a hardened Linux distribution but there isn't a system in the whole wide world that is confident that these kinds of jails are sufficient to safely run arbitrary untrusted code. This is half the reason Firecracker exists on Linux because containerization just isn't enough. Hence why it's only allowed to run actually sandboxed in the JavaScript VM and even then the JIT makes it not airtight. This is how past Jailbreak exploits worked.
Like we're talking about code running in a VM completely isolated from the host system but has one teeeeny tiny escape hatch, a single WX page used by the JIT and that has been exploited multiple times.
Web browsers could be given super special access or some other suitable sandbox. We know how to do it, even if it comes with some tradeoffs.
Communism is a thought experiment about how people might organize if we ever achieved post-scarcity. We haven't yet figured out how to achieve post-scarcity. We have absolutely no idea how to do it, if it is possible at all.
It would make sense for Apple to tout a replacement connector as being faster, so I'd imagine they would go above the USB 3.0 that Lightning is capable of.
I think he meant that though the redesign is comprehensive an it's basically a different phone from the inside, reviewers still considered it an exact same design externally.
Yeah. If you look at the complete board shots, those chips are inside the sandwich of PCBs. So yeah, it was probably disassembled in an reflow oven without much care for the components.
Taking all the shielding off those chips is probably what destroyed the board. Without doing that though, these images would just have all the chips covered by shielding metals/alloys.
I noticed that too. They might have been poking and prodding around with the different chips or something to see what is inside. That or it is the result of aggressively removing all the shielding. Sure threw me for a loop though.
It's good to see Apple behaving and recognising the momentum the Rights to Repair movement has got globally in the last few years (especially in the large market of EU, and now picking up in Asia). But I think iFixit has been too generous in giving the iPhone 14 a repairability score of 7 out of 10 when Apple still places additional unwanted hurdles and control through software:
> We are hearing reports that Apple is continuing their hostile path of pairing parts to the phone, requiring activation of the back glass after installation. You really shouldn’t need Apple’s permission to install a sheet of glass on a phone that you already own. Using software to prevent the use of aftermarket parts gets a big thumbs down from us. These locks are frustrating and ultimately futile—Apple simply can’t control all the repairs that happen with their products, no matter how hard they try.
If Apple allows super easy salvage of another device for parts, I wonder if phones will start to be stolen again. Easy salvage might create an unacceptably wide-spread life-safety risk to ALL smartphone owners.
> Easy salvage might create an unacceptably wide-spread life-safety risk to ALL smartphone owners.
Yeah, it'll be the end of the world if an iPhone is disassembled and its parts sold worldwide! /s
If preventing theft was the real goal behind requiring software activation for repairs, then Apple can simply display a warning to the user that a replaced part is stolen and to inform the police. The real reason for this anti-repair feature is to ensure that iDevice users are forced to buy Apple care, are forced to buy parts from Apple at artificially inflated prices and to prevent them from sourcing cheaper parts from elsewhere. When I buy an iPhone, I own it. If I want to replace a part in it with a non-genuine non-apple spare part it is my right to do so, and Apple doesn't have any right to prevent me from doing so.
Life-safety? Seriously? It's gun control and law enforcement problem, not the one of easy salvaging. Y'know, it's hard to imagine that someone in Europe or most of the Asia would be robbing at gunpoint for the smartphone.
Risk/reward just does not match - it'll be most likely few years or even probation for simple robbery with good ol' bats, and tens of years for robbing at gunpoint, a good part of it from illegal firearms possession. Not to mention that actual murder for smartphone will move it much closer to life sentence.
>Life-safety? Seriously? It's gun control and law enforcement problem, not the one of easy salvaging. Y'know, it's hard to imagine that someone in Europe or most of the Asia would be robbing at gunpoint for the smartphone.
Yeah, instead you’d be robbed at knifepoint. And if not at knifepoint, then by using any serious of improvised weapons.
A knife scares me far more than a gun up close, as a sharp knife causes massive damage to tissue and internal organs, while many are shot by pistols and live.
Europe and Asia both have a fair amount of motorcycle robbery / purse snatching.
Victims can get dragged into traffic and killed, or stabbed if they resist. Robbery is robbery, a handgun is just one way to threaten someone in the process.
Agreed, but in this example they specifically cite the glass. Does seem like you should be able to replace glass without phoning in to Apple in some manner.
Well I mean it also cuts down on their repair costs quite substantially. Repairing anything but the front screen has been a nightmare since the iPhone 8
Not if I am forced to buy the parts from Apple or they stop providing it. The real goal behind this anti-repair feature is to prevent users from sourcing parts from elsewhere and using it to repair their device. If Apple decides to support a device for only 5 years, you will no longer be able to repair your device once Apple stops distributing the parts. This anti-repair feature prevents you from using other compatible (non apple) parts on your phone (which, by the way are often much cheaper than Apple's artificially inflated prices to force you to buy Apple care).
> Forget satellite SOS and the larger camera, the headline is this: Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair.
I find this line hilarious because it's an example of law of the instrument[0]. iFixit and other activist repair shops treat these devices as if their(the iPhones) purpose is getting a repair and all this talk over they years about iPhone repairability was from that standpoint.
I'm happy that Apple is making the new iPhones easier to repair but I never in my life purchased a brand new device with intention or plan to repair it. Why would anyone try to sell me a device by talking about how easy it is to repair it? What I expect is that it would never need a repair and if it needs a repair the vendor will handle it. Also, iPhones were always the easiest phones to repair because specialists who repair iPhones could be found on every corner. Every repair shop repairs iPhones, so repairing an iPhone was never a real issue but something that repair nerds like to speculate on. It's almost as if the happiest they could have been if Apple shipped the iPhones broken but easy to repair using some cheap generic part.
I had my iPhones replaced, repaired or self services by buying the parts online through the years. It's no accident that iPhones always were best at retaining second hand value.
> I never in my life purchased a brand new device with intention or plan to repair it
The last two laptops I bought, repairability was a very high priority. The T440s I had before my current HP Envy x360 I actually bought because I got burned with a cheap Acer, where I couldn't find any replacement touchpads. A less repairable laptop wouldn't have lasted me even two years, since I broke the display around that time.
At first, I wanted to buy a used enterprise laptop, since they often have repair guides available and parts can be found on eBay. However, HP made the repair guide and parts for this "consumer-grade" notebook available officially, which gave me the confidence that this laptop could last me five years or more.
I think people who expect their electronics to last more than the length of a warranty should definitely consider repairability to be a big factor. You don't want to buy a beefy laptop for the next decade, only to have it made useless by a broken keyboard or screen.
> I never in my life purchased a brand new device with intention or plan to repair it.
Devices don't last forever. What happens when inevitably, it fails? I don't want to be buying a new iPhone all the time — money still doesn't grow on trees — and even outside of Apple's ridiculously overpriced products, replacing e.g., my entire laptop¹ because a component failed is not enticing. Better if the design permits a $5 replacement, instead of a $70 or $700 replacement.
And as an engineer, it hurts when you know a small change to the design could have made the repair $5 instead of $75, without impacting anything on the manufacturer's end — except, of course, the amount they're getting manufacturing replacement parts nobody needs!
Not to mention the e-waste generated by re-manufacturing then entire device just to fix a single component.
> What I expect is that it would never need a repair
Alas, stuff breaks. Such is the world.
> and if it needs a repair the vendor will handle it.
… well, good luck finding such a vendor. Apple, in particular, does not offer compelling warranties. (Though IME warranties have shrunk across most vendors. Which is a proxy for quality: the manufacturer themselves don't think their device can withstand more than 1 or 2 years at most.)
¹phones are, unfortunately, extremely limited in what you can repair with almost any model on the market today. It's a shame.
Apple devices last forever, it's pretty common to give the old devices to your parents or sell them - the Apple device market is very vibrant because they last. By the time that the device would fail due to wear and tear you probably wouldn't want to use it anyway.
You may remind me about design failures of Apple where the devices would break down but Apple does repair programs or recalls when something like that happens. That's also why we have warranties.
> Apple does repair programs or recalls when something like that happens
Usually those repair programs are limited to a few years after purchase. I still have a 2015 MBP where the reflective coating is damaged (screen looks really bad) but it only got bad after the repair program has expired.
I also had a 2016 MBP (gave it to a relative) but I'm scared that the flex cable or the keyboard are going to fail and repair is going to be too expensive and Apple won't fix it because it is too old.
> but I never in my life purchased a brand new device with intention or plan to repair it
We all expect our devices to work forever and never break while we are still using them.
Yes, Apple handles the repairs, but they are _expensive_. If you are not in the US, chances are that some 'authorized' third party will repair it. So now you are into 'expensive' and potentially dodgy territory. I've seen substandard repairs over the years. One common issue is that a repair is done but FaceID (or Touch ID) no longer works.
Repair shops manage to repair some things but many repairs are not economically viable. A phone that's easy to repair is also cheaper to repair.
Case in point: you have to take your phone to a repair shop to replace the battery (unless you are pretty handy yourself). That costs money. When phones had removable batteries, repair labor cost was $0. Just get a new battery and replace yourself, in seconds.
I think you are wrong, people think a lot about repair costs, which is why Apple Care sells so good. If people didn't think of repair, why would they buy Apple Care?
When the back glass on my iPhone X broke, I stopped buying iPhones. Authorized service providers would have charged more for repairing the device than it costs on the second hand market, and 3rd party repair shops would probably do a half assed job because it is so difficult to do.
It's really ridiculous that the part that breaks most easily is hardest to repair.
I ended up buying an Android with a plastic back, and I kind of hate some parts of it, but I also hate that iPhones are so fucking fragile.
> I think you are wrong, people think a lot about repair costs, which is why Apple Care sells so good
Good point but I think this is more like an insurance because accidents happen. People also buy cases and screen protectors so they are definitely aware that these things can break but the plan is always not to break it.
No one really cares if that the device would be hard or easy to repair as long as they know that repair is a thing and it is a thing because people see the shops on the high street, know apple store fixes broken iPhones or know people who got their devices repaired. Hard or easy to repair is not very relevant to most people because they wouldn't care how much effort took the technician to do their job.
iFixIt and others come from an era were smartphones were in the small space between repairable and expensive to replace. Like small laptops. Sure after years of specialization many shops offer quick fixes but it didn’t use to be that way. Sure you will never repair your phone but when and if it needs fixing the more accessible repairs are the better it is for the wallet and quality of work.
I went from Ericsson(GH688, T10) to Alcatel to Nokia to Siemens to iPhone 4s and have been using iPhones since then.
At what point was the timeframe when you threw away your iPhone because was not possible to repair on a high street repair shop? I never had and I don't know anyone who ever had an issue with repairing their iPhone. Was it at the iPhone 3G years?
My last repair was getting the battery and the front glass of my iPhone 6s that I still use as a secondary phone replaced. It cost me about 50$ if I recall correctly.
Success on what? If I measure repairability success would look like Framework laptops, if I measure mainstream adoption success would look like Apple/Dell/Samsung, if I measure for longevity and versatility success would look like Apple/Thinkpad, if I measure for refined design success would look like Apple.
> Why would anyone try to sell me a device by talking about how easy it is to repair it? What I expect is that it would never need a repair and if it needs a repair the vendor will handle it.
Because people value reparability, which someone posted evidence for. Buying a computing device that you can use and depend on for decades is a laudable goal, and reparability is table stakes for that goal because stuff breaks.
IMHO Framework's value comes from modularity, repairability is just a perk of modularity. I like it but it comes at cost of design features like thickness, weight or robustness.
As a happy Framework user, the selling point for me is upgrading, not repairing, the device. To be able upgrade to a new mobo, processor, memory module, or port, without having to buy a whole new device is incredible. As such, I am not planning on buying a new laptop for a loooong time. Clearly the iPhone is not taking that approach - it's repair only, which is not nearly as exciting.
This brings back memories of the Xperia Z1 Compact (+ several later generations) that used this same design of gluing the screen and back glass independently to a mid frame.
Unfortunately they are not good memories. The slightest, barely visible bend or sub-par repair and the back glass would peel up in one corner and coat the underside of the camera in dust and condensation
I’m not sure I would risk buying a phone with this design again. Apple will have to have worked some serious magic to make it strong and robust
-- guessing - three things - 1) better margins on repair kits than hiring folks to replace screens all day - 2) difficult to assess if a screen/part is apple genuine or not at the store when dealing with trade-in/warranty returns - 3) apple genuinely cares about their environmental impact --
#3 seems true, but remember all this bites Apple as well. The redesign also makes it cheaper/easier for them to repair things. So even if this is 100% selfish it would still be good overall.
> We are hearing reports that Apple is continuing their hostile path of pairing parts to the phone, requiring activation of the back glass after installation.
Hopefully that's not the case. Why go through the effort of a redesign like this if you're just going to continue handicapping repairs that way? Clearly it wasn't a marketing gimmick since they haven't mentioned it at all.
Reading through this article made me really start to consider buying a new iPhone. I've had my mind set on switching to Android for the past year, but a pro-repair pro-planet move like this needs to be rewarded in the marketplace, and I'll be telling everyone I know to get a 14.
...that is, unless they're still locking parts down with serial number checks.
Ahaha. Apple only changes stuff when they can jump on a bandwagon to make money.
First privacy/security, which they didn't give a crap about until they realised it was marketable.
Now right to repair, which they also didn't give a crap about and often went out of their way to prevent. Suddenly public awareness has increased and it's not become a marketable feature. So not surprising that Apple has jumped on it.
Does the iPhone 14 still have the battery glued to the back? Couldn't figure it out from reading the article. I recently replaced the battery on my old iPhone 6s using the ifixit repair kit. Of all the steps I found removing the tape attached to the battery was the flakiest/hardest operation. After many attempts I did remove it but I also ended up cracking the battery a bit :sigh:. Any changes that make the removal of the battery easier would be a great win for repairability.
Looking at the board photo, something bad happened during disassembly of the 14 Pro Max. At least 9 components were heated and moved off their pads on the main CPU board in the lower left corner. Some of the chips on the other side are also shifted. Will take some work to get that running again...
> Why isn’t Tim Cook bragging about repairability? We had no idea this was coming, because Apple didn’t mention it—at all. But they should have.
Didn’t they upgrade AppleCare to include unlimited repairs and brag about that? I think this might be related, and a better way of marketing the feature.
I don’t know. They call it a victory for repair ability but the parts are as paired as they’ve ever been… Even replacing the rear glass triggers a warning and requires activation… That’s hardly repairable if the software is crippled as a result.
The article text is kind of incomprehensible on its own, IMO. If you're not already knowledgeable about modern smartphone repair you have to watch the video to make sense of it.
The EU pressure would be in the domains of software distribution (Apple thinks third-party app stores are just malware) and charger compatibility (Apple still holds onto Lightning). They've yet to talk about either of these at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of these requirements is either geolocked or exclusive to EU models.
> Apple thinks third-party app stores are just malware
Apple is greedy not stupid. They don't want third party app stores because it would cause competition and interfere with their almost entirely vertically integrated consumer milking machine... they don't care about malware, they care about control, controlling the user, to make sure they spend as much money as possible with Apple.
Notice that they have been increasingly swapping out as much third party as possible so they can take all of the profit, they "produce" film and tv shows and sell those tv shows on a device they make with a payment processing method they own... lots of layers of profit, it goes well beyond monopoly, they are destroying the concept of a free market. They do similar things with hardware and tech, buying out or forcing businesses into positions where they have to sell to Apple out or get pushed out.
I can assure you there are plenty of people within the Apple organization that genuinely care about security and privacy. And if Apple happens to profit due to those efforts, all the better. Not everything is some evil nefarious ploy.
There’s also very nice people working for Oracle. That doesn’t really reflect on how decisions are taken and what priorities are set at the higher level.
This is just nonsensical speculating, unless we understand the internal motivations of Apple’s decision makers. Maybe they’re evil and view this as a tool to dominate the world. Maybe they think these are genuinely beneficial decisions for their customers. Who knows.
> This is just nonsensical speculating, unless we understand the internal motivations of Apple’s decision makers
No, your reasoning is nonsensical, you can defend anything with that argument. If you apply it to the rest of the world then no one can do evil because you can never know someone's true motivations... at a certain point you have to draw conclusions from actions, and it's pretty hard to see Apple's actions as not intending to maximise wealth extraction at this point, sure "tech" stuff still happens there out of some necessity and momentum, but the people at the helm clearly have a singular goal.
If your argument is merely that strong inference is flawed, then you are in for a lot of disappointment with reality in general, since 99.9% of what everyone does every day is based upon it out of necessity.
Tim Cook testified in the Epic vs Apple trial explaining in clear business terms why they don't want third party app stores, side loading and non Apple surveyed alternative payment systems. The core of the argument was the money they believe Apple is entitled to.
As usual with these things, it's a convergence of factors. People caring, both in and outside Apple. French repair index (this update earned them 0,5 points / 10 compared to previous gen). Internal cost pressure on warranties, etc. "The time is right", i.e less things to optimize/design for in other areas (already solved problems).
Probably many other factors that only mechanical engineers and product owners at Apple can answer.
why don't we just open source everything and use peer-to-peer software for a new type of digital networked resource accounting to replace money and privately-owned resource planning (ERP) software that is used today to produce imperialism.
> Forget satellite SOS and the larger camera, the headline is this: Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair.
If you keep posting unsubstantive comments we are going to have to ban you. We've already asked you multiple times, and you've unfortunately continued to do it a lot.
Breaking the silence by posting something unsubstantive is the worst thing you can do. Threads are sensitive to initial conditions. Please don't do that again.
It's quite normal for a thread to get upvoted but not get comments for quite a while. If that means people are reading and digesting the article, that's great. We want reflective comments, not reflexive ones (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) and those take time.
Yeah but you posted that comment like, 20 minutes after the post even went up, probably less than 10 minutes after it hit the front page. For a post to not have any/many comments at that point is pretty normal.
Only the base model, and it's gone from bad to less bad? I can forgive that designing a phone to be easily repairable can be very hard, just as long as you don't purposely make it harder to repair, or unnecessarily expensive.
- using no glue or snaps
- all components on one PCB, no thin cables that can break
- standard philips/torx screws
- four screws to open the enclosure, four screws to take out the pcb
- expensive sensor modules on pin sockets for easy reaplacement
- only using components that are certified for longe lifetime -even if they cost a few dollars more (e.g. DC to DC converter)
- not using plastic for packaging and we ask our supplier to not use plastic when sending us the parts (e.g. no bag around the USB cable etc)
We wrote about this [2] and often do presentations for customers and have a slide about this and it gets a great response and I believe gives us an advantage compared to competing products on the market. As the market more and more appreciates this, Apple probably also realized that this can be a competitive advantage and give them positive press.
[1] https://www.airgradient.com/airgradient-one/ [2] https://www.airgradient.com/about/