Hacker News Reader

Comment by wfunction | Hacker News Reader

Who actually buys the explanation that this was not intended to leave the factory?

Anybody with common sense. Do you really think that Apple, who prides themselves on having outstanding customer satisfaction, would deliberately try to brick their customers phones through something this obvious?

Apple definitely looks out of their own interests, but they jump through a lot of hoops to protect their customers from bad experiences, especially since the obvious implementation was to just disable the fingerprint sensor if can't be trusted.

Edit: additional info from the TC article: <<The update is not for users who update their iPhones over the air (OTA) via iCloud. If you update your phone that way, you should never have encountered Error 53 in the first place.>> Your conspiracy theory would really require that they brick phones through both the OTA and iTunes update.

> Do you really think that Apple, who prides themselves on having outstanding customer satisfaction, would deliberately try to brick their customers phones through something this obvious?

Yes I do think that they would attempt to discourage unauthorized repairs in such a way for less-than-noble reasons.

If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?

> If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?

That hardly takes too much imagination. One possible explanation is that higher-ups in Apple read the news, but not necessarily every single "the Apple Store won't replace my broken phone" complaint.

> That hardly takes too much imagination. One possible explanation is that higher-ups in Apple read the news, but not necessarily every single "the Apple Store won't replace my broken phone" complaint.

For a company that takes so much pride in supporting its customers, you'd think the stores would have been able to contact Apple internally to find out what the error even is before saying they won't fix it, right? Which would have led them to realize it was not meant to be running in production?

It seems entirely probable to me that most of the Apple Store incidents for this went along the lines of "I got this repaired at a repair shop and now it doesn't work!" "Unfortunately, we can't fix an issue caused by an unauthorized repair. Go back to them." I certainly don't think I'd have dug much further if I worked retail.

<<Yes I do think that they would attempt to discourage unauthorized repairs in such a way for less-than-noble reasons.>>

I have added some additional information to the parent comment (i.e., only bricked updates via iTunes, not OTA) that further undermine the theory that this was a deliberate change. I realize that you could still argue that the actual bug was that the OTA update did not brick the phones, but Occam's razor really starts applying...

<<If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?>>

I do agree with you that Apple has a long record of dragging their feet to issue fixes for pretty significant bugs, so it is possible that the press caused them the issue the patch faster.

A thought experiment: suppose you are in charge of handling repairs for a multinational fleet of hundreds of millions of devices.

One thing you'll probably do is triage: by looking at the numbers of devices that fail in various ways, you can optimize your parts channels, training, processes, etc. in various ways. This is business 101.

Now try to guess how many people have been experiencing this error. My guess is it is a pretty small percentage of several hundred million. I also guess that there are a number of other failure modes affecting similarly small groups of users. In a device as complex as the iPhone, with a population that large, there has to be.

But wait! Now the press is hammering you over one of those small-population failure modes. Everything else equal, you're an idiot if you don't handle that one first.

Of course, thought, this is Apple. So the reasonable, simple explanation makes no sense and instead Occam's Second Exception indicates that when Apple is involved, skullduggery and shenanigans are the only reasonable explanation.

Triaging by data is just the first step. Once you decide it's an actual problem you have to be able to reproduce it. To confirm this is happening, you have to get production phones, then do an out-of-process rework, then do this for different OS versions, OS upgrade methods, iTunes version, etc... Reworking this sensor is not an easy task so you have to have someone do it for you and get their time, etc... It's actually a pretty big project to do this correctly.

> Yes I do think that they would attempt to discourage unauthorized repairs in such a way for less-than-noble reasons.

Repairs are not really a revenue stream. Apple Care is a revenue stream but the incentive is to not repair. Since every repair logged against Apple Care is a cost, it doesn't make sense that Apple would want to do this themselves from a purely economic perspective.

I've been in HW all my working life. Any field return is expensive and resource intensive to handle and you cannot pass all those costs onto your customers. You do it to provide good service to your customers. You eat the repair cost as part of internal warranty cost which is built into the pricing of every unit sold.

What you are saying just doesn't make sense to me.

As a user I don't want any yahoo being able to replace my touch ID sensor. I have tons of sensitive information on my phone. I want that thing disabled if touch ID breaks or has been tampered with.

>If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?

How do you know that they didn't "bother to do anything" on this issue until someone ran an article?

Precisely. Repairs are a cost. Turning people away because of pink dot, visible signs of 3rd party repair or Error 53 avoids that costs and provides opportunity for a new sale.

> would deliberately try to brick their customers phones through something this obvious?

would deliberately try to brick their customers phones who made unauthorized alterations to their phones via 3rd party repairs

Yep. Totally would.

> Do you really think that Apple, who prides themselves on having outstanding customer satisfaction, would deliberately try to brick their customers phones through something this obvious?

I don't buy Apple products for this specific reason. My answer is Apple would and have done it. I am not an Apple typical customer, I love to hack and take things apart.

Nice down votes for answering a question differently then you. Apple absolutely tried to brick jailbreak phones in the past.

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2541099/mobile-wireless...

> "Warning: Apple has discovered that some of the unauthorized unlocking programs available on the Internet may cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software," the message read. "If you have modified your iPhone's software, applying this software update may result in your iPhone becoming permanently inoperable."

I did not downvote you, but I think people might feel that you seem to let your personal disdain for Apple color your response regardless of the facts of the case vs. having a real discussion.

Even this point is a bit disingenuous - your quote from the article in no way supports your position that Apple would deliberately brick your phone - and in fact, there is a quote further down in the article you cited that further undermines this claim:

<<a user identified as ansuz07 said, "The percentage of iPhones that have become bricked from hacks is very low. Even those that experienced problems could be fixed by a simple restore. Apple is going to make it sound a lot worse than it actually is since they are the ones who don't want you to do it in the first place">>

>> they jump through a lot of hoops to protect their customers from bad experiences,

I would say Apple is one of the best, if not the best company for customer service, but I wouldn't go so far as to make a blanket statement like that.

There are a lot of 2011 Macbook Pro owners (me being one of them) who would disagree.

There were thousands of complaints in the Apple support forums, several articles in major Apple/Tech blogs, etc. It took well over a year for the issue to be acknowledged. In that regard, I'm kinda jealous how fast this Error 53 thing got resolved.

They'd certainly test it at the factory. I'm sure they test it when they do an authorized repair.

The fact it could come up later after a 3rd party repair was done probably wasn't thought of. I'm willing to buy it was an accident. Occam's Razor would seem to support it.

The other theory, that Apple designed this to screw people who went to 3rd party repair shops into buy new phones, requires assuming a fair amount of malicious intent and pre-planning on Apple's part.

How do you think this would have played out differently if the other theory were true?

it would have affected both OTA and itunes updates.

It would have affected OTA and hardwired updates, and it would have happened on boot not just on a restore or update.

Oh, and they wouldn't have backtracked, fixed the problem, and offered refunds to people who bought new phones as a result of this.

Apple isn't clueless enough to think that this error 53 thing wouldn't cause a crap-storm...

They probably would have had a more informative error message.

Yes, an accident, just like using ONE fraction of a millimetre shorter screw under a spot of PCB containing 8 tracks.

http://hackaday.com/2014/10/19/using-the-wrong-screw-a-painf...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com