Hacker News Reader

Comment by astockwell | Hacker News Reader

Apple, I get it. I get why you do it. But seriously, this retroactive punishing of prior 3rd-party purchases is asinine. I had purchased multiple lightning cables from Anker (a very reputable brand), and had one of the iOS 11.x updates basically render them useless. Apple's product support is not fast enough, nor pervasive enough (to say nothing of cheap enough), to justify this behavior.

Edited for clarity

View on HN

It was not done intentionally. They simply don't QA their releases on repaired phones (because why would they?). The touchscreens in question highly likely use an older touchscreen controller from a previous iPhone. These controllers don't support certain commands that evidently they are now using.

As far as the lightning connectors go, that WAS done intentionally. The third party lightning connectors generally don't implement a very specific charging protocol designed to prevent metal migration between the pins and the pads on the connector. They only implement the handshake. But guess who has to honor the warranty if you've used a non-compliant charger cable?

Is this why some lightning cables seem to have one scorched pin on the connector? I have some that only work one way now.

The irony is all of mine that have the scorched pin are Apple's...

>(because why would they?)

Because a company understands their product in the field and cares about what effect a change might have. Now is that cost justified? arguably no.

It'd be pretty hard for them to know though. They'd have to reverse engineer (the irony isn't lost on me) every variation of third party screen/touchscreen controller. What happens if some feature isn't available on a third party screen? Either they don't implement the feature at all or third party screens are now worse off and we'll have a headline "Apple cripples third party repairs!".

This is precisely the kind of stuff that Microsoft is famous for, and it is entirely possible. Heck, third party hardware is what made PCs great. I think, however, that there is a difference in customer base; Microsoft caters to businesses, Apple to consumers.

When Microsoft breaks a third party app/device with a Windows Service Pack, Microsoft needs to fix this otherwise their customers get angry. When Apple breaks a third party app, they require the customer or third party app provider to fix it, because Apple is inherently a company that wants to control the whole stack and doesn’t embrace an open ecosystem.

There's a major difference here: a 3rd party computer part drawing 5% more current than expected probably won't cause issues (There are however many of cases where they do...) whereas a component drawing 5% more current on a phone may cause a shutdown.

It's amazing that I find myself thinking that Microsoft of the 90's and early 2000's as actually being a more open and accommodating company and windows being a more open and accommodating environment than Apple and iOS today.

Whether Microsoft had no choice and would have been worse if they could in this respect, the fact they they weren't and I think Apple is, and Microsoft was widely lambasted as money driven (e.g. M$) and evil at the time, and Apple largely gets a pass now, is interesting. That could be because Apple is better at managing image, or because people's perceptions and what they expect has shifted, or because there's a lot more bad (and worse) actors out there now that make Apple look better in comparison. It's hard to tell exactly why it's looked upon more favorably now, but I do believe my thoughts on Apple to be accurate, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Fruit company pulls the plug on anyone who writes anything bad about them. No more marketing money, no more freebies, so publishers think twice about it.

When Microsoft broke third-party stuff, the end result didn't cause fires. It was also done very deliberately to damage competitors, according to information revealed at trial.

Software companies can do things a bit differently from hardware companies.

Can you imagine the maintenance nightmare in having special case hacks just to support bugs by one program? I read some of the MS blogs where they detailed all of the workarounds they've had to do. It has to make Windows less stable and harder to maintain.

OR provide third parties with API info, maybe even the third party implementation. It doesn’t even have to be official. Apple knows very well how to leak controlled information. But it would greatly improve the quality of third party repairs, and lower the load on official support workflows.

Slippery slope here. If they start testing with 3rd party hardware, that market will grow for third party parts whereas if they constantly tell people they don't support it and casually break those devices by accident, then they curb the issue while it's a small segment of the market.

I see a company like Tesla taking the same approach.

If we keep going down this slippery slope, next thing you know there'll be stores called Phonezone or Advanced Phone Parts on every street corner selling repair parts for every popular brand of phone at reasonable prices enabling consumers to do their own repairs at home.

Or you know they could build according to standards for interfaces and cables and provide excellent documentation making it easy to repair.

I’ve worked with many LCD panels: while they all support one of a few signaling standards, there is no standard for the cables and connectors. (Or if there is, nobody follows them.) For each LCD panel, you need to make a custom cable.

So that part is not something that’s specific to Apple.

> very specific charging protocol designed to prevent metal migration between the pins and the pads on the connector

This is 100% bullshit.

This is 100% not bullshit.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170272058A1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170124010A1/

It's bullshit because it isn't a real issue. Apple is just acting as a patent troll, inventing fake problems for the sake of filing patents.

... what? You're a metallurgist, or do you just play one on TV?

You also obviously don't understand what a 'patent troll' is.

I play one on TV.

From the first one:

> To mitigate these issues, external contacts may typically include a corrosion-resistant coating to the exposed exterior surface… Although temporarily effective, such coatings are subject to frictional wear and may become less effective over the life of a device.

Frictional wear is not a huge problem in practice.

There’re billions of devices with built-in batteries in the world. I’ve been carrying a cell phone, and later sometimes other electronics, since 1999. Never encounter such issues.

Most manufacturers use gold plating, and they advertise reliability for 10000 mating cycles:

https://gct.co/usb-connector https://www.gradconn.com/Products/MicroUSB https://www.molex.com/molex/products/datasheet.jsp?part=acti...

This is the point I'd have made if I had more patience. It is simply ridiculous to claim that galvanic corrosion and/or electromigration is likely to be a problem on a square millimeter gold contact with a few microns of metal that passes at most 15W continuously for a few years before being discarded.

They probably can (and I guess rather easily) test whether the touchscreen is or not from Apple and at least let the ungood ones work as before (I am sure this is pretty easy to do: just keep the old controller), issuing a warning (not that Apple is short on these) to the user: "your screen may malfunction or may be insecure. If you had it repaired outside the Apple network, we remind you that it is not covered by our guarantee".

I am pretty sure this is easy, cheap and honest.

Here's a great article that discusses why doing this would be a bad idea: https://blog.darkrainfall.org/2016/02/a-short-rant-about-err...

Except this particular issue has absolutely nothing to do with TouchID or security at all. It's just the screen. Error 53 was significantly more justifiable.

I do realize the difference here; it's just that the parent brought up security, so I assumed that they were bringing up the case from two years ago.

Well, security was just a small part of my comment, anyway: you replied as if it were the main issue.

Well, that is an opinion. However, bricking a device without previous warning seems quite out of control. There are many easier things to do. Like, for example, nagging the user every day with a message, not upgrading the software (and still nagging the user with a message), etc...

Bricking a device is certainly a bad user experience and not at all what the user wishes. Nagging him at least lets him use the phone and keeps him informed.

You cannot assume the user is stupid and not assume the user will not repair the phone outside your network. You cannot have both things at the same time and get away with it.

That is what I think. If the user is stupid, let him be so.

> not upgrading the software

For goodness sake no! Blocking software updates is a terrible thing to do, because most people don't want to install them anyways. You're basically putting people in an already bad situation in a worse situation.

> Nagging him at least lets him use the phone and keeps him informed.

It only takes the user using the sketchy Touch ID sensor once for their fingerprint to be sent out to malicious actors.

> If the user is stupid, let him be so.

That's what you think, but that's not how Apple works. It's their job to make the default work well for those who may not be completely knowledgable about security.

I get what you are trying to convey. I disagree but there is no problem in that.

However: where does Apple state that their products may stop working if repaired with different components? (Honest question, I have tried to find it).

This was that best I could find from a few minutes of searching.

> Service Exclusions and Diagnostic Fee. Apple may charge you a diagnostic fee (including shipping charges) as described in the Country Variation table, below (“Diagnostic Fee”), if Apple inspects your product and determines that (i) your product does not require service, (ii) your product has failed due to or has incompatibilities with software or data residing or recorded on your product (iii) service is required due to the failure of parts that are neither supplied by Apple nor Apple-branded, (iii) additional labor or parts are required that were not specified in the original estimated charges and you do not agree to authorize service based on Apple’s revised estimated charges, or (iv) service cannot be performed because the serial number has been altered, defaced or removed or the product has failed due to accident, abuse, liquid spill or submersion, neglect, misuse (including faulty installation, repair, or maintenance by anyone other than Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider), unauthorized modification, extreme environment (including extreme temperature or humidity), extreme physical or electrical stress or interference, fluctuation or surges of electrical power, lightning, static electricity, fire, acts of God or other external causes (“Service Exclusions”). Apple will return your product to you without servicing it and may charge you the Diagnostic Fee.

This is from Apple's Repair Terms and Conditions: https://www.apple.com/legal/sales-support/terms/repair/gener.... It doesn't say that the product will stop working, but it does say that Apple isn't responsible for fixing it if it goes wrong. I'm not sure if that could be extended to them not having to support your third party component in software, though.

Thanks.

You see it is really not very noticeable and the writing says nothing about hardware stopping working.

I guess we have both learnt from this exchange.

Thanks a lot.

> the product has failed due to ... faulty installation, repair, or maintenance by anyone other than Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider

That sounds like it could be not working, with root cause as bad repair.

Did Joe's Fly By Night iPhone Non-Genuine Replacement Parts disclose that their replacement part wasn't the same as Apple's? Seems like that's where the onus lies.

Apple has a program for third-party stores that use genuine parts, the Apple Authorized Service Provider program. If the repair shop you go to isn't an AASP, then you can't say they have genuine parts.

It's neither easy nor cheap. The engineer in question now has to support multiple variants of the driver, and QA has to acquire several of these screens and maintain a dedicated test rack of them.

I'm a little amazed by how many people in this thread don't understand how much work developing for, testing, and maintaining actual physical devices is.

> The engineer in question now has to support multiple variants of the driver, and QA has to acquire several of these screens and maintain a dedicated test rack of them.

Conversely, the update just needs to reliably detect if the screen is Apple brand, and abort the update if it's not. If this can be done, then the current driver could be considered generic and working everywhere, and the engineer would just need to maintain the generic and the current version.

That is, if Apple didn't mind to pay for making easier for third parties to get sales instead of Apple. Somehow I don't think that's the case.

The update is an all-or-nothing type of deal though. You either update the entire system or you don't. So now people with a third-party screen don't get new features and - more importantly - they don't get security fixes.

If the update wasn't all-or-nothing, now you have to test interoperability between this generic driver and the rest of the system. That might be OK if it was just this one driver, but what if you suddenly have a generic driver for N subsystems? The combinatorics explode quite quickly.

Even if it's all-or-nothing and no generic drivers are implemented, it's better to deny new features than to cripple a working device. Apple defines the third-party market with how much documentation it releases. This is not a technical or practical problem, it's Apple not easing its iron grip, as it always does.

Would you mind pointing me to the implementation spec for the Pixel 2's touchscreen controller?

Sure, Download the source from https://source.android.com/setup/build/downloading. The driver is in kernel/drivers/input/touchscreen.

Unless the Pixel 2's touchscreen is so weird that it needs a new driver, this will work for everyone.

I looked at it, but that doesn't actually tell me the touchscreen interface. It just tells me the bits they're currently using. If Apple had open sourced their driver it wouldn't have made a difference, as whatever they're doing differently wouldn't have been in it until now. In order for me to make a fully compatible touchscreen, I need the datasheet and programming manual for the touchscreen controller.

As much as open source is a thing for software, it is not for hardware and especially silicon.

> I looked at it, but that doesn't actually tell me the touchscreen interface. It just tells me the bits they're currently using.

I have to agree with you on this. This is not a full hardware specification, it just tells how the hardware should behave up until the driver was released.

Modern open source hardware is still far in the future.

Open source hardware's still far in the future, and I'm actively worried about open silicon. The RISC-V foundation is making steps in the right direction, but it'll be a long time coming before I have a document that isn't under several layers of NDA telling me how to configure the memory controller on the latest Snapdragon.

You have a working device and then you modify the software and it stops working.

If it works, why change it?

> It was not done intentionally.

What evidence is there make this claim?

It all seems to boil down to this question. Do you trust that Apple had the user's interests in mind?

> They simply don't QA their releases on repaired phones (because why would they?)

The more important question is why wouldn't they if the customer's experience is what guides their decisions.

> What evidence is there make this claim?

From the article:

"A similar thing happened for the iPhone 7 last year. An iOS update prevented the touchscreens from working on iPhone 7s with third-party repaired screens. Apple then released a follow-up software update that made them work again, resolving the issue."

To me, that makes axoltl's explanation far likelier. From Apple's perspective, I get it: they do Q&A on what's officially supported. Trying to pull in all of the unofficial changes is more expensive and potentially restrictive.

From my understanding, many Apple chips are custom, and I assume much of their firmware is too. What your asking is for Apple to support third party knock off chips in their firmware and drivers which were most likely reverse engineered to "get it close to functional". That's a bit silly.

Imagine getting upset that an Occulus firmware update didn't work with a knock off HMD that lacked features of the original...

We are not talking about a small number of users though, millions of their users use third-party screens.

They should have a test to make sure they don't get left in a dust with an update.

Is the onus on Apple to ensure the third-party screens work, or is it on the third-party screens to ensure they're compatible?

I don't believe the onus is on Apple to /test/ for all possible permutations since they own and control every component of their hardware, but the onus should be on them to fix any phones rendered inoperable by another iOS update unless its to prevent a bigger issue, 3rd party batteries exploding, etc.

This is also another good reminder to postpone the iOS updates as long as possible; I think it's been since v10 when the updates have had a less than stellar record.

> but the onus should be on them to fix any phones rendered inoperable by another iOS update

How is it their responsibility to support third party hardware? And, where's the line for support?

If I make a very poor knock off screen with a design issue that is made apparent with an iOS update (say, incorrect implementation of a required spec, interface, timing, etc), why should Apple have to support a flawed design?

What if Apple included a feature in the hardware that but the software wasn't ready at release, but would be made available as a standard feature in an upcoming iOS update? Should Apple have to continuously fragment their codebase, resulting in some tree of hacks to support each new half-baked chipset?

To someone in the hardware and software world, this perspective is absurd.

I find this stance very odd. How do you imagine them achieving this? Do they have someone constantly ordering screen from the hundreds of vendors on Alibaba, in some attempt to make sure they "find them all"?

If you could give one example of a company with a custom and proprietary system and chipset supporting third party knock offs I would be very interested. I've never witnessed this during my time in the hardware industry.

> What your asking is for Apple to support third party knock off chips in their firmware

They're already doing that for some other things.

For instance, some (mostly cheap) Wifi access points are known to have buggy implementations of 802.11 that require firmware workarounds in phones and laptops. Manufacturers have to support these devices for the benefit of the consumer and to maintain their own reputation. Customers aren't expected to understand that it's some other piece of tech that's at fault.

Granted, it's a bit different since this is a separate device. But this is still one example of Apple (and every other phone manufacturer) supporting other's people buggy code for the benefit of the users.

Yes, but even for your WiFi example, fixes to work with a non-compliant third party are often reactive. In many cases, that’s the only practical way.

My previous life was network hardware validation, so I have some perspective on this.

What your describing is "interoperability testing", and it's ubiquitous in the communication standards world.

Standards sometimes aren't clear, sometimes there are multiple implementations of a feature before a standard is ratified (and a big user base with the now non-standard implementation), and sometimes bugs end up in silicon and firmware.

One company I worked with had a very large lab with hundreds of ethernet cards. A column of robots would cycle through each one and plug a network cable in, make sure the link was up and solid, then move on to the next.

I think this is fundamentally different than Apple supporting third party hardware.

Communication standards are designed to allow chipset a to talk to chipset b. Both have an obligation to get a link up. A failure to get a link up is a failure for both, from the customer perspective.

A closed, proprietary, custom hardware system has no such obligation. Unlike the communication channel, the risk is completely unbalanced. A failure for the knock off hardware design is just directed to Apple (as you see in the comment section here).

Sure, you can't really blame the customer since the knock off parts aren't easily detected or may have been installed by the previous owner. You also can't blame Apple since you've made a custom iPhone with mystery parts, and I think it's unfair to make them stop updating firmware/software so they don't break these mystery parts.

Why doesn't any other phone manufacturer have this problem?

No other phone manufacturer is that tightly HW/SW integrated.

Other phone manufacturers aren’t as prolific in updating the low level firmware of their devices once it’s on the market?

Apple relies very heavily on customized silicon to provide an edge (Lower power consumption, for example, or extra features). This means that there might be a part out there that's sorta close, but not quite. Once Apple starts pushing their customized silicon, the off-the-shelf part doesn't keep up.

This is complete nonsense

> don't implement a very specific charging protocol designed to prevent metal migration between the pins and the pads on the connector

Any sources for this ? I'd like to learn more.

I linked some patents below:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170272058A1/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170124010A1/

But a quick search yields some interesting research:

http://www.te.com/documentation/whitepapers/pdf/p313-89.pdf

I bet there's much more to find, I'm not a metallurgist.

It's not like repair shops are doing this to cut corners and costs or cheap out. It's simply impossible to source the exact replacement chips for recent iPhones, Apple doesn't sell them, in fact they probably ask their chip manufacturers for exclusivity - and at the scale of Apple orders, manufacturers are happy to do whatever.

The problem here is that Apple leaves third parties in the dark. A reasonable, open, spec and stance on more complex repairs would shift the responsibility to the repair company.

I had a cracked iPhone screen repaired by an authorized 3rd party, they didn't seem to be in the dark.

It seems more likely that Apple is checking serial numbers or some kind of embedded meta-data, to verify that the parts in the phone are authentic Apple parts.

If that were true, why didn’t they do this kind of authentication right from the start?

There is little upside in screwing over millions of existing customers.

If this is the case, wouldn't the "touch current" from capacitive leakage on the Y class capacitor tying the SMPS ground to mains neutral do this anyway?

Surely, if electromigration is an issue, wouldn't these issues be just as significant? Isn't gold practically immune to electromigration at these energy levels?

Anker cables are licensed, they are tested to be compliant.

I'm confused how your Anker cables stopped working. Mine continue to work and Anker is part of Apple's "Made for iPhone" accessory certification program.

Anker produces officially licensed cables that legitimately carry the ‘made for iPhone’ mark. If they stop working it is much more likely something else caused it instead of a software update.

it generally works when charging and turned off. 1) plug 2) turn off 3) wait.

Validation generally do not apply when turned off

What a charger? Does the phone simply not let the power through if it doesn't receive the correct bits from the signal wires? Or was the charger breaking some voltage/amp limit?

The lightning port is a double edged sword. On the one hand, the wires are "smart" and can adapt to any protocol, so the same port can theoretically function as a USB or ethernet at the wire level (again, theoretically). But to make that happen, every plug has a chip that negotiates the protocol when plugged in.

It's likely that negotiation failed in some cases.

That's absolutely crazy for most of us who think "this is a wire, why the hell would it fail?" but this kind of crazy complexity in a 5mm plug is possible nowadays.

Even more so for USB-C. Strange world when a cable is not a cable.

I find this even more despicable because Apple chooses to use a certain type of rubber under the guise of it being more eco-friendly.

Yet this rubber is ridiculously brittle and frays almost without fail within 6-12 months meaning you just end up having to by more cables thus using more of the worlds resources anyway than if they had shipped you one cable that didn't fail.

  My 17 year old Ti Powerbook cable used daily for 11 years, no fray.
  My original iPod cable, no fray.
  My iPhone 3G cable, no fray.
  My iPhone 4S cable, 5 years use daily, no fray.
  Change happened somewhere here, newer cables are more matte and softer feeling 
  My iPhone 7 cable, frayed within 6 months
  My 2014 MBP cable, frayed within 12 months
  Replacement cable, frayed within 12 months

So you're saying that you're sure that the problem that people usually attribute to bad strain relief is actually caused by slightly different plastic?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com