Apple is locking iPhone battery replacement
theverge.com
theverge.com
There are third party battery health checking apps on the App Store that replace this functionality.
According to the article:
> is shown regardless of whether a genuine Apple battery has been installed in the phone — it all comes down to whether Apple or one of its Authorized Service Providers installed the replacement.
So the theme is not on the genuinity of the part (unless we assume that Apple doesn't know how to recognize an "own" original part or that third party, unofficial batteries are indistinguishable from the original ones [1]), it is only on the fact that the person that changed it (and regardless of how good the work was performed) did know the "secret handshake".
Very likely it is a matter of either a sequence of commands/taps/whatever or of connecting the device to some program (or server or whatever) to "reset" a flag.
And yes it shouldn't be so different from how a number of cars have "reset codes" for errors or for oil/filter change log.
Now in the car, the on board oomputer has no way to know if the oil you (or the dealer) changed is good or bad, but a battery on a smartphone?
[1] even if it seems I am saying the same thing twice, the meaning is actually slightly different
There’s also the possibility of repairs being performed with used or otherwise tampered with genuine parts, which are almost as much of a wildcard as third party parts.
Maybe things have improved with smartphones, but I remember third party replacements for MacBooks with swappable batteries being worse than a crapshoot — on top of bad capacity and faster degradation they also often caused kernel panics and power management issues. I can see why Apple might want to not be stuck with supporting that.
If an original (used) battery is installed, it should be recognized as original and graded accordingly to its state (let's say 80% of what it should be).
The current provision doesn't prevent the use of a defective or used or sub-standard battery, it only prevents non-Apple personnel from performing a repair without triggering the (possibly unjustified) alarm.
This is a pro-consumer move, because it gives the consumer more information about the state of a product. They can ignore it if they want, it doesn’t impact the operation of the device.
This is not pro-consumer any more than saying that only Ford-certified auto shops are able to disable the "check engine" light, because Ford can't guarantee the performance of auto parts they can't certify are genuine.
With the whole "iPhones throttle" thing a couple years ago, and how simple this comparison is, hopefully this will get picked up by mainstream news and be changed.
I think two distinct issues were conflated in irate/conspiratorial users minds, that when Apple introduced new OS versions, they were optimized for the newest hardware, but seemingly not the prior gen hardware, which seemed increasingly sluggish. This was true before iOS 12, which miraculously brought back older devices to their original speed, through a years worth of extensive optimization.
I think certainly Apple benefited in new sales from upgraders of sluggish devices, but I'm not certain it was intentional. Despite their hoards of cash, Apple employs fewer engineers than almost any tech company proportional to their revenue, which requires focus, and leads to blind spots.
If it was intentional, they've changed course now, with iOS 12, and maintaining usability of older devices, even to the extent of accepting fewer upgrade sales as more users retain older devices, which is definitely now a more viable path for users of older devices, like me. (I nearly upgraded from my iPhone 6s, prior to iOS 12, but decided to keep using it.)
That’s not to say all third party batteries (or unauthorised replacements of genuine batteries) are bad, but as a consumer it’s nice to at least be aware what’s in your phone.
That is, not all third-party car parts are bad, but as a consumer you would want to be aware of what's in your car, yes?