There is a healthy after market ecosystem primarily because apple charges so much. Not the other way around.
Furthermore, in the video on the ifixit site, the blogger replaced the battery with a genuine secondhand apple battery and it would not recognize it.
This is predatory behaviour from Apple on its consumers.
For example, you are claiming that just attaching a chip from an old apple battery to a new one should read as genuine in the phone. That is a total scam.
The detection feature is tied to a chip, not to the cell chemistry itself. If chips from old iphone batteries are all it takes to show a scam battery is genuine, given the high volume of old batteries, EVERY scam battery would show as genuine. This is a workaround already used and well known in other situations. To avoid this workaround you need to tie a specific chip in, not just any apple chip in.
Seriously - how do YOU propose apple alert the user to a bogus third party battery.
The phone detected this tampering and disabled the compromised component.
And you are disappointed that the part has been “locked down”.
If it were really Apple’s intention to prevent you from servicing your device, would they only disable the Touch ID sensor? Why wouldn’t they make the whole device inoperable, rather than make you suffer a minor inconvenience by having to use a passcode?
The less exciting answer is that the sensor was designed to certain security parameters and modifying it invalidates those. Yes, the threat model includes nation-state actors. Disabling the sensor preserves system security; designing for a potentially adversarial sensor is difficult and increases risk.
They did by mistake: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205628
And as for future use of the phone, that's already hopeless, because if you have the capability to fabricate a rogue fingerprint scanner, install it in the phone and unlock the phone to activate it, you could just keep the original phone and replace it with a fully rogue phone that you've copied the original data to.
But each device has a unique encryption key that is implemented in hardware. The flash storage cannot simply be moved to a new device. Cloning the storage and the hardware key is assumed to be significantly harder (and more costly) than replacing the sensor with something similar-looking (see any number of Chinese knockoffs).
Which was the second point. They can replace the whole phone and you're in the same situation. Having two components authenticate each other just requires them to replace both.
> The flash storage cannot simply be moved to a new device.
Not the way they've designed it, but there is no security reason not to allow that once the phone has already been unlocked.
How? This would require decrypting the data, wouldn't it?
Why would I give them that? I'm handing the phone over powered-down and without revealing my passcode.
So they can repair your phone.
And they get the same thing when they give you the rogue phone back and you try to unlock it, at which point it sends the PIN to them and they can use it to unlock your original phone and then mount it over the network to display the same data until they've finished copying it.
Though even that only makes the attack more expensive, because again, they can just replace the whole phone. Doing that undetected is harder because you have to connect the rogue phone to the original one as soon as they give the rogue phone what you need to unlock the original, which is a sophisticated attack. Though manufacturing custom malicious hardware already implies a pretty sophisticated attack.