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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Pretty disingenuous for this guy not to mention the potential benefits of such measures, namely: iPhones become pretty much worthless on the black market, discouraging theft.

I'm more worried about someone stealing my phone (where the cost is the whole value of the device) than I am about breaking the phone (usually my fault) where the cost when repaired by Apple is fairly reasonable.

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I can see your point in theory. But I find less "it's not repairable to protect you from thieves", and more in line with Apple wanting to sell you a new phone when you drop it, instead of repair it.

I'm wanna thing there are a lot of better ways to avoid a black market, than creating more e-waste with disposable devices impossible to repair.

But Apple literally does repair my phone when I drop it?

You mean if you pay 10$ per month for AppleCare? I dont pay for it but I have helped friends file claims with Apple, and they usually just ship back a brand new device instead of actually repairing the device. Even for things like screen damage. You can tell because small scratches on the back screen from normal use are gone upon return.

It was my understanding that they do that so they can get you a fixed one back quickly, then they can stack them up at their large repair centres. The one you receive back is just one that someone else broke a while back.

Wait.

Do you seriously believe Apple is sending everyone new iPhones and not repairing them at all?

That would be a stupendously bad business decision.

> where the cost when repaired by Apple is fairly reasonable.

Careful, if Louis Rossmann reads that you may give him a sudden case of apoplexy.

The only thing "fairly reasonable" about what Apple likes to charge is that you fairly reasonably may as well just buy a new phone.

I've broken iPhones around 10 times.

Not a single time was the cost of repair even close to the cost of a new phone.

How did you break them?

Impact, water, normal use.

If I broke something 10 times in one decade, I'd probably be looking to replace it ASAP.

It's not one phone, it's multiple phones that I've broken at different times for different reasons.

Even worse then, it sounds like they're doing a bad job of iterating on the design if it's continued to break.

I think it's more disingenuous of Apple to hide behind that and use it as an excuse for everything they do. If they really care, they should allow owners to opt out of such features.

Why then does apple not offer to take these phones (without compensation) and refurb them to be resold, by Apple. This way there is no incentives for thieves as Apple will not give them a dime however these phones are not part of the huge trash pile that is being generated.

Not every trade is handled by Apple. A tiny minority outside of the US. And I dislike the idea that they can remotely make my phone unusable, like Samsung can.

They do, people trade in phones for credit towards an iphone all the time.

Doing it without the meagre compensation they give now would be deeply unethical, Tesla tried something like that recently when a story emerged that someone was quoted for full out of warranty battery replacement for a broken cooling hose fitting on their cars battery and they refused to give any core charge even though the battery itself was still fully functional (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8-OkfCcRAo).

Couldn't you just steal the complete phone, reset it, then resell it?

Unless the owner disabled Activation Lock you can’t reset it/reactivate it without the owner’s iCloud password.

if apple offered replacement parts they would also dampen that black market a lot.

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