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Comment by skyeto | Hacker News Reader

You could surely still have this for non-genuine / used batteries, but here we have a genuine battery coming straight from Apple throwing that warning. Just let 3rd party repair shops buy them at a reasonable price and don't throw the warning if it's unused.

Edit: and preferably let them buy the batteries in bulk, without having to have the phone on hand which just causes unnecessary delays.

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It’s because a lot of them are genuine batteries which have either been stolen from factories, second hand from other phones, or have had the id ripped from a genuine battery.

The thing is there is very little drm here. There is no complex crypto chip on the battery. The battery just says “my id is 36382” and the phone goes “that’s not the id I expect”. Which makes it impossible for fraudulent parts to replicate since even making the chips respond identically won’t work.

Yes it has some downsides. But I think the trade off is reasonable. If you want to do an unofficial replacement, you still can. Just ignore the notification that shows on boot.

Surely this is easy for an unofficial battery to replicate... You just have a step during installation where you put the new and old batteries face to face briefly so the data lines touch, and the new battery can read the old batteries ID and memorize it?

There were some devices that would let you copy the ID over but they fell out of popularity / couldn't keep up. Just not worth it for a low margin item I guess.

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