iPhone 14 Pro Programmed to Reject Repair – Teardown/Repair Assessment [video]

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21 points·josephcsible··6 comments

The key takeaway: all of the parts have serial numbers that are paired together, so if you replace any of the components, even with other genuine Apple ones taken from another identical iPhone, you'll lose some or all of the following functionality, depending on exactly which components they were: True Tone, Auto Brightness, Battery Health, FaceID, Portrait Mode, and Cinematic Mode. And while they claim it's for security that they disable FaceID, the rest are all completely indefensible.

Someone somewhere made a policy decision that they wanted to make it hard, but not impossible, to live with a Frankenstein phone.

They totally could have had it refuse to boot... But they didn't.

They also totally could have just had a warning dialogue on bootup, followed by full functionality... But again they didn't.

I'd really like to see their rationale for the choice they made.

Probably wanted to degrade user experience enough to make users just go to Apple, but not enough to attract regulator attention.

Somehow this feels like progress regressing by 2 centuries or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts

Is there no way to reliably manipulate data without direct leads like precise magnetism or something? Couldn’t you manipulate the serial numbers on what I assume is an isolated ROM in these components that way?

Apple has enough volume that they have custom made lots of bits of silicon for their phones now.

That means that it probably won't be just a serial number embedded in a ROM - instead it'll be a challenge-response system so even someone watching the data lines can't replicate a genuine apple part and trick the phone into accepting it.

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