> repair providers disclose the use on non-genuine or used parts
This has my complete support. I’ve had a phone repaired with a knock off display/touch module. It stopped working with an OTA update. Buying used phones is a total gamble, as is.
This has my complete support. I’ve had a phone repaired with a knock off display/touch module. It stopped working with an OTA update. Buying used phones is a total gamble, as is.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
Currently, I think it will only tell you if Apple did the repair or not, but it would be great to have a list of all parts that have been replaced, if the part is genuine, and if the part was swapped in by Apple and/or an authorized repair centre.
I want full disclosure of whats happened to a phone when buying used, but I don't want Apple to be able to make parts not work. If I want to buy a franken-phone full of knock off or mix and match parts I should be able to, but I should be able to clearly see that in the settings screens.
Sounds like you want to have a master give the master the whip but their good concience should prevent them from whipping you.
> If I want to buy a franken-phone full of knock off or mix and match parts
Its a phone for christ sake, they only last a few years, where have you seen this issue even come up
For me this is a decent service and a decent device lifetime (provided it will stay in my kid's hands for a few years more).
In the past I had to deal with non original repairs (in specific batteries for HP laptop) and my experience was truly truly bad. True, it was 15 years ago, so battery technology might have changed.
I don't really care for self repairing. I understand that there are people that care for that and I respect that; for them Apple probably is not the right brand. For me, personally, a phone or a laptop must work as expected, have a decade of lifetime, and might require servicing a couple of time during its lifetime max, for a reasonable price.
So far, my experience with Apple tic these boxes.
Self repair is a tiny part of the market. But if I can’t self repair because I can’t get hold of parts, then you probably can’t find an independent repair shop to fix something because they can’t get parts either. That is their goal.
> Apple is probably not the right brand
How do you imagine that other brands are not doing the exact same thing? If Apple is allowed to do it, everyone will do it. Not just on phones, on cars, on dishwashers, everything.
https://www.cdccellularrepair.com/post/samsung-parts-seriali...
If the second case is true, we can clearly mandate this by law, but then we must explain the reasons behind it, and we must also search for alternative ways of enforcing such reasons.
IMO the modern devices are way too complex to service on your own for most of the people. And those who might be able to technically do that often times are not interested into actually doing it. Also, the tradeoff that such a serviceability would imply might be not interesting (e.g. bulkier device, more complex waterproofing, less sturdy chassis, ...).
Again, it's my personal opinion, based on personal experience, but since we do have alternatives (e.g. the fair phone) and since these devices are not that widespread, I'm afraid my opinion is more common that you'd think.
Again, this is MY experience, in MY context, with MY use case. I believe that my use case is pretty common, but I might be wrong, of course.
ah yes, "right to repair" was going so well, up until it led to a place you didn't like and then "it's a phone for chrissake, throw it away and buy another every 2 years".
what happened to e-waste concern, weren't you saving the planet?
like if your goals can only survive if you utterly steamroll everyone else's concerns and cross-purposes/goals that's probably not a goal that's accomplishable in a multilateral society, or at least your attitude towards those goals is unhealthy.
people want to know that a used phone isn't going to be full of shitty parts that diminish the experience, and we are trying to bias towards longer device lifecycles and more re-use. driving down cost to the absolute dropshipped-firehazard minimum isn't the only singular goal that people might have.
in fact sometimes these goals are inherently contradictory, like parts quality vs cost! cost encourages repair, but bad parts are also e-waste and every repair increases the likelihood of a total failure (damaged board, damaged back, etc). Shipping 27 batteries from amazon or china so you can replace them every 2 months is carbon-intensive and resource-intensive, on top of all the social issues it causes (like people who get upset and sue apple for "breaking their phone" when their knockoff part uses a legacy driver from an older phone that was removed from a certain iOS release).
in this situation, diminished trust in used products probably also has a negative effect on device lifespan and e-waste, and you've explicitly codified this with the "it's a phone, throw it away every 2 years" standard. That's not very eco-minded. You absolutely should care about parts, because parts keep those devices running and out of landfills.
If anything we should be pushing harder to force vendors to provide verifiable first-party supply chains with defined, long-duration lifecycles. Why can apple keep a battery or a display or a camera in stock for 10 years but google or samsung can't?
You seem to be criticising some fantasy scenario that has never happened in the real world, and likely never will.
> people want to know that a used phone isn't going to be full of shitty parts
How often does this happen? I have never seen this issue come up in my life, I bought my phone second hand. Have you ever bought a second hand phone ?
Parts avaliability bites all the time. The manufacturer told me to throw away previous phone because a microphone jack is broken.
> we are trying to bias towards longer device lifecycles
You are not if there are no repair parts avaliable. Things break, thats normal, you can't overengineer every screw to make them last forever.
> sue apple for "breaking their phone" when their knockoff part uses a legacy driver
As they should, it is my phone after all. Imagine your car manufacturer shows up in your garage at night and removes something because it's "legacy"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37258203
> Parts avaliability bites all the time... You are not if there are no repair parts avaliable
well, apple has better parts availability and supply lifetimes than any other brand on the market, so sleep easy. You are getting 8+ years more parts availability than most android vendors. That's great for the planet.
> As they should, it is my phone after all. Imagine your car manufacturer shows up in your garage at night and removes something because it's "legacy"
your car manufacturer is under no legal or moral obligation to support your modifications to the car.
practical example: if you replace the head unit (which ties into the rest of the control electronics nowadays) with a third-party model, and the car manufacturer does an OTA software update which changes the way the car interacts with the head unit, and it breaks the third-party integration: wow, sucks to be you.
they don't have to keep supporting legacy cruft forever just so that a third-party modification doesn't break, just like anything in the software world. if it's not advertised as being a publicly-exposed interface then it's subject to breakage at any time. Carplay is a supported interface, swapping in a new head unit and a CAN interface to try and mimic the OEM head unit's CANbus traffic is not.
if you use sun.misc.unsafe, you're gonna have a bad time, period. That's on you. Tinker all you want but don't cry and sue when the unstable ABI is changed. Linux kernel explicitly formalizes this philosophy. You're approved (in-tree), or you're subject to breakage and we don't care about the consequences, you brought it on yourself.
again, you can say that's software and it's different because we need to keep phones out of landfills, but apple is providing long-life availability guarantees of OEM parts at OEM rates for 3-4x the total lifecycle of their competitors' products.
If apple advertises somewhere that you can use older phone screens then fine, sue, but otherwise they’re under absolutely no obligation to support them when misused on other models. The fact that it worked for a while is irrelevant - you touched com.sun.unsafe.
There are two main problems he mentioned, IIRC. (It's been a while, so my memory may be wrong or the situation may have changed).
Firstly, you can no longer do component level repairs. So replacing some capacitors that got waterdamaged is no longer allowed. This is part of the agreement you make with Apple.
Secondly, although you can buy screens and batteries, you can't keep them on stock. You need to get the phone from your customer, then order the parts from apple, then wait for them to arrive, perform the repair, and only then can you finish. If you want to do "While you wait" repairs it's impossible.
It's a bad look to go off on a rant about Apple every time a customer asks a question, so I can understand them being annoyed when someone asks them if they're part of the official program.
Apple obviously doesn’t want it because even under the best of circumstances it’s difficult to ensure consistency from repair to repair, much less between different technicians or locations. And explaining a customer that while, yes, they did go to an authorized repair shop, but no, that specific repair doesn’t fall under Apple’s warranty or seal of approval, is also a nightmare.
Similarly, for keeping parts on stock I can see both sides of the debate. Shops would like to have stuff in stock to provide the best and fastest service available, Apple on the other hand wants to prevent parts from falling in the wrong hands given the already prolific grey market for their parts.
I know they’ve already loosened up a bit with some shops that have high volume and good track record, letting them have some common stuff on hand (e.g. batteries, screens, etc.), but there’s also the option to let the customer get the part via the self-repair program and bring it to the store to have it placed.
There are two competing interests at play but I think with a bit of compromise in either end a workable solution is possible.
As for shops getting pissed when asked if they’re part of the program, I think your explanation is rather poor. It’s equally, if not more of, a bad look to get pissed everything they’re asked that question. If anything it makes them look sketchy when that doesn’t need to be the outcome.
People are generally just interested in the quality of the components used and want to know if official components are used to gauge that, as well as know if they can go to Apple should problems arise (i.e. if it’ll be covered by Apple’s repair warranty).
The repair shop will definitely have considered the option. They will have researched the pro's and con's.
You complained about having to deal with the Genius Bar. I think a lot of repair shops will think that if they go into the repair program they will just turn into a worse version of the Genius Bar.
In addition, the repair shop will know what kind of work they do, what kind of work they want to do, and where they get their profits from. You don't.
So 90% of the time when a customer will suggest joining the apple repair program it's someone who doesn't understand the pro's and con's, doesn't understand the shops business case, and won't respond well to a full explanation of why the repair shop doesn't join. And this person is saying "you need to change your business model, this thing I heard about is better".
Imagining myself in that position, I would also get pretty annoyed.
Sometimes at a party or something someone hears about what I do, knows very little about it, and tells me I should do it completely differently. Doesn't happen often, but it's happened. I get pretty annoyed by that.
I think you might be confusing me with someone else, I don’t recall complaining about the Genius Bar?
> So 90% of the time when a customer will suggest joining the apple repair program it's someone who doesn't understand the pro's and con's […]
Who’s talking about customers making suggestions? We’re talking about customers asking if they are or aren’t an authorized repair shop that’s in the program.
Customers have plenty of legitimate reasons to ask this question, and shops that get pissed when they are being asked this question will quickly lose the trust of their customers.
I can understand why shops get pissed when they’re being asked the question, because best case scenario they see the writing on the wall and know they’re about to lose a prospective customer and “worst” case scenario they are about to be confronted with the reality that someone might in fact not agree with their beliefs that a non-official part is as good as an Apple OEM part or that their beliefs that their work is on par with Apple’s certified repair processes.
But from the perspective of the customer the question comes with the implication that the customer has a certain standard they’re looking for and they are not interested in someone who doesn’t meet that standard, regardless of if the workman shares the same opinions on those standards.
This is the tradeoff you make for not having iPhones stolen and stripped for parts. If you allow “blank” parts with no serial, or allow pairing with random serials, then people will steal phones and strip them.
I’m all for allowing “unpairing” of components when a unit is not in the “stolen lockout” state, such that they can be re-paired with other phones, but they do it for a reason, not just restricting repair.
The value delivered to the average customer by reducing theft risk isn’t zero, and actually it’s probably more than consumers gain from the ability to have a third-party shop install a counterfeit battery with half of its advertised capacity.
Apple battery replacements are dirt cheap, arguably actually probably dumping/under cost (this “byo part” thing usually ends up with repairmen whining that if they have to use first-party parts they can’t compete with apples pricing) because apple wants to make a show of greenwashing. So the commercial value of third-party battery repair is quite small. Is it all really actually worth saving 10 bucks?
Honestly this is a major spit in the face from apple, there is no reason to not make the parts available for sale.
Isn’t one of the major, constant gripes of the repairmen that they can’t do component level repair and so they have to replace assemblies?
That works in the favor of the repair program here. Oh it’s the camera? Well, there’s only one part that it can be - the camera board. Easy to order.
Repairmen don’t like that but apple is never going to sign off on randos drilling and repadding and reballing their products.
Like again, the accusations of bad faith are fundamentally misplaced. The faith is so good that independent repairmen can’t compete with the service rates that apple offers unless they’re using non-genuine parts to do it. It’s not exactly the way repairmen would prefer to do it, but it accomplishes the goals of maintaining product quality, preventing phone theft, and minimizing e-waste, and repairmen don’t really care about #1 or #2 so their solutions don’t solve for that.
People don't like this take, but most of the time Apple's goals are not completely malicious or incoherent. Just like the sideloading thing: there are legitimate user-focused security and permissioning goals there, and people just don't like it when those ideas are taken to their logical conclusion. Letting users bypass permissioning and app review mean those processes might as well not exist, you have to put a non-trivial barrier there (like requiring a developer account). And providing board-level repairs and driving down the cost of assemblies is realistically how products have to be serviced in the modern world. Krisfix drilling and repadding 4090 boards is not typical quality/skill and is not a scalable model for a repair network. This needs to be something that can be done by a person with 1 year of experience in a strip mall store.
Right to repair does not mean that rossman's business model is the only way that can ever be allowed to work. Shipping around a tiny PCB is not a big deal and board level repairs still keep phones out of landfills, even if it doesn't keep rossman in business. There is no inherent right to profit in capitalism, you can't outlaw someone's business model just because it makes yours difficult.
What? Why? Are they like nuclear bombs? What happens if an iPhone screen gets into a wrong hand?
Its shocking to me, that in your mind my right to keep my phone repaired is somehow comparable to Apple's right to prevent me from buying (not stealing) a replacement part.
It means the manufacturer retains ownership and control over an item after they sold it. You are giving them a lot of control over your life, many years in the future - they often refuse repair or impose oneirous terms. This creates insentive for them to consider your phone 'their terf' and to create artificial obstacles to repair by third parties.
This does not stop at Apple, it happens to cars, farm equipment, household appliances, et .
This is a total capitulation of right to private property. You are basically going to become a medieval serf, but with mutiple owners.
Does it matter?
I’m stating as a fact of matter what their interest is in a comment in which I try to describe the interests of both sides of the equation (with reasonable efforts made to be accurate).
You make the mistake of reading that and attributing it as a personal opinion of mine and then proceed to get all worked up and making false equivalencies in a strained effort to make your point.
The fact of the matter is, for better or for worse, that they are free to decide who they want to do business with (pending some legislative changes here and there).
What their reason is for doing business with one, but not with another, is neither here nor there but if i had to venture a guess I’d say it probably has to do with the prolific market of fake Apple devices.
> It’s shocking to me, that in your mind my right to keep my phone repaired is somehow comparable to Apple's right to prevent me from buying (not stealing) a replacement part.
It’s shocking to me that you present the argument in such a way that the only logical conclusion is for you and me to encroach on Apple’s property rights by being able to dictate if and how they sell their property to us.
And what is the basis of this? Apparently according to you, your property rights are so broad, that it includes access to someone else’s property lest you be deemed a medieval serf of all things.
Drama much?
It needn’t be this complicated nor dramatic. When you purchase an iPhone the iPhone (i.e. the physical device and the physical components it contains) become your property.
You can do with that property as you wish, but those property rights decidedly don’t lend you any rights over other components Apple might produce.
To suggest that your purchase somehow grants you any entitlement to components that weren’t part of the initial sale is outright bizarre, regardless of whether you assert that the entitlement exists outright or as an option for purchase.
Car manufacturers get a reputation based on used vehicles not just new cars. High resale value translates into higher margins because higher trade in value means purchasers have more money for their next car. Similarly people who used to buy used cars will often move up to buying a new car when their economic situation improves, that makes used cars a valuable form of advertising.
In that context Apple likely looks at the used market as quite valuable as long people still consider used iPhones as durable devices worth paying a premium for. They don’t need to sell you 1,000$ phones every year if you’re willing to buy a slightly used phone for 500$ someone else can more easily keep buying the next generation.
How do you get people to pay a lot for a phone, and do so fairly often? By making sure they can sell their old phone for a decent prize.
Everything Apple does is in support of this. That implies that they do want you to be able to repair your phone (otherwise you couldn’t sell it), but only if it’s in a way where the buyer of the phone can feel confident that the phone they buy isn’t going to die in a month due to a shoddy repair job. Apple providing OS updates to old phones also supports this (and it also helps them with App Store revenue).
Apple doesn’t care if you sell or continue to use your old phone because in that segment they’re not competing with themselves. They’re competing with cheap android phones.
IMO, Apple does more than anyone to make sure their phones are used as long as possible. Most android brands are far more likely to go in a drawer as it’s not worth the effort to sell it.
It doesn’t mean they couldn’t do better. I think it’ll be a process between Apple, repair shops and regulators to come up with a compromise that benefits consumers even more… including those that buy second hand (possibly repaired) phones.
Why would someone selling a used device disclose that it was repaired for $15 at a flea market?
Apple wants their devices to either work great, or not work at all.
Sounds like it’s not a brand for you, which is fine. Plenty of other people are happy with the value prop, which is also fine.
The fact that our industry's security practices demand constant updates is a regulatory failure, not an inevitability.
Assumes facts not in evidence. My experience has been people tend to blame the platform supplier first and foremost.
1990s OEM computer maker loads a bunch of crapware on your PC? You're likely to blame Microsoft Windows.
SimCity doesn't run on Windows 95 because of a bug in SimCity? You're likely to blame Windows 95. Microsoft at least understood that dynamic.
iPhone acting weird? Apple's fault, obviously, no questions asked. It's the default position of consumers.
I agree with your assertion that this is a knock on the Apple brand for a certain subset of their audience. I don't think it matters to the lay user as much as it does to the power user.
For the first, MS knew what was happening, and worked to make it easier. The computer manufacturers were the MS customers, not us. MS didn't do the actual loading, but they did point to how easy it was to load up, and say "Gee it would be terrible if you did this, this, and this, to load up the machine with profitable junk the user doesn't want.".
For the second, MS had somewhere between zero and negative interest in non-MS software continuing to work. We have sworn statements in court that they actively worked to make sure that 1-2-3 wouldn't run.
Your third is the statement you're trying to prove using the first two.
Again, I don't _completely_ disagree with your third statement. But the first two do _not_ support it.
Because I have known people to buy repaired cars and blame the manufacturer for issues that might be related to the repair, not the repair place. But usually IME when people buy a car out of warranty, that's been repaired a few times, they realize what they're getting into.
For phones there would, at a minimum, be a few years for most people to adjust from "it's an iPhone, no one else even _can_ repair it" to "it's used, who knows what's inside anymore". But I'm willing to bet we'd get there. But it's just a gut feeling.
Now the laptops have soldered ram and ssd, and the screens are paired to the motherboard. Actually I started using linux for a few years, since macos started spying and sending telemetry about every move you make in the OS.
Components don't always fail in isolation. When they do, they can cause damage up/downstream, like if a cap shorts to ground. It's very hard to detect partial damage. That's what drives module level replacements.
People were complaining you can’t use random parts salvaged from dead phones or use non-genuine parts. And yeah, that’s true, because functionally those are indistinguishable from parts chopped from stolen phones.
Yes they do, the self service is a useless PR stunt which is useful to no one. It’s there so Apple can say “look, we support repair” but it’s completely useless to the average person to the point where people are getting laws put in place to force them to make something better
“who is paid to not like them”
What is this conspiracy theory? I guess technically people donate money to his non profit but that doesn’t go to him?
“There is no problem with them”
What about these problems? - It doesn’t help at all with aftermarket parts, only “genuine Apple” ones they have complete control over - You have to order each part individually, so it takes way more time and money than it needs to if they could just stick replacement parts - It’s designed for individuals to repair parts, which very few people do, they need to be able to take things to repair shops (there is an independent repair program but it’s even more useless)
“other than rossman not being able to make money performing installations of genuine parts at the prices apple charges”
If Apple is artificially blocking others from competing fairly with them, then yes, that’s an issue. It’s called being anticompetitive. Despite all the barriers, though, he (and other independent repair shops) can still often do repairs at a much lower price, but because Apple wants to extort more money rather than making their prices competitive they create artificial issues with this
“People were complaining you can’t use random parts salvaged from dead phones or use non-genuine parts. And yeah, that’s true, because functionally those are indistinguishable from parts chopped from stolen phones.”
What about this compromise solution? Each part is still serialised, but the enforcement is done in the part itself rather than the OS. The part will refuse to power on if a key isn’t provided by the phone. An aftermarket part will still work because it doesn’t have this enforcement, and there is an unpairing process that can be used to salvage non-stolen devices that requires the device to be unlocked. When the unpaired part is connected to a phone again it will pair to that device. Of course, Apple won’t do anything like that unless they have to
Why would apple restrict parts sales? They still make a profit from selling the components. They are only needed for repairing a product, there is no other use for them.
Car companies will argue that all third party car mechanic shops should close down because its difficult to ensure consistency.
We all understand why Apple wants these things: they are advantageous to Apple. But what I do with my phone after I bought it should not be Apple's concern.
>If anything it makes them look sketchy when that doesn’t need to be the outcome.
You yourself said that the local store is beloved, didn't you? Maybe most customers understand that the store is working within the confines of Apple's rules?
You should just use the Genius Bar. What's your problem with it?
On the other hand, speaking as an old EE the amount of crap Apple do to their Laptop on newer generation of MacBook circuit. You kind of understand why Rossmann has all the rage.
While I am not aware of Apple doing circuit level repairing, at least not since 2001 with first Apple stores opened. Apple's Genius Bar and repairing were there to file all the problems their products were getting in real life usage. So you get some iteration and small improvement every half generation. Somewhere along the line this stopped happening.
"Authorized" basically means "manufacturer mandated incompetence" in the repair space.
A couple of locations didn't survive COVID. With their crappy attitude, nothing was lost.
That's not a failure of the display module per se, but a dealer handwaving "suitable substitute" without authority while failing to satisfy a performance requirement that's observable but not abundantly obvious.
In other words, third parties without privileged design knowledge tend to operate on a naive "it's a suitable substitute because it fits" paradigm, which is good enough in many cases, but the risk of a repair based on this model being met with dissatisfaction tends to increase with the character/complexity of a replaceable component and/or sub-assembly, which may not be independently discoverable or even documented.
As a trivial example, you may independently observe a simple 470-ohm 0805 SMT resistor in my design, and you could certainly purchase a quality replacement on the market that "fits"...but the unacknowledged risk in doing so is not knowing with certainty whether my design intent surrounding that component depends on other salient characteristics, e.g. composition, power rating, tempco, operating range, endurance, etc.
If you wear polarized lenses, like good sunglasses out in the sun, polarization angle changes visibility of your screen.
It can make your screen completely illegible if not created with forethought.
The IPS iPhone SE 2000 has a fancy polarizer that is never fully opaque in any orientation. I've seen this on other phones too. I believe it's pixel-level polarization.
Some of the screens might be different on each subpixel, making the screen not-blue for example when you're wearing polarized sunglasses.
I’ve never found credible information online, but I haven’t looked that hard.
This is infinitely better than a black screen, which is what you get with linearly polarized screens.
Manufacturers can't realistically be expected to guarantee a device will keep working as normal with third-party parts.
Any of these could throw off a third party part if not implemented exactly the same way.
Occam’s razor..
Why would they ever have a plan to make sure only their screen works with their phone?
So the display was ok but was disabled by SW.
These kind of modern just movements are not what mega corporations like Apple enjoy. But they have to throw bits and pieces around for marketing to show to mostly young that 'they care', 'they understand', 'privacy first' and so on. Well sure they do, about their revenue. Just look at their actions, rest is pure marketing carefully crafted over months and endless meetings and psychological market analysis.
What they did is just marketing move and basically allowing you to pay them fully just like in official repair center. That's not what right to repair means (hacking together my own fixes if I decide to, ie in old John Deere fashion). They should just make sure that things work at the end while not compromising things like security and longevity, ie by open protocols and specification. Nothing like that is happening anytime soon in Apple realm.
Drivers have intimate knowledge of the hardware, and expect exact behavior. If the knock off hardware doesn't exactly implement those same behaviors that that driver expects, problems can happen.
I assume that the driver did something different, that the knock off got wrong.
You could claim that the lack of serialization/identification was the problem.
If they would have known it was a non-genuine part, they could have used the legacy driver. As is, they would have had to find some side channel to identify it was genuine or not, or just never update the driver for that module again, all based on user reports of random phone stopping, and analyzing those phones, because there's no way to know what some random knockoff is doing.
Motive, Opportunity and Means, Aplle has all three.
Third party manufacturers are perfectly able to make an entirely equivalent and compatible display unit, as the originals are sourced by Apple from such manufacturers in the exact same way.
To your ears, maybe. Another perfectly feasible explanation is that there were differences in the third-party component which fell foul of an update.
I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to use third-party components. I'm saying they shouldn't be surprised—or cry foul—when they break.
If a panel driver manufacturer messed up the standard MIPI DSI and eDP interfaces for a bog standard smartphone panel, they would not have a business. Conformance is easy to validate due to the very limited scope. On the other end, Apple likely sources a third party IP block (as is standard in the industry) for their SoCs, and have little to do with over what goes on the wire.
If the display was a dud for other reasons and the software update overlap was coincidental, then sure Apple is without blame - this could happen with an original screen too.
> with a knock off display/touch module
I don’t agree with this,
> they would not have a business
> Conformance is easy to validate due to the very limited scope
This is difficult to respond to, since we come from such different backgrounds. Your assumption is that there is reasonable QA, for a knock off part. Even though this is a logical assumption to have, it is incorrect. QA can very often be, does it work in this device we have right here?
And, implementing a hardware interface correctly doesn’t mean much when you, for example, attach a flex that makes the signal marginal.
It wasn't Apple.
But, trying to place the blame on the manufacturer would mean that they have to support all third party screens, that they have no knowledge of, in their driver/software updates. That's nonsense.
Best case scenario is they hear field reports, and undo whatever they wanted to do.
Disclosure is nice.
But what reason would cause an after-market component to fail after a software update? We don't want these companies building software "genuine" checks to brick phones that use other parts.
With the camera modules and batteries it’s a question of calibration and Apple clearly never thought anyone but them needed to calibrate the part.
Apple should not be allowed to inconvenience users of aftermarket/non-Apple parts.
You have choice.
You can go to "authorized repair shop" and pay 50% of the cost of a device for a repair or go to your nearest repair shop and pay a fifty bucks to repair the broken charging port. You get what you pay for.
The only problem would be "authorized shops" up charging premium rates for cheap parts"
I live in Switzerland and I get why repairs are expensive. Because the labour is really expensive. I did multiple repairs (not on phones) where the labour was more expensive than just buying a new device (cheap printers).
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/businesspers...
>Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (MMWA), it is illegal for a manufacturer to void a warranty or deny coverage if a customer has a repair or maintenance performed by an independent repair shop or using a third-party replacement part (unless the original manufacturer provides the service or part for free).
What I want is to known if a device I had repaired, or am about to purchase, has a knock off in it. This could be displayed in the "about device".
car manufacturers market "genuine OEM spare parts" as if we have a moral and social obligation to pay for their parts 4X than the same part from cheap chinese knockoff brands.
They too are buying from the same chinese OEM, just their "brand sticker" gives them the power to charge a high premium
This is actually incredibly false. I have several collages that came from the automotive industry, for automotive chips. The automotive industry is not using the same Chinese OEM parts, for any of the safety critical ICs, which come in some of those expensive OEM parts.
In fact, they have incredibly complicated processes, with full supply chain lockdown/inspections, to keep cheap Chinese knockoffs out of the supply chain, in direct response to human death from Chinese knockoffs making it into the supply chain. When a knockoff is used, and it makes it into a car, that vendor is blamed, when someone dies. Vendors put extreme pressure on these companies to make sure they don't make the news for killing people/recalls.
All of that, obviously, adds a premium over the unqualified knock offs.
I'm not sure about structural parts, but I suspect it's similar.
I really am willing to pay 4X the price for something that’s twice as good. Half as good isn’t good enough for me anymore.
There are tons of non-Apple repair shops they can go to.
- tell them detailed information about the device in need of a new battery, wait up to a week for that bespoke battery to arrive, then send old battery back.
- agree to share all of your accounting with Apple, now and I think up to 5 years from termination of the contract.
- agree to share all of your client details with Apple.
- agree to audits checking if you dont posses any third party parts that could be used in Apple products.
- agree to never repair Apple product beyond strict list of services approved by Apple.
This wasn't intentional -- it was an inadvertent result of routine code cleanup -- and Apple added the driver back in a later OS update to restore functionality, and added messaging to indicate to users if their display wasn't a genuine Apple part.