We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score
ifixit.com
ifixit.com
That cut down on a lot of the robbery bullshit, but then criminals simply found new buyer classes - they'd simply part stolen devices out and resell everything but the iCloud/Knox/whatever locked mainboard. Displays, cameras, speakers, batteries, flex cables, cases, everything.
So now, at least Apple is tagging the most "valuable" parts in new phones, simply to make stealing them unattractive for thieves, which frankly sucks but is necessary because it's a public safety issue.
(If anyone at Apple is reading this: ffs, allow the legitimate owner of a device to "unpair" all components in their phone in iCloud so that legitimate second-hand shops can strip a broken device at least for its parts)
If that were true, Apple would only require the replacement part to be verified, but they also require the device receiving the part to be verified. That's the "pair" in "pairing".
The "require the device receiving the part to be verified" is just a consequence of how it's currently implemented. There are ways to implement this without the need to do per-device pairing, but doing so in a secure way is quite difficult. I suspect they'll eventually remove the requirement to pair devices using system configurator, if only because this removes the need to have chat assistance with pairing. That's costing them money to have a call center, and they want to avoid it I suspect.
> There are ways to implement this without the need to do per-device pairing, but doing so in a secure way is quite difficult.
Is this based on first-hand knowledge? I'm skeptical on both fronts because I neither see any evidence this is what's being combatted, nor do I see the technical difficulty of being able to self-authorize your phone's parts to be used in repairs.
Sure it takes some engineering effort to get there, but I wouldn't expect it to be particularly challenging from a technical point of view. The phone is already linked to a user account, and the phone's parts are apparently already linked to the phone that's currently using them.
* Apple wants to make sure components in an authentic phone are not capable of being stolen and resold (this is a problem today, even with the pairing, although it is less valuable due to pairing)
* Apple wants to make sure that if you change components, that the replacement component is authentic
* Apple wants to make sure that if you change components, that the replacement component is not stolen
I can't comment on specific implementations, but allowing users to just re-pair devices in the current state would not allow the above 3 goals to be met. By restricting who has access to the pairing tools, they can achieve those 3 with the downside being obviously it leads to a crappy user experience for repair.
And brand new parts could lock themselves to the first device they're put into.
It wouldn't be ideal for repair but it would be much better.
As it stands today, you can already use any random components, you'll just get a pop-up telling you it can't be authenticated.
But no, it is of course about money grabbing, and then the consumer is the opponent.
No need to try to defend them based on unsupportable benefit of the doubt possibilities. If their motivations were actually for the users benefit, then the user would have these options and be benefitting.
How does that not completely bypass any of the reasons for wanting to do this?
And it is “anti-consumerist” to make my property a less desirable target for theft?
Do it from your iCloud account. Presumably thieves will not hold you at gun point to log in to iCloud and allow pairing of your phone's components to a ready recipient iPhone
I don't buy the anti-theft angle that can only be solved by buying a brand-new genuine part direct from Apple.
That's not the main purpose, it's an excuse. You can tell because they don't take relatively simple steps to make things easier for non-stolen parts replacement like the one being suggested
The suggestion from OP whereby the seller of a used phone logs in and "unpairs" the parts could avoid this, unless a robber forces you to do it under duress.
Isn't that possible with the full iPhone atm?
it's resulted in a few deaths in chicago at least
They wouldn’t live to tell the tale
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/family-of-dakotah-earle...
and before you dismiss it given the time of day or one off, armed robberies for cell phones are way up in chicago and they are occurring in broad daylight . the crime that keeps getting covered and that I know someone who this happened to is, 1 -2 people walking on the street, a car pulls up with 4 people . they all get out and have guns and force you to give up your phone and passcode. Armed Robberies are way up 44% 7978 cases and they are all for iPhones and passcodes . people are getting pistol whipped when they don't cooperate and increasingly even when they do.
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/09/chicago-at-least-14-robbed-vi...
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/09/north-side-chicago-robbery-sp...
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/09/4-more-depaul-students-were-m...
Overall I think it's pretty safe to pull out your smartphone in public these days, which was not the case years ago.
Stolen phone? The phone is still activated, part can't pair with new phone. Not perfect, but at least somewhat less anti-consumer.
By restricting the reuse of parts, when you crack the screen of your old phone, you are faced with a $500 repair bill, and decide to just pay your phone company $50/month for a new contract that comes with a new phone.
It's almost always the same play book:
- moves to some US address nearby
- turns off for days
- shows up in Shenzhen or Guangzhou
Usually from there are a few attempts to phish the owner with fake iCloud alerts (and sometimes outright threats) before they strip it for parts.
To be clear it's not like the phone theft itself is part of some concerted effort by Chinese actors: there are only so many places where the tools and skills to strip down, repackage, and resell something as specific as an iPhone speaker unit are so common
No threats though... I assume they just parted it out.
Imagine how happy someone would be if they had their display replaced with a stolen one and next thing they know their phone is both bricked and of no value even for parts.
Sell me the phone that can be stolen please.
I’ve heard plenty of stories of people getting their phones stolen in public. Especially when I was in school, we’d hear of plots like kids coming up to students and asking to call their parents because they’re scared and alone only to run over to a car waiting around the corner and drive away.
You can argue it’s unnecessary, but it certainly chilled the market for stolen phones. They’re pretty obvious targets and they’re very personal. Not worrying about it as much is a big win, but some people have other priorities and that’s ok too.
(We _do_ need laws to allow customers that can prove their purchase to unlock their parts though.)
In that world you need very little actual protection against murder because there's no incentive to do it. That's the current state of iPhones, you don't need to lock them up, use those chest pickpocket proof bags, or strap them to your wrist because no one wants to steal them.
I never, ever argued against "actions to stop it". I argued against this action. I never argued that my anecdata that my phone has never been stolen means that all action against theft are unnecessary, but I believe it is good cause for me to want a phone that doesn't have excuse-driven anti-consumer anti-repair garbage built into it to "prevent theft" that has never been my problem.
I am, however, arguing that this is not how we should be dealing with problems like this. It, in fact, should be illegal.
My counter is that a primary reason you never had a stolen phone is the anti-theft solutions implemented by private companies.
Personally, I think removing the incentives to theft is a great way to reduce it, and this is particularly effective. Sure repair-ability would be nice, but I repair it so infrequently and it’s sufficiently cheap that I don’t mind. As an example, expecting the police to successfully hunt and remedy every petty theft of all the phones that would be stolen instead would be a lot less resource efficient for society. We have enough crime as is that the police have better things to do than fail to find a lost phone.
Once again, no I didn't. Hell, the snippet "Apple shouldn’t solve this" doesn't even appear in my text.
At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe you're being deliberate in doing this, because I don't understand the need to paraphrase me. If I didn't think all of those details and qualifiers were necessary, I would've just left them out myself. And while I understand that my writing is not succinct, it's not like I wrote a novel, so why not just quote what I actually said? Otherwise, it feels like I'm just having to explain how my position differs from the one you're arguing against.
> My counter is that a primary reason you never had a stolen phone is the anti-theft solutions implemented by private companies.
I will quote myself:
> I never, ever argued against "actions to stop it". I argued against this action.
Note that while I have owned a couple iPhones, the last iPhone I owned only had one "paired part" that I am aware of. I am not arguing against iCloud locking as a concept. I am not arguing against all anti-theft measures.
I can see why someone may miss this from the first comment I made, since well, I didn't explicitly say that part. However, at this point, I don't understand what else I can say.
> Personally, I think removing the incentives to theft is a great way to reduce it, and this is particularly effective. Sure repair-ability would be nice, but I repair it so infrequently and it’s sufficiently cheap that I don’t mind. As an example, expecting the police to successfully hunt and remedy every petty theft of all the phones that would be stolen instead would be a lot less resource efficient for society. We have enough crime as is that the police have better things to do than fail to find a lost phone.
I am not suggesting police go and try to find every lost phone. I am suggesting that we have a serious societal problem and we're not really doing anything about the problem itself. The fact that police can't handle every single case suggests to me that it's completely out of control. It'd worse if this was the same for e.g. shoplifting, or breaking and entering... which it is, in some areas. But we don't accept that as "normal", and we shouldn't accept this as normal either.
I realize you were explicit about the fact that police action was just an example of something that one could do, but I find it interesting that it is the example you would go to. While a lot could be said about Japan, with far less prisoners and prosecution, they have generally a lot less issue with crimes like these in particular based on both anecdotal evidence and published statistics, yet it feels like it is a foregone conclusion that there's nothing that can be done about all of this petty theft. I call shenanigans.
Furthermore, while this may sound reasonable in an era of disposable phones and new shiny toys every year, I think it's a horrid long-term outlook. To me paired parts isn't worth it: it's a threat to sustainability and civil rights, as I think Apple's practices tend to be widely emulated regardless of whether or not the outcome for consumers is ultimately good. It's already getting harder and harder to buy computers, new or used, that do what you tell them to. Paired parts is just another dark step in the wrong direction.
In the future, Apple product launches will be measured in the volume increase they make to landfills.
There are phone theft groups at every festival of sufficient size.
A year prior https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/4-charged-with-stealing-ph...
> Four people from out of state face charges for allegedly stealing phones during Lollapalooza in Chicago over the weekend.
> ...
> When police asked Bardales about the phones, he allegedly told them he bought them at the music festival for $50 each and planned to sell them for parts, CWB Chicago reports, citing prosecutors.
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/stolen-cell-phones-from-acl...
> AUSTIN, Texas — Austin Police are investigating an international crime ring that targeted Austin City Limits Music Festival. Authorities believe a half-dozen people worked together to steal approximately 1,000 cell phones from festival attendees. Police say five people have been arrested but more suspects are involved.
The big target here now is music festivals where teams will rove looking for vulnerable/inattentive people and get into their pockets or bags and bolt.
Most people haven't had their phone stolen. That doesn't mean phones aren't stolen.
(I got it back via chasing after them and a minor physical altercation. This was definitely an unwise choice on my part, because the thief was then in the news a few days later for murder.)
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/fcc-smartphone-theft-re...
It's much less common now, since all the major brands brick themselves when stolen (though it's starting to be common to either shoulder surf the pin, or to grab an unlocked phone out of people's hands, then rapidly reset 2FA and email passwords).
I agree with the GP comment that it should be possible to make phones theft-proof and also repairable though.
I recommend using the “Screen Time” feature on iPhones to protect against this. You can basically set a _different_ 4 digit pin to access some of the settings of the iPhone, including the Apple ID one. (The setting becomes grayed out and inaccessible until you disable screen time).
Apple acknowledges this and seem to be ok with it [1].
[https://www.macrumors.com/2023/04/19/apple-responds-to-iphon...]
But at face level… your phone is so personal that it’s pretty easy to mess with basically all of your life.
When you have someone’s unlocked phone, you can usually get access to their emails, and use that to reset most accounts. Finances, social, emails, often work etc.
Here’s the WSJ explanation if you want:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-iphone-security-theft-pas...
The societal problem is that people got used to paying over a grand for a thing that fits in their pocket.
> Nobody has ever stolen my phone.
Put yourself in the position of the thieves. You would want an easy target; one that if push came to shove that they wouldn't be able to injure or detain you. How big are you, physically?
My wife had her iPhone stolen in the north side of Chicago maybe 15 years ago - in a good area no less. Some big guy followed her to her apartment asking to make a phonecall for some made up emergency. She's 5'2" and was like 90 pounds at the time. She did the math on how it was likely to go and just handed it over, as it was late at night and she was alone. Predictably, he ran off. (As an aside, I think it's hard for men to understand exactly how vulnerable women feel in general - as ne'erdowells see them as easy targets compared to even men of similar size)
The same thief may have thought twice if it was me - because I'm a man rather closer to 6' and 200lbs. He may win that fight and get the phone, but not without me getting some licks in - an unattractive proposition, since a broken orbital or finger cuts into those profits.
Someone tip toed carefully into my house while I was sleeping in it, in the Mission near Valencia St., and cat-burgled* my wife's phone off her nightstand, at around 3am. We have some pictures of his legs (?) that he took in some bathroom later that evening. Finally it winds up pinging its location at a Mission phone repair shop, which of course the guy there is saying he has no idea what we're talking about and maybe the phone is "upstairs."
We didn't report, because last time I reported someone breaking into my garage, the two SFPD officers were talking about people interested in my "printer." Nothing was stolen, because it woke me up and I yelled at them from above.
I don't really know what the economy is around stolen phones. It surely exists. I don't know why you would want to die on this hill of ignorance. It's a quintessentially social media thing to do! You have no dog in this race.
*Our cat helpfully ran out the door for fun.
Sorry, I'm not buying it, this is Apple protecting their exclusive repair turf and nothing else.
I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets, because noone will take the phone off of them, so it's not worth it. Phones are still being stolen but imagine if they could sell to a global market of repair shops.
You couldn't go to any tourist location without having your phone stolen if it wasn't bolted to your person.
I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)
Apple should offer a better repair program and offer the ability to "unlock and relock" it in a apple store with proper proof of ownership. Or anything else in that direction.
Do you think thieves are that descending? I know someone whos iPhone 14 was stolen in London. If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?
An example of one theft is not evidence that the policy doesn’t reduce theft, or that the purpose of the policy isn’t to reduce theft.
I can promise you the person who stole this iPhone doesn't run a profitable criminal enterprise. But I am also not disputing that someone along the theft value chain, someone will likely be discerning. However, your claim seems to conflate a criminal enterprise and the theft value chain with an individual thief.
Also, I find the notion that it is very risky to steal something in London hard to believe, but if you have some data to back that up I would be happy to change my mind.
Things being easy to steal and sell aren’t the _cause_ of crime, they’re a symptom. If someone has felt the need to resort to a life of crime for whatever reason, how is lowering their “salary” (so to speak) going to reduce crime? Surely they now need to steal more phones to make up the difference? I guess you could argue they might commit a different crime instead?
Please tell me you understand that reducing the value of an iPhone on the black market will reduce incidence of theft even if it doesn’t eliminate it entirely.
To use a hyperbolic example, if the median profit for stealing a phone would suddenly drop to $10, where their only value are the easily extractable raw materials, a 20-fold increase in theft would be less likely then a rapid drop in theft.
Currently there are avenues to remove iCloud lock, where licensed repair shops or Apple employees remove them for some extra cash [1], so the value of stolen iPhones is greater than the raw materials, making it attractive. But with higher regulation, that could change.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmygb/checkm8-info-remove-i...
Activation lock made a huge difference. The next step to talking profits out of stolen iPhones is to make harvesting parts difficult.
I absolutely give Apple the benefit of the doubt when it comes to I this. Back in the bad old days iPhone theft was incredibly common and that has come down a lot over the years.
I would 100% buy this if you showed me data that indicates that part harvesting is behind most of the remaining theft of iPhones, which it very well may be, but if we have the data we would not have to guess.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watch-catalytic-converte...
People steal stuff because they can use it or because they can turn around and sell it. If they can’t do either, they eventually stop stealing those things.
I don't think anyone has ever made that claim, but people do tend to do what's easy/convenient and it's a lot easier and more convenient to put in 8 hours in a safe climate-controlled office where you get medical benefits and a salary you can depend on than it is to go out every night mugging people or trying to pick pockets, then trying to figure out how to sell your stolen goods, all without getting killed, robbed yourself, or caught by police.
Most people need to make money somehow and nobody is picking the most dangerous, risky, effort intensive means to make that money when they have other options readily available.
The harder it is for someone to make money doing anything other than commit crimes the more likely they will be to commit crime and for some people (those with few resources, and addictions and/or past criminal records for example) it can be very very hard to get and maintain legitimate employment.
Not necessarily. If they can't make enough money from stealing iPhones, they may quit and go into management.
They are plenty of stories on Reddit and TikTok where the stolen phone ends up in China, and then the owner is phished into disabling iCloud so that the phone could be wiped. If not the sold is phone for parts. To me the very fact that you need an entire phishing ring to make stealing iPhones profitable means that there is some cost that deters thieves from targeting iPhones.
Barring phishing, the next best thing is to scrap it for parts. I can see Apple's reasoning here - if most of your growth is going to come from poorer nations it makes sense you don't your customer base worry about carrying a year's salary in their pocket.
I'm also unconvinced it's a "money grab" on Apple's part. Locking down repairs will not come anywhere close to replacing the lost revenue from the consumer's slowing upgrade cycle.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/10zg2o7/how_a_typica...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/yoataa/ever_since_m...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/rwlznf/warning_stol...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/rwlznf/warning_stol...
Plenty of people hope for a good samaritan interaction and will do something like that.
also idk if they ever changed it, but a long time ago I found a phone that was locked and no identifying information shown. I asked siri to call 'my' mother and she arranged a pickup.
2. You can read the phone number off the sim card
3. Many people upon losing their phone will set their phone to lost mode and include a number.
Yet the father was the one being fished.
> 2. You can read the phone number off the sim card
How?
> 3. Many people upon losing their phone will set their phone to lost mode and include a number.
Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.
Your phone could disappear and you would assume it fell out of your pocket or that you left it somewhere, when in fact someone could have stolen it from you while you were not paying attention.
And besides, most people probably don’t expect that a thief would respond and trick them into unlocking the phone for them. Instead the expectation might be that a thief would not respond, and that if someone responded they are a good samaritan trying to help you.
Not sure I understand. The father's phone was stolen, and the son was contacted, and the son logged into the account.
>How?
Anyone can pop out the sim card and plug it into any dumbphone, navigate to settings and read the phone number. I assume there's probably a USB device to dump data on a sim card.
>Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.
Your phone is lost until you attain the information that it was stolen. I fail to find it now, but there was a tiktok of a woman who lost their iphone at festival and it turned up in china where she also was unsuccessfully phished.
If the phone is set to display notifications when locked, you can see the usernames of friends of theirs in notifications on the screen.
I found a locked iPhone on the ferry one time and saw Snapchat notifications from their friends on the lockscreen. I sent a message request to one of the users on the notifications, and told them that I found the phone on the boat and that the owner of the phone should contact the ferry company to retrieve the phone as I would hand it over to the crew of the ferry.
Similarly, if your goal was to be a thief instead of being helpful you might keep an eye on the Instagram notifications of the phone, and then cross-reference friends of those people to figure out who owns the phone.
Granted, that's dealing with stolen iPhones getting sold and an entirely set of other problems. You'll note that 26.8% of them were either unlocked, easily guessable, or in one instance had the credentials there (compare shoulder surfing before stealing the phone).
> Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns.
This would only make sense if Apple had an existing system for customers to unlock their own parts and then disabled it. The system you are talking about doesn't exist, and the idea that they built X but didn't include X+1 because of "greed reasons" isn't entirely credibly.
While you could argue that maybe someone brought the idea up and it was shot down by some devilish exec, it's equally likely to me that
(1) no one at apple thought of the idea
(2) since the product would be customer facing it is some apple design hell along with the iPad calculator
(3) no one cared enough to spend the political points to push for the product
(4) the problem just isn't prevalent enough to justify the cost.
There are plenty of reasons why Apple could be building this to reduce theft while also not building some other auxiliary system.
Do we have data to show this?
> They don't bring money, but increase the risk of landing in prison.
I also don't think the risk of going to prison for theft in London is that high. Sure, stealing an iPhone increases it, but an increasing an insignificant risk by a factor of 10 could still leave it being insignificant.
But his only bears out if thieves can easily discern an iPhone 14 from other phones, which I'm not sure is that easy in the context they operate. And it also requires it to be risky to seal in London, and I think if that were the case then theft would be less prevalent there. And I think if the people in London cared about having their iPhones stolen, they would take political action to that effect.
But sure, it all sounds very plausible, though I would still like to see data to back it up. It may be, but it also may not be.
If the whole part won't be used it will be stripped to components and resold to the same repair shops anyway. Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more.
Apple doesn't want phones fixed because Apple wants to sell more phones, plain and simple. There is no other incentive.
The risk of getting caught scales with that increased volume. The extra friction of parting out a phone for less money compared to selling the whole phone beggars belief that "stealing more" is the most common response.
"iPhone theft getting less profitable raises the rate of theft" just doesn't make sense.
Yes, classically, thieves just scale up their operations tenfold when their profit per theft goes down. This is why iPhone theft has skyrocketed in the past decade, to the point where the general public is anxious to ever wield such a device in public for fear of being immediately snatched.
Oh, wait, that’s not what happened at all.
Doesn't sound like it.
If "Find My iPhone" (the anti-theft subsystem) is disabled, then the serial numbers for all the parts could be sent to an Apple database, and/or the components could have a "ready to be re-used" bit set that caused them to factory reset themselves if the phone they're plugged into changes (so any state on the re-used thing wouldn't somehow leak into the other phone).
I'm not sure how to define "phone they're plugged into" though. Whatever board has the NAND + security coprocessor on it, maybe?
A better solutions is to take the direction FairPhone has chosen and make the things that break user-serviceable and offer the parts for sale on Apples own website. If the issue is that phones are being stolen and sold for parts, just flood the market with cheap parts. The new iPhones are absolutely massive, so I'm not buying that you can't make them a bit thicker and allow a user to take them apart. How many people use their phone without a cover anyway?
If Apple is serious about being more environmentally friendly, then make a user serviceable phone. Not replacing your phone because fixing it is either impossible or impossibly expensive is going to have a much bigger impact than buying carbon credits for people who charge their watch. My best guess is that Apple is so obsessed with just-in-time production and so hostile to the idea of stocking parts, that they can even see the potential benefits.
So, I think those issues are mostly fixed, or at least best-in-class.
The problem of "I bought your laptop, but you didn't disable anti-theft" is questionable. Here's how to sell a macbook so that it can be used by the purchaser and so that your data is wiped:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212749
It takes 4 clicks (and probably a password entry), and it's easy for the purchaser to confirm it was done before forking over cash (assuming they turn on the machine to confirm it can POST). If the seller forgets to do this, they can initiate the wipe + unlock remotely via iCloud.
Apple parts are pretty cheap already, so that's not the issue either.
As far as I can tell, all the complaints boil down to people wanting to fix phones without Apple's authorization. Its a valid complaint, but it only really impacts independent repair shops at this point.
I'd also like to see better support for third-party replacement parts (like with PC's), but I don't think there is any realistic market demand for that, and it is not what people are asking for.
Implementing any functionality over two billion devices is non-trivial, especially when it requires aspects of transactional behavior (as this would).
"iPhone's have become too mainstream to steal, I rather get a crappy phone nobody wants“ – nobody said.
I was robbed at gunpoint (but not in a 'problematic' part of town) and the thief outlined all the steps he needed me to take to remove my phone from Find My and from iCloud. I think a lot of these mitigation measures could make sense but there's no perfect solution.
I think you are missing the point of the comment. The GP says that Apple should allow parts to be unpaired to allow re-use of components; this example suggests that there is utility to keeping the existing security system.
IMHO this is a huge problem. A thief just wants to steal your phone. To ensure the value of the device, it’s now common to force you to provide your passcode. This gives access to all your data, can be used to reset your Apple ID password, lock you out of your account, and erase and lock all your other devices. This problem never existed before, and it’s significantly worse! Like, way way way worse. It’s so bad I wonder if I should really be signed into my Apple ID on my phone at all. Because I don’t give the slightest care of someone stealing my phone. But I do care if they have access to all my data, erase and lock me out of all my other devices. I really care about that. And this problem only exists because Apple locks down the device and all parts.
Not being in the walled garden provides a lot of freedom and flexibility to setup contingencies.
If we're moving into the realm of the ultra paranoid, high security over convenience focused user - sure. In fact I dare say such a user might prefer a Linux phone with physical keyboard, or no phone at all. But if we're talking average iPhone or Android users here, I can't imagine the scenario would change much at gunpoint.
This is HN though...surely there are a lot of people who care about security and have experience using custom roms.
> you'd likely require root to override the core system and password auth I'd imagine
Honestly, even a simple solution would be putting on something like Prey, which is free and easy to use, and using a third party applocker tool. Those two things don't need a custom rom or any other customization.
It would likely be a problem even without the lockdowns and official parts flowing freely, because even if Apple is selling the parts with zero margin, black market and gray market parts supplied from stolen devices are still going to be cheaper, which means there will still be a demand for them from unscrupulous repair shops that use cheap parts of questionable origin to gain an upper leg on shops playing by the rules. There will also always be individuals doing DIY repairs who won’t care where parts come from so long as they’re cheap.
I don’t know the safety situation of where you live but I literally had this conversation with friends two weeks ago where we loved the idea that the iPhone is a better purchase because it’s less prone to theft (because of the reasons GP mentioned).
> West Midlands police have issued a stark warning to iPod users: ditch the white headphones or pay the price.
https://www.theregister.com/2004/03/30/ipod_this_seasons_mus...
Apple could be very well front-running this and trying to prevent it before it becomes a problem. This is clearly a possibility.
So making repair worse to make theft "better" seems like a bad tradeoff to me. And that's even presuming that this stated goal actually works. I would expect that a very non-trivial amount of phone theft happens without knowing the model. Assuming that's the case, having 1 manufacturer make selling parts non-viable doesn't really help that much.
So A) even if it was 100% effective that seems like a bad tradeoff to me and B) I'm skeptical of how much difference this actually makes in theft rates.
I know that I personally, if choosing between a phone that I knew for a fact would 100% never be stolen, but also couldn't be repaired, vs. a phone that could easily be repaired but was subject to theft, I would choose the repairable phone every time. It's an anecdote, but I've never had a phone stolen and literally every single phone I've ever had has needed repair at one point or another.
i would think having a permanently useless phone would stop the first rate from ever increasing much. you are walking around with a grand in your pocket everywhere you go so to lower the risk of violent robbery is good.
Perhaps because it's known to many thieves that iPhones are a useless thing to steal due to Apple's tight account-tied software locks?
This article predates some of the parts behavior but shows that similar efforts have deterred theft.
Times I’ve been mugged and had my phone taken: one
Not to mention that it is not infinitely worse. There is some relative amount of needing repair to being robbed at which it becomes a bad tradeoff. Where that point is is probably different for different people. But that line exists somewhere for everyone.
Only in crappy countries where lots of people own guns.
I'd say the polar opposite, as long as you're excluding screen and battery replacement which aren't what's being talked about here.
I don't know anybody who's ever had a non-screen/battery component replaced. On the other hand, I know tons of times someone's phone has been stolen.
You did not read the iFixit post then, it is what is being talked about here. The post has nice screenshots of the phone complaining that the battery is not "a genuine Apple battery".
If this were a real issue, then I as the device owner should be able to toggle this on and off as needed. But that hits deeper, since this is a device that's being sold as "purchase" when I don't have real control - Apple does.
At best, this is a rental being mis-advertised as a purchase.
Unfortunately, I don't get paid by anyone except my employer lol. 16k HN and 160k Reddit karma points in about a decade isn't exactly influencer-worthy.
> If this were a real issue, then I as the device owner should be able to toggle this on and off as needed.
Phone theft is a real issue, even in places not suffering from open street markets with people fencing stolen shit, like London [1].
If Apple knows that serial number 0x12345678 was sold to you, and that it is the component you want to install, then they have a guarantee that this part is authentic and should work properly.
So, Apple needs a way for you to pair a serial number, but also that the serial number you're pairing is authentic. I'm not sure they have the second piece today.
It's already awful to lose your phone, but even more so when you're at a multi-day event you paid hundreds to attend.
https://www.wftv.com/news/local/lost-your-cell-edc-backpack-...
If you've lived in certain places, you'd know this isn't a solution at all.
Thieves will start holding people at gunpoint forcing you to unpair it all while they wait.
Crime is real. Obviously its frequency is going to depend on where you live/travel.
This would be way less valueble to do if the companies just sold the parts are reasonable prices.
The extreme ways fixers have to go to to source parts for legitimate repairs concerns is insane.
The entire reason there even is a whole ecosystem of people picking apart phones in Shenzen is because it's so darn difficult to source it any other way!
However, this is probably fraught with problems that Apple doesn't want to deal with. Users will want to know if someone tried to pair their parts and they'll be hit with a large number of subpoenas daily from people who want to know which repair shops had their stolen phones.
It wasn't just the manufacturers who were pretty pissed at that. Minnesota passed a law requiring smartphones to have a kill switch that would allow the owner to remotely render the phone inoperable [1]. Then California did, with the California law also making kill switch support be turned on by default. Those laws have been in effect since mid 2015 and were quickly followed by a huge drop in smartphone thefts.
Another solution would be to have a database of parts, and a repair using a stolen part wouldn't work.
Absolutely not. The cases for repairs vastly outnumber the cases for theft to a degree it isn't comparable in the slightest. This should be the basis for any honest discussion.
Not putting that in perspective cannot lead to sensible considerations.
"Oh you're trying to replace your phone screen with one from a stolen item. Please provide your contact details so we can pass that on to the police."
Doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. ;)
So the theory is that, once thieves will see you're carrying an Iphone, they won't bother taking it. But why? You're already being mugged, everything that's even remotely valuable will be taken. Why would they let their victims go, just because their valuables are more difficult to flip? "Give me all your valuables - oh wait, that's an iphone, nvm my bad you're free to go" is that the idea here?
And on being less of a target for getting robbed in the first place - you're carrying an expensive af iphone, chances are you can afford to carry a lot of other expensive valuables too. If you're worried about getting robbed, start with not carrying a device that's more expensive than a fridge.
My condolences to everyone who actually had to survive through a robbery. But I doubt it could've been avoided just because your Iphone was currently difficult to sell. People can get robbed regardless of their perceived wealth, it's a happen-stance crime.
Criminals do not want your iPhone. It is an instant tracking device that even if they sold it in an hour would still lead the cops to where they sold it.
I was robbed at gunpoint in the late 2000s and even then the criminals did not want the phone. They did want everything else tho.
It’s anti consumer bullshit and absolutely nothing else.
In Brazil I've heard stories of muggers holding up e.g. a bus and not bothering to get iPhones. This was a while ago, before the trade routes to get stolen phones across the world for disassembly and parts resale were as developed as they are today.
The anti-theft measure here makes it not profitable, or much harder to profit, from taking a phone because you can't resell it or strip the valuable parts. I had a friend get pick pocketed in spain, and the next day the phone was several countries away.
Just because people can get mugged regardless of perceived wealth doesn't mean that we don't try to reduce the risk.
Pickpocketers will fish anything that is in your pocket and in crowded public transport immediately pass to other partner in crime.
Same with thefts on scooter that rob woman with bags - they don't check if it's prada bag or if has any valuables inside.
Same with thefts that can even break your car window to get some bag that they see is inside but in the end has only groceries.
The world of scamming and petty theft is vast. I've known some real slick thieves, and they are of the opinion that lifting a phone is just not worth it these days. However, this deterrent is obviously going to be effective on a spectrum. If someone is trying to sell you stolen goods, are you going to buy a new iphone from them on the off chance you can get parts out of it?
It actually is typically a grab and run in a crowd.
We know making smartphones harder to flip deters this because in 2015 when it become mandatory for smartphones to require a remote kill switch the owner could use to kill a stolen phone the theft rate for such phones dropped significantly.
A lot of phone thefts are quick pickpocketing/snatch-and-run, or snatch-off-a table, not some Hollywood "stick-em-up, give me everything you have" type of situation.
People target expensive phones, period.. but having fewer ways to turn those stolen phones into enough money to justify the risk means people will be less inclined to directly target them (especially when other brands' expensive flagship phones may be easier).
Similar concept in general physical security/theft deterrent, really.. put up a bigger challenge than others in your vicinity and you're less likely to be targeted.
That's your mistake right there, the challenge to steal isn't identical for different things, and also depends on the things.
For examle, there are plenty of cases where the thiefs snatch the phone from your hand (even while you're still talking), so making resale value low helps here
> you're carrying an expensive af iphone, chances are you can afford
That's the second easy mistake - the "chances" can be low, so the fact that you hypotheticall can afford doesn't help the actual criminal much (if you're jogging with a phone chances that you carry much valuable besides the phone is very low).
It's utter BS, and the lip service companies are paying to right-to-repair bills in state legislatures honestly confuses me given their directly antithetical behavior. Hope strong repair bills get passed and they are fined to hell and back :)
is this a loaded framing for the proposition that "you can't perform component-level repairs if you're presenting yourself as an apple authorized service center"? because the point of apple authorized service centers is you get the apple authorized service, not someone drilling and reflowing your board to replace components.
it's great that rossman can do this, but he's N=1, and apple can't make their entire network out of rossmans. I think it's pretty obvious why they have to enforce minimum standards and standardized repair protocols in an authorized service program.
this is the "rossman doesn't like any repair solution in which rossman doesn't get paid" thing in action. component-level repair isn't the only kind of repair, it's just the one that results in rossman getting paid the most.
it seems incredibly dishonest to frame that as being something that happens often. can you provide statistics about how many apple authorized repairs come back with shoe rubber inside?
like if I go to a best buy for apple authorized service, you're telling me they have a big box of shoe rubber in the back they're using for repairs? Doubt.
People already have to try to phish people’s iCloud details after stealing their devices to resell, costing them time and money and making it more annoying to try and steal.
I do think people who want to repair their phone should have access to a version without this stuff and deal with the consequences themselves.
For everyone else, including myself, please continue to make it annoying for thieves to target iPhones.
Apple has already created a pretty good deterrent to prevent iPhone theft - the Find My iPhone system. It’s better because it’s actually useful to the user and works even if you turn the phone off. The way I see it there’s absolutely no need to serialize the parts as an additional measure to prevent theft (given also what I said in the first paragraph)
He corroborates your point regarding not discriminating the phone he stole, to be fair.
But your point is valid, and I can understand why you hold that opinion.
I take it you’ve never been to an impoverished area? Holding an iphone paints a massive target on your back.
It doesn't matter. The market will dictate behaviour. As soon as the value of iPhone parts drops at the end of the chain (Shenzhen et. al) this will propagate all the way up to the street criminals.
Perhaps they will not discriminate by iPhone submodel (will not matter after a while of the serialisation policy), but they will (and do) discriminate by brand.
Much smartphone theft includes robbers grabbing the phone out of unsuspecting victims' hands, forcing them to surrender it at gunpoint, or pickpocketing it.
Either way, I don’t think Apple set out to make the iPhone unrepairable just because. There just weren’t letting repairability getting in the way of the design and aesthetic they want, and I think it’s fine for them to have this opinion. They couldn’t achieve both so they biased towards design, and look to slowly iterate towards repairability compromising as little on design as possible.
Sounds like a sensible strategy.
However if that doesn’t exist, as an engineer, I am aware of the concept of tradeoffs and ever since that company has existed they’ve always biased towards design.
They would rather 1mm of thinness or an angle a specific shape and if that means that this normally standard screw won’t fit, then “oh well”. Like I said above, it’s an opinion. My FairPhone has the opposite opinion where everything in the design was made around repairability.
Both of them have different, diverse, opinions on what design is. Neither are right or wrong, per se. That’s why the market is so awesome, go to the stall that fits your need, don’t try to make all the stalls make the same thing.
The “security” feature is the serialisation of said screws, no? Even if they were standard and freely available, the serialisation would still cause this issue. Unless it’s somehow not possible to serialise a standard screw but I don’t know how that would differ from the process of doing it to custom screws.
They do. Have you been living under a rock?
https://www.selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home
And there’s no way for Apples policy to fuel theft when the stolen phone and parts from that phone can’t be used for anything. You might have had a point a few years ago when they neither sold parts nor did the pairing stuff.
I think they’re moving in the right direction. But like many here have pointed out they should allow you to unpair parts in a phone you own.
There are comments here from people who have been robbed at gunpoint and forced to unlock their phone and disconnect it from iCloud. I think Apple could solve it by making it a 24 hour process that can be reversed. But that just illustrates that it’s actually a hard problem to solve properly.
I don’t care at all about 3rd party parts. I’ve been burned too many times. It’s not environmentally friendly if you buy a brand new shitty part that you end up discarding along with the phone a few months later because the part was bad. Just force Apple to sell good quality genuine parts at a low price. The sum of the parts should equal the price of the phone. Yes that will be unprofitable for Apple, but governments can force it through regulation in the name of sustainability
If they stop selling parts then they should be forced to disable parts pairing for that model… then relying on 3rd party market as a fallback is an fallback
Louis Rossmann used to beat Apple on the price of repair specifically by desoldering individual chips and swapping them, which is far cheaper per repair. But it's more expensive to train workers to do this kind of repair, and Apple doesn't like paying for skilled labor in America, so they just make the consumer eat the cost of whole assemblies.
At the same time Apple has also insisted on locking down their supply chains so that you cannot buy factory original components at all. They don't want you to be able to buy the chips that go into their phones, because they're worried you might pull a Strange Parts and cobble together a whole iPhone out of them.
It's oddly convenient how all of these things - the need to stop iPhone chop-shopping, the need to stop product cloning, and the need to have cheap labor costs - all just so happen to result in a really shitty repair experience that makes buying a new one always the best option.
> all just so happen to result in a really shitty repair experience
You're saying getting genuine parts and instructions directly from Apple that are simple for a low-skill person to install is a shitty repair experience?
All this uproar is about is needing to contact Apple for them to link the part to my phone. How is that a shitty experience?
He's saying when the screen doesn't work because a 1/5 penny transistor broke he'd rather pay $15 in labor for the tech to replace it than >$15 for a new screen assembly.
And related, people are saying they'd rather be able to pay the $15 in labor when Apple End-of-Lifes the device and no longer produces that assembly.
They did that. https://selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home
all of them had parts replaced, some of them multiple times
I'd much rather pay for theft insurance than have to pay 10x for parts replacement
Once such practice is started it will never stop. If it benefits Apple why would they wver stop it.
Thieves have existed since forever. There are many things which get stolen and don't integrate such protection and people live with that. No tech things like gold bars, gold rings with diamonds. Some people simply look after their stuff. And it is possible to buy insurance, tracking devices, lock boxes and other services to help.
* Maintenance Manual with explosion diagrams and step-by-step guides
* Short guide videos for important parts (terse and helpful, very good hidden on Lenovos Website)
* OEM-Parts from Lenovo itself or dealers
And the best thing…it was shipped with Linux and it reacted “Oh. Should I turn on scaling?” :)
Probably not was Lenovo intended but in the end both sides are happy.
I bought a cheap desktop in the meantime, which still works fine, ten years later.
When the laptop came back, Lenovo diagnosed it "no fault found", and didn't replace the faulty cable. Not only was the display still intermittent (due to the bad cable), but their technician removed and then improperly installed the insulator for the backlight's high-voltage transformer, so it was painful and unsafe to touch the laptop if the display was on.
Compare this to Apple, where I drive into any big city, hand them the broken shiny thing, a bag of money containing about 10% its retail price, and it Just Works when they hand it back to me (almost always on the same day).
Maybe Lenovo can repair their own stuff these days? I haven't observed this anywhere I've worked since.
(My evidence that they can't fix their stuff is that there is usually a pile of broken Lenovos in the back of the IT office.)
...or, if you bought AppleCare and it's still within that time frame and not an egregiously obvious user error situation, no (additional) money at all.
I had a similar experience with sending an X1 Carbon to Lenovo’s repair center: “No problem found”.
When I called to complain, I was told they recommended on site service over sending machines in. The repair tech was prompt, pleasant, and skilled. The machine was fixed in 30 minutes.
But in both cases - well all - this shall be part of the device pricing. We had here also a fan with fan (within first year), promptly picked up, promptly replaced.
PS: Most manufacturers have multiple OEMs for batteries, displays, WiFi and so on.
In my experience that is a low value. It has always been repair this one, or buy current model for 20% more than repair cost.
So, when I read your comment about "That is one of the many reasons why (we) use ThinkPads." I think people need to be reminded about Lenovo's (POST IBM SALE) controversies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...
I replaced the battery in an iPhone 5 earlier this year and it's ticking along fine. The longer it stays out of the dump (or a desk drawer) the better. All of the carbon and precious minerals mined to make this device aren't likely to be recycled into new devices: they'll end up on the shores of a country in the Global South along with all of the other tech detritus that we throw away. The resources are spent, the damage done, I want to get as much use out of it as possible.
It's measures like pairing that make me question whether Apple's recycling program is even legit or more corporate green-washing. Has anyone done an independent audit of their process and where materials end up once devices enter the program?
Maybe the NSA can do it? But I suspect they could more easily hack phones in software.
but philosophically there's no reason the digitizer can't be a secure enclave too, and sign a message authenticating that it's really the digitizer that you think it is. unless you can force it to leak the secret or you can break RSA, it's as secure as any other cryptosystem.
remote attestation does work and I don't really get why people continue to assert that it doesn't. root-of-trust and remote attestation are solved problems, and detecting component swapouts (and other "hostile component" attacks) are one of the primary use-cases for these systems.
I don't want to have ownership of devices I pay money for, because if I don't own anything, nobody can steal it from me.
But from an environmental perspective, it makes a huge difference whether something can be quickly repaired or not. Who can do the repairs is an important question, but it is secondary to the first. I am not happy with iFixit not distinguishing bad repairability and having to go to Apple for a repair.
I find it ok to withdraw like one point for the tie-in to the manufacturer, but the new score puts it on a level with devices which just have to be thrown away.
This is also a disservice to the customer, as while the Apple prices might be quite high, they seem to be related closely to how difficult a certain repair is to do. Improvements there are a benefit to all customers. The new scoring system hides this and actually reduces the pressure onto the manufacturer to improve repairability.
board-level repair is fine, and is probably necessary to get some of the economies of scale in assembly and distribution. but you'd think it doesn't count for some reason.
"How Parts Pairing Kills Independent Repair" [2023-01-17] https://www.ifixit.com/News/69320/how-parts-pairing-kills-in...
TDLR: "Put Pairing in the Peoples’ Hands" and "Unpair the Future"
Their second point is totally spot on and lost in the food fight. Parts Pairing must be disabled for any discontinued models which have also fallen out of warranty. (Like if I bought the last iPhone 5 and could no longer buy Apple Care for it.)
Further, Apple must provide repair parts. Actual cost for noobs like me and discounted for warranty repair shops (any org who wants to sign up, eg identity and tax id verified.) Excess inventory for discontinued models liquidated to some one's like iFixit.
My u/unpopularopinion:
Counterfeit and grey/black markets are a scourge. I absolutely want parts pairing for any new devices. Doubly so if my threat model included espionage or surveillance.
Then any phone reported stolen would just not work as replacement components.
If the concern is to prevent the resale of stolen devices or parts, Apple could simply provide users with a way to report the device as stolen (e.g. via iCloud.com), which would put the serial numbers of both the device and its parts into a blacklist. Problem solved.
Instead, the current system effectively assumes that ALL parts coming from a different device must've been "illegally obtained", which is nonsense.
You can do theft prevention without actively making independent repair shops' lives miserable. But Apple's goal is to make independent repair shops' lives miserable; theft is just a pretext. Just look at their track record, from the humble pentalobe screw all the way to the repair program NDAs.
I’d sacrifice just about anything to not black out with a knife at my neck again. So I’d say overall I’m pro this.
> Advocate for Apple to provide access to their calibration re-provisioning processes instead [...] Them not providing those tools sucks and is anti-repair.
By that rationale, Marcan might actually support iFixit's decision here.
Isn't that also why most stolen phones end up in SE Asia where they're disassembled for parts?
Just a few years ago, every major news source had an article every other week sounding the alarms about the smartphone theft problem. They would universally blame the phone manufacturers for not doing more.
I’m not saying these changes would prevent occurrences, but if they couldn’t even strip parts from a phone, it makes it a less enticing target for thieves.
I do think that a version of the iPhone without these restrictions should be available for purchase for customers who know that’s exactly what they want, not this convoluted system.
I have the impression only apple fans are reacting negatively to this news. Like I said, apple rather push for security than liberty, be it software or hardware. It's okay, it's a choice, idc about apple products so I'm pretty much neutral on this. I have made the choice for myself, I'd rather have liberty right now, but once I am too old to use that liberty, you can be sure I'll go to Google/Apple/whatever. It's not a dig, it's a real choice.
Don’t like the product don’t buy the product.
This has never worked, because in a single product, a myriad of concerns are bundled together. Just like how people are complex, and you can't simply avoid toxic people. Or you can't just uproot and go live in a better place.
Individuals have much less liberty than the "free market" and "vote with your wallet" sentiments imply.
Same with voting, really. If you look at the US, you have an imperial shit-ton of political issues, and a ridiculously small pool of just two parties to choose from. Even in countries where there are multiple parties, it's rare that people agree with everything they say and do. But with voting for any of them, they support them anyways.
And so, that's why the arguing about the liberties come into the picture. Because if you buy a product, you essentially support the product and the manufacturer. Maybe you want to support a single thing about them, like how well they protect their cloud, but with that, you also support all the other things they do as well. And you especially can't get away from things which are so pervasive that they are part of the zeitgeist, like the ever-present telemetry that comes with the always-on internet connections.
Now, the increased theft protection may outweigh the hit in repairability for you. People have different priorities, and it's understandable if theft protection is important to you. But iFixit's repairability score doesn't measure theft protection, and they shouldn't grant leniency just because there may be a good excuse.
Not that I care, I gave up my iphone and macintosh 12 years ago, I'm just noting a pattern of negative press being upvoted and this is among it.
As always, security has to play against other factors - like eWaste and convenience.
That's like banks blaming you for "identity theft". No, the bank failed to safeguard your identity or validate your transactions.
Similarly here, the valid argument, and target of such changes, is unscrupulous “repair” shops, aka the market makers for these stolen parts.
Whether cars, or phones, after-market repairs are riddled with hazards, and it's not those shops that end up in the news when someone's brakes fail, tire treads separate at speed, or a Samsung or iPhone explodes their face off.
My dad once got tricked into buying an icloud locked phone. I was very sure it was a loss cause, but he tried bringing it to a local repair shop anyway. They removed the lock in a few minutes for something like 100usd.
Apparently at least some of those icloud unlocking ad that I always thought were scams are actually legit. So these locks may not be as effective as Apple may want you to believe.
I had one case of spontaneous malfunction, one bricking via repeated high humidity environment and one bonk against bare concrete, which resulted in the screen needing to be replaced so I have to ask: how bad is theft in your corner of the world?
Our world is running out of ressources at fast speed and this habit of throwing phones away (iPhones and Android phones or anything else) without real options to fix them is creating a huge pile of waste which are furthermore highly toxic.
According to IEA, demand for oil should peak in 2030, which is a lie, considering India still have (and want) to catch up with Chinese economic devellopement (India GDP: $3.34 Trillons, China GDP: $19.34 Trillons), for the same population. Demand can't fall in that condition.
But production will...
Peak production for conventional oil happened in 2006, resulting in an all time high of oil price in july or august 2008 at $148. And then output started to fall after a few year of stabilisation of the production.
Shale oil production in the US, oil sands in alberta, took over the increasingly disapearring share of the conventionnal oil.
What will happen in 2030 is that the cumulative production of all sources of oil will decline, inexorably, for 30 to 40 years, until the energetic cost to extract it will be above its energetic value. It would may be then extracted for its value as raw material, at very high monetary cost. Or with the help of another energy source, such nuclear (it seems to me that Saoudi Arabia has asked access to civil nuclear technology), but also at very high monetary cost.
In fact, it's not completelly a lie from IEA, in a sense that demand will be forced to decline... But it's far less worrying to say we will need less bread in the future than say we will not have enough of it...
Throwing things away as we do will appear to us, probably in our own live time, as the must stupid thing mankind has ever done in its 200.000 years of existence.
They’re allowed to have an opinion, and with engineering there are tradeoffs. They tradeoff design with repairability and have the opinion that it is a good tradeoff. They want to test that opinion with the market and it resonated. What’s wrong with this?
I genuinely am confused as to the anti-consumer moniker when the consumer has never had more choice?
This is a great example of what I had in mind. Apple has successfully convinced you that pairing every part of the phone to the motherboard such that it can never be replaced by anyone other than Apple (usually for a price greater than the phone itself) is somehow essential to the iPhone Experience™ and beneficial to the user.
You still haven’t explained how choosing to tradeoff design over repairability is anti-consumer when the consumer can buy a FairPhone right now (who, I can tell you, have a significantly worse experience and design than my iPhone, but I don’t care because I can tinker with it!)
I think you just don’t like the company and are looking for silly reasons to bash them.
Because in a few years the phone will be unusable because of the battery. Your mum probably doesn't care about how new and fast it is, it will likely still work fine for her, but she'll likely have to replace the whole phone because of the battery.
What confuses me about all this is the fact that anyone who wants an easily repairable phone has access to them on the market, as I’ve been saying, I support companies who make this stuff because I like tinkering with hardware.
I think Apple should continue to be a company that biases towards design - trading off repairability if it comes to that. That’s ok because if I don’t like it I can buy a different phone.
My mum just wants a phone with the feature she cares about, and when it gets slow or bad, she rings me up to upgrade.
Most Apple devices are used for years, sold to or given to people requiring the latest since they are not worthless after a short time. I'm not sure what those people you talk about do with their year old iPhones.
Apple is pulling the exact same kind of shady bullshit that John Deere did with its tractors - except that in that case, the tech community was up in arms and actually spearheaded a right-to-repair movement.
Meanwhile, when Apple does the same thing, everyone seems to be falling over themselves trying to find an excuse why, well actually, Apple really only has the best interests of its users at heart.
What's going on?
Kudos to iFixit for at least showing some stance, but even their post is weirdly excusing in places:
> While it’s an improvement over the status quo of just a few years ago, when Apple wouldn’t sell parts or supply instructions or software tools to anyone outside the Genius Bar and a few select “authorized” repair outlets, it’s still a major problem. Apple has made some real progress here—and we’ve been reluctant to criticize manufacturers taking meaningful steps. There are good people inside Apple working hard to make this situation better.
Since when can investing a huge amount of resources to build your own DRM scheme and then paddling back a tiny bit when there is too much political pressure be called "taking meaningful steps"?
Would you applaud Microsoft for "taking meaningful steps" after they spent years on hardwiring Edge-only links into the OS, then eventually carved out a tiny exception after EU pressure grew too large?
These are the types of actions that help the ethos of "REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE".
But it comes at the cost of capitalism and pure profit making. There's going to have to be a hard reckoning sometime soon that we can't keep just throwing stuff away (and paying again and again), just so the stock market keeps moving up.
making things worse under the guise of listening, that's oh so pro.
When I first hand-etched my own PCB to attach LEDs to my Commodore 64, controlled by software that I'd written, it was amazing.
When I first used a 300 baud modem to connect to a BBS and communicate with people far away, it was like a whole world had opened up. The opportunities were endless.
Now Apple with their subscriptions, artificially crippled devices so they can force the cloud upon people and monetize personal data. Artificially unrepairable devices. Removing ports to sell dongles and wireless chargers. Removing features all the time. Creating devices that are not interoperable with other devices, because that makes their victims ever more locked in and unable to resist next year's even more efficient milking machine.
So much unnecessary bullshit, and more and more every year.
In the old days computers would improve each year. They wouldn't remove stuff. This years device was like last years, but with added features. If you were thinking about upgrading, you didn't have to make a spreadsheet for yourself with what you're gaining this year and what you're losing, and how much the monthly subscription will be. Buying new tech was an easy decision.
Nobody would have tolerated any of this in the 1990's or 2000's, so why now? Why are people so resigned to not truly owning anything? How can they seriously claim that any of this is actually good?
Apple championed non-replaceable batteries, no headphone sockets, locked bootloaders, had to be forced to use USBC. Now they're championing remote hardware pairing. Every time there's the barest of paper-thin reason for it, always more lock-in, and of course no way for the consumer to opt-out of such bullshit.
Just the worst most consumer-hostile company.
But every time they come up with the latest new consumer-hostile bullshit, for some reason so many cult-of-Apple zombies come out of the woodwork, to parrot the flimsiest of pretext for why it's actually a good thing and why they're happy they're getting milked even more this time, and everyone who doesn't want to be milked is actually in the wrong or just cheap or poor or something.
They wear their special Apple release day dunce cap and line up at midnight at the Apple store to be milked for the latest phone that's half a step forward and half a step back, with an iCloud subscription tacked on.
It's so infuriating.
But the most infuriating part is that other companies invariably follow suit once the dust has settled and the latest anti-consumer behavior has been normalized, because every step is more and more lucrative, and a far easier path to profit-creating than real innovation.
Line must go up, and they're all out of ideas, so why not create subscriptions where none existed before and stop repairs so people have to buy new phones? The zombies won't care because they're just dying to put their special release-day dunce cap on again. This one has magnesium!
Somehow USBC is revolutionary because people can now save videos to external storage. What? My Galaxy Note from 2012 had microSD.
Soon will come the subscription-based hardware with remote hardware disabling. A subscription for access to particular phone features. Mark my words.
I hate Apple customers for their ignorance and shortsightedness in enabling Apple in their quest to ruin computing. It would be fine if they were just ruining it for themselves, but they're not. The trickle-down from Apple is ruining the whole industry.
Of course, I'm not excusing the other companies for jumping on the enshittified bandwagon, but Apple is the only company with zombies who will accept whatever latest bullshit they can dream up, without ever dreaming of switching sides.
I hate Apple for what they're doing to the computing landscape, and I don't care if their M2 is better on power per watt or whatever. I'd plug in and use a device I actually own.
I wish Apple would just concentrate on creating the best product they can make. Even if it had the bullshit but you could opt-out.
No bullshit and just the best product. I would buy five.
But not any of this, this is shit.
Fuck Apple.
Ifixit: you are not on my side.
Because if they didn't do that, anti-theft would be just a useful excuse to further rob the consumer of agency.
They do give out such a code, right? I'm just assuming here, but since they paint themselves as such champions of ecology [1], they must. Because if they didn't, that would make them hypocrites, and liars, in claiming there is no way to deter theft without taking rights from the consumer. And we know Apple is honest and on the consumer's side, so that can't be it.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201351
My old company had a big problems with leavers dropping off the iPhone without giving either their passcode or unpairing the device from whatever iCloud account they used, so they couldn't even give it to anybody else. Full shelf full of 1000€ bricks all working fine. (Apple didn't have a proper device management service back then)
And its parts can then be re-used in other Apple devices?
Also I don't know of any major phone manufacturer that sells genuine parts besides Apple.
And yes, other companies selling fewer official parts (although I've never been unable to get screens, batteries, or replacement charging parts for my non-apple phones) is bad, and I already criticize companies that fail to make parts available. When they start doing part pairing, I will criticize them for it to. The fact that this behavior is bad has nothing to do with it being Apple. Not making parts easy to get: bad. Making replacement parts not viable without input from manufacturer: also bad.
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cars-most-likely-...
-edit- Yeah even according to your source, a pretty tiny minority appear to be stolen for parts. Probably because, as you point out, parts are so easy and relatively cheap to get, except for inherently valuable parts like catalytic converters. And guess what? If people start stealing iPhones to harvest the gold/rare metals, parts pairing is not going to fix that.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/auto-theft-canada-1.6953242
if you could re-use a phone, people would just factory reset the phone after stealing it, and people did it. then apple locked that down. then people started stripping the phone for parts instead, and apple started serializing parts. Etc.