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Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

This is another dishonest post by Kyle and iFixit. The failure to mention a critical a reason for pairing—theft prevention—is enough to dismiss the entire piece as hopelessly biased.

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.

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While they probably should have mentioned it in the article, I don't think that would change the end result. The justification for the pairing doesn't change the fact that it makes the iPhone more difficult to repair.

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.

If the solution to theft is "remotely brick parts that work perfectly," it is a shitty solution that doesn't deserve consideration. Doubly so when Apple's workaround for that is "pay us even more money to double the e-waste by having us send you another perfectly working part, but ~verified~!"

So, abandonning liberties for a bit of security then.

It’s an important conversation to have. My mums phone got stolen with Find My active. The police refused to do anything about it, they tried to phish her details, failed and I followed it to Shenzen.

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.

The right-to-repair crowd are the ones trying to use guns to prevent me from buying the devices I want to buy.

This isn't remotely true. IFixit dropped the IPhone repairability score, does that impede you from buy one?

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.

I just don’t understand how repairing a phone got conflated with liberty in these conversations.

Don’t like the product don’t buy the product.

I mean, I don't and I won't. But fundamentally, the reason I have never bought an iPhone is exactly what the GP said: I want to be able to do whatever I want with a device I own. I'm not willing to give up that freedom for some minor security gains.

>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.

There are plenty of other products you can buy on the market that don’t lock down everything on a per part basis like Apple does. What are you even talking about.

Well, as long as you would like a pocket computer on which you can use the phone network to make calls, browse the internet, and use navigation, there really isn't many other products, just Android phones. So you choose between Apple and Google, essentially. Now, if someone has a single concern, like this per-part locking down thing, the decision is easy. But if someone has a larger set of concerns, the decision becomes which of them to give up.

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.

That seems a touch melodramatic, is a somewhat more thriving indie smartphone repair market truly "liberating"? It's not like someone has a gun to your head to buy an iPhone

This needs to be said, so that people can make an informed decision. Because I think it's important to know that not one is better than the other.

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