Apple fucked us on right to repair (again) | Hacker News Reader

Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)

pluralistic.net

171 pointsjrepinc151 comments

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The article claims that Tim Cook said a certain thing

"Tim Cook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices"

It also provides a link to a source... in which Tim Cook said something totally different

"While macroeconomic challenges in some markets were a key contributor to this trend, we believe there are other factors broadly impacting our iPhone performance, including consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, US dollar strength-related price increases, and some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements"

It seems to be a pretty big jump from "one of the reasons we didn't perform as well as possible this quarter is because of customers taking advantage of our reduced price battery replacement program" which could impact their bottom line by just operating on thinner margins than normal battery replacements, to "repairs are stopping people from buying new phones"

Yeah, I looked at that too. Seems like a very bad faith interpretation of what Cook was saying.

The whole article is bad faith. It links to a Vice article claiming that Apple is lying about its environmental stances because it doesn’t reuse old iPhones and MacBooks. Then, they breeze over the fact that Apple literally breaks these devices down into their core materials for use in new devices and falsely claims that they’re “shredded into immortal e-waste”. How is that not reuse? Are they suggesting that the parts from an iPhone 4 can somehow be reused more effectively? How many old iPhones are still out there that would even be able to use any of those parts?

That is in fact not reusing. That’s recycling.

And what they could do instead is yes sell those parts, or extend their certified refurbished program. It currently only goes back to the iPhone 12, even though their newest OS supports much older phones. To say nothing of how far back security updates are still (selectively) being released.

The logistics of doing that are nearly impossible. Old phones are old phones. No one wants them.

That’s a matter of price.

People who currently use their old phone rather than upgrade every year very much do want their old phone.

Technically "reuse" means wholesale reuse of components, shredding them would be recycling.

But you're right. The whole right-to-repair is just lobbying from independent iPhone repair companies who want to make a quick buck at Apple's expense. It's part penny-pinching, part fake environmentalism and lots of hate for everything Apple. Even if Apple would bring out the most repairable phone ever it wouldn't be enough since it's all about the control they don't want Apple to have (even if that control is advantageous to the customer)

I staunchly refuse to buy an iphone or whatever else Apple sells. I both support right to repair and am affected by many non Apple companies that do anti-consumer stuff. The article here actually lists several companies that aren't and hate right 2 repair, including Wahl (learn something everyday).

I can't understand why anyone who isn't a manufacturer would be against this.

> The whole right-to-repair is just lobbying from independent iPhone repair companies who want to make a quick buck at Apple's expense.

That is a very interesting take. Basic repairability, whether by an independent shop, or a skilled individual (aka you), should be a goal so the manufacturer doesn't have a monopoly on repairs. Market economies abhor a monopoly, and the vendor-only repair scheme is a big one. Looking at cars, The US has the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which was fought for in the courts, to force vendors to accept that aftermarket parts didn't void the warranty of the part wasn't related. Which isn't directly applicable here, but the point is that an outside vendor could create a replacement part, better in some way (cheaper is a kind of better), and repair shops and customers could choose to use that part instead. Apple shouldn't have that much control. We decided this for cars, the same should be applicable with ebikes for the mind.

How is it advantageous to the customers? Are there commonly shady phone repair people doing bad work? I've never had a phone repaired(Rugged cases prevent the need pretty effectively!) so I might be out of the loop.

This isn't specific to repair shops, but there are a plethora of 3rd party battery options for many, many cell phones. iPhone included. Even stuff sold from companies like ifixit. My experience with replacing those batteries with anything except the OEM battery has been always .. let's just say underwhelming.

Maybe I've just been consistently unlucky, but there doesn't seem to be any quality control and plenty of outright lying from 3rd party vendors on battery capacity and expected performance on aftermarket cells.

That’s fine. It’s not the Apple Reusing Program. It’s the Apple Recycling Program. Why are they complaining about reuse when the market for reuse would be a drop in the bucket. Recycling and making new phones that people actually want to buy is a better strategy than attempting to salvage components. Yes, reuse parts would be better if people wanted to keep the same phone for that long. The problem is that they don’t.

Shocking that an article that uses a swear word in its title doesn't adhere to the strictest journalistic standards :)

That's because Doctorow (the author) is not a journalist. He's an activist. He never has and never will adhere to any sort of journalism standards.

The complaint about trademarks on refurbished parts also sounds a bit off, implying that nothing used with a logo on it can be legally imported. There may not be a good and legal solution, but it seems like refurbishing operations and repair shops are trying to avoid having to tell end customers that the assemblies they use for repairs are "a mix of used Apple components and third-party components not approved by Apple". If a disclaimer like that can't get the parts through customs, then maybe we have a problem.

Several years back, before Apple clamped down on this kind of commercial behavior, I made the mistake of taking my iPhone to a third-party repair firm for a screen replacement. They claimed to be “Apple-authorized,” but it’s unclear for what. The knockoff part they used to replace the screen was palpably awful-dim, purple-tinted, discolored around the edges, somehow flickering like a CRT, and a millimeter or two thicker than the real deal so that it stuck out from the body of the phone.

The guy said “it’s fine, it looks great, it’s working perfectly, there’s no problem with it.” Basically “a screen is a screen.” I suppose in some situations and some parts of the market that may be true, and I’m glad that part of the market is adequately served by commodity Android manufacturers. But part of the small premium I pay to Apple for my low-end model iPhone, I pay specifically to avoid having to look my repairman in the eye and attempt to divine his judgment and trustworthiness before he makes off with my money. Consistency and trust in the repair ecosystem is a feature, to me.

There’s a balance to be struck, sure, but I’d hate to think of somebody doing the equivalent “what, it’s fine!” type of repair to a safety- or life-critical device and claiming it’s just as good as new. Even if somebody were to track such repairers down and prosecute them after their repairs injure somebody, we’d be moving from a high-trust to a low-trust kind of environment in exactly the areas where I least want to have to worry about trust.

Anyway, as to phones, I’ve since been very happy to pay Apple the $4/month to cover quality, authentic repairs should I damage my device—and I take them up on that coverage fairly often. $48/year plus the $29 deductible per incident works out even cheaper for me than that unacceptably poor third-party repair cost me years ago.

This is only slightly comical to me because the article actually mentions ventilators and how evil they were that they could only be serviced by the OEM due to the “VIN” on the parts.

I would not want to be the person strapped to a medical device where “it looks fine, it works great” guy was the one that fixed it on the cheap so he could make an extra few dollars.

If first party repairs are an option, my choice is clear. If my choice is between a third-party repair and death, I'm less principled.

Yes, that's my point. The article had to use a once-in-a-lifetime/millenium global pandemic to make its point.

Emergencies happen. Were inappropriate or flawed repairs ever a significant problem? Are there other solutions to that problem? Could there exist a third-party repair service or parts manufacturer competent enough to be authorized? Even besides an emergency, is the measure worth, say, severe delays to or even the impossibility of getting a repair somewhere that's disadvantaged either by being too far away from official services or by economics?

And why couldn't this be a post hoc PR rationalization for what just as well could be profiteering?

Now apply all those questions to the far less life-threatening concern of smartphones and laptops.

>Were inappropriate or flawed repairs ever a significant problem? Are there other solutions to that problem? Could there exist a third-party repair service or parts manufacturer competent enough to be authorized?

Yes, and they continue to be. Potentially, but no manufacturer, Apple or otherwise, has found one. Yes, but not at the scale that Apple operates. That's why Louis Rossman is a shyster. He has skills that are very rare but peddles his right to repair schtick as if every repair shop has those skills and then misrepresents the situation to create drama to drive engagement to his business and YouTube channel.

Consistency and trust in the repair ecosystem is a feature, to me.

You can always go to a real apple repair depot, instead of the crook changing your screen, as you cited.

3rd parties having access to real apple parts, an easier ability to replace them, makes it easier for you to get good independent support. It has nothing to do with that crook you mentioned.

(Just to steel-man the counterargument) it is not as clear-cut to me that everyone is realistically able to make such choice (depending on the geo, quality control of the authorized centers). The repair process is opaque enough that you are compromising the user who is choosing to pay for premium parts to get ripped off with some probability. Even a small percentage of bad parts in the ecosystem will disproportionally diminish the value of used/repaired iPhones so there is a non-trivial calculation to be done on the social impact of such individual choice.

There should probably be regulations mandating that electronics replacement parts meet certain minimum QA and performance standards, particularly those with the significant capacity for harm such as batteries and components handling power. Parts not meeting these standards would get rejected at the border.

Perhaps they should design the machines so that they are user-serviceable.

This was the default at one point. Look at the manual for any home appliance from the 1950s.

The difficulty in replacing an iphone screen is not that it's hard to plug it into its receptacle - the difficulty is in acquiring a part (they won't sell them) and then in opening the device, which requires skill and a specialized tool in pretty much every case.

Maybe, hold them together with small screws, instead of that.

"but then it will weigh an extra .237oz!"

Shut up.

>"but then it will weigh an extra .237oz!" Shut up.

It's not fair to dismiss this argument. The vast majority of people don't care if it's user serviceable and will prefer that the device weighs .237oz less than be user serviceable. This isn't some niche market we are talking about, we are 16 years after the release of the first iPhone. My account on this forum is 11 years old, and this point has been argued for almost that entire time. As much as been hand wringing about customers not caring about .237oz in favor of user serviceability, there have been countless smartphones released that people didn't buy. "Shut up" isn't a product strategy. "Perhaps they should design something users don't want" is a silly statement at this point.

Exactly. The whole "modular phone" and related phenomena are effectively nerd porn and against 50+ years of industry progress towards cheaper, better, denser integration.

I’m glad that the nerd porn exists because I do care about sustainability but operating on Apple’s scale means those devices are a fantasy for the majority of people. Apple’s approach seems more sustainable considering how many claims they can continue to make. Maybe it’s all marketing but I can’t find anyone that invalidates their claims without mischaracterizing them (as this article does a ton).

The problem is, you have two ways to build.

One way, is to make it non-user serviceable, the other, to make it user serviceable.

Now, which do you spend immense sums researching? Which people do you hire for your company? And after you spend years down this path, tooling, hiring, designing, someone says "the environment counts, it should be user serviceable".

Well of course, with billions spent designing, and predicated upon current methods, AND with all the people you hire experts in closed, non-servicable design?

What sort of answer will you get?

Apple, and others, the entire industry, has created this industry to be like this.

If the same R&D was spent on user serviceable, it would happen. Cheaply. Easily.

So of course it's "very hard" to do user serviceable, because no one knows how, and no one has the experience, and no one is researching it.

And no, these little firms working at it, don't equate to Apple working at it.

It may not be on purpose, but to claim it isn't possible is unfair.

You know if the auto industry was left to its own devices, it would still be claiming electric cars weren't feasible too, right? And from their perspective, they were not! Because without billions in research, and iteration, it wasn't.

Just like with Apple and user serviceable parts.

Just as with cars, and bags, and everything else, we should legislate such requirements. So all players in the market must comply.

This seems a little disingenuous. The entire reason that user-serviceable devices aren't possible is that the tooling required to service them becomes more and more specialized as the devices get smaller. It's not a matter of whether or not they can make user-serviceable parts (which why I replied to a comment about things like Fairphone and other modular/serviceable phones) but whether they can scale that and the reality is that 1) it doesn't scale without being so expensive that users can't afford the devices and 2) most users just don't care about user serviceability. So the idea that there are 2 ways to build is a false dichotomy.

It's not a question of possibilities. It's a question of trade-offs. It just does not sell (or at least hasn't.) Integrating everything often equates to less cost, less weight, less materials, less power use, less thickness, more reliability, more water resistance, more performance etc. for the vast majority of the users who have voted with their wallets. And to a nontrivial degree there are physical constraints that dictate this not just marketing and R&D spending (do you want to have replaceable SODIMMs in your iPhone?) I bet the average user likes the idea of modularity and user serviceability but wouldn't want to pay $100 extra for modularity in their $1k iPhone. They are likely more willing to purchase peace of mind through insurance, ala AppleCare+, than to purchase serviceability.

But sure we can keep pretending modularity is free and therefore of obviously a nonnegative option value to the user.

There have been no options besides that paradigm.

Laptops in the 90s had swappable batteries, as did phones. It's perfectly doable.

You have the scent of someone with Apple stock.

>There have been no options besides that paradigm.

Fairphone has been around for 8 years. There was the Shift 6m. The Galaxy line was highly repairable up until S5. We are past the point of speculating if its "perfectly doable". People don't want them. To say there were "no options" is ludicrous.

>You have the scent of someone with Apple stock.

I guess it's easier to call me a shill than to accept the almost 20 years of failure for smartphones in this aspect. It's easier to pretend that there were no options than people not actually buying them.

I love this place, it's a magical land where Planned Obsolescence never happened.

Standards are preferable, and I'd like to pick and choose which portions of the ecosystem I like, and others where I'd like to use something different.

Android isn't a malware riddled ecosystem and you can install 3rd party hardware and software.

> Android isn't a malware riddled ecosystem and you can install 3rd party hardware and software

Not sure if this is serious or sarcastic.

> somehow flickering like a CRT

Backlight dimming can be implemented via PWM, which turns signal on and off at different frequencies to achieve the desired brightness setting from the backlight source. When it is poorly executed you tend to see that effect (more so at the lower backlight settings)

Oof, this just proves that their strategy works. By limiting the availability of panels, 3rd party repair shops are left with very poor quality rejects. What happens is that Apple disallows any of their suppliers to sell panels on the open market, so 3rd party repair shops aren't able to get good panels, then Apple points to the 3rd party repair shops with shitty screens and tells you that you shouldn't trust 3rd party repair shops because the quality of their repairs aren't up to par. If appropriate parts were available, there would be no reason that someone with basic soldering skills and the ability to use a screw driver wouldn't be able to replace your screen with one just as good as it came with out of the box.

You've fallen for the scam.

You act like there wasn’t a full decade and more of history where 3rd party repair existed en masse for electronics and the situation that he’s describing was exactly the result.

There’s no scam here. Most of us find the official repair stuff to be a feature, not a crutch.

Man this article sure does seem to claim some specific ill intent or malice from Apple.

I don't really know why there's so much focus on permitting scrapping of parts that are deemed unsalvageable. From Apple's perspective there is no guarantee the parts are any good, or the cost of salvaging exceeds the benefit of just scrapping them for raw materials as is.

Frankly, the prices that Apple seems to be charging for common repairs seems quite reasonable nowadays. I'm not sure what the profit motive is at the prices they list. The new 15 series batteries can be replaced by Apple for $99... Which seems like a bargain for a first party battery that you know is going to be done properly.

99$ isn't really a "bargain" in the absolute sense. I encourage you to look at eBay buy it now listings for used/refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre NUCs, for example. You can get an entire computer with 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and a Skylake+ CPU for that kind of money.

A Skylake CPU is an 8 year old CPU. Why are you even comparing old desktop-class CPUs to the cost of a battery replacement on a brand new device?

I can buy an ancient server that consumes hundreds of watts for $100 too, it doesn't mean it's a good value.

I can also buy an entire iPhone SE 2020 or something, for $100 as well.

What does age have to do with the value proposition I put forward?

Has the battery chemistry in a iPhone 15 advanced significantly in the last 8 years? I don't think so.

> I can also buy an entire iPhone SE 2020 or something, for $100 as well.

Exactly, thanks for reinforcing my point.

I honestly don't know what you're even saying. The value proposition of an 8 year old piece of hardware that doesn't even have a battery in it is essentially unrelated to the cost or value of replacing a battery in a brand new phone.

Likewise, the used cost of a device that is functional today (iPhone SE 2020 in my example) is almost unrelated to the cost of the battery replacement. I think you'd find that attempting to repair the NUC you highlighted would soon exceed the $100 if you needed to do anything more than very basic repairs.

I was trying to put your original "100$ isn't unreasonable" into context. I think making a comparison between a roll of graphite dipped in some lithium salt and an entire computer made up of billions of transistors is a reasonable one.

You didn't address my parent question either. Because you either don't know (that's fine), or don't want to address the fact that there's very little that has changed in smartphone battery (or any lithium-ion battery, for that matter) composition or manufacture in a long while.

> I think you'd find that attempting to repair the NUC you highlighted would soon exceed the $100 if you needed to do anything more than very basic repairs.

Well I thought you didn't see the point of this comparison, so I don't know why you want to open that can of worms ;) But okay! A replacement 1TB nvme SSD costs 40 bucks (that's a new, in retail box, btw). A used stick of 16GB RAM costs 30 bucks. A used i5-6500T is 30 bucks.

Since you don't like comparing apple to ora--- er, batteries to computers, how about this? An iPhone 13 Max battery harvested from a broken-screen unit can be had for 30EUR on eBay. Except Apple doesn't want you to have that option. It wants to be the only game in town, and have folks like you justifying its monopolistic and unsustainable behavior.

And what exactly is stopping you from using said harvested battery? It works. You plug it in, and it's fine. Literally the only thing you miss is the battery life indicator (which, seems reasonable, since a harvested device may have had its battery life reset or something) and the pop-up that says this battery may not be an original component if you check the Settings menu. That's it. What's the issue here?

Well see now we've well and truly wandered away from the discussion of your original comment, and veered straight into the territory of what the original article was addressing.

> That's it. What's the issue here?

I guess you didn't read the original article, but it does touch on specifically why this is problematic, and can only lead to even worse outcomes in future.

It also links to this iFixit article, which might make things clearer for you?

https://www.ifixit.com/News/69320/how-parts-pairing-kills-in...

> the prices that Apple seems to be charging for common repairs seems quite reasonable nowadays.

That is besides the point. If Apple is the only one allowed to do repairs, they can set whatever price they want. That they've deigned to make it $99 is a price not determined by the market.

I didn't realize that Apple forbade anyone from doing repairs? If I want to replace the battery in my iPhone, there are a multitude of 3rd party vendors I can buy from. It'll tell me it can't verify the battery is authentic... but you can still use the battery. Same with screen, camera, etc.

If Apple wanted to actually forbid repairs, they wouldn't let you turn on the device if the battery wasn't authenticated, or the display wasn't authenticated, etc.

The point is that we shouldn't have to live under Apple's good graces and just hope they remain benevolent.

What is there to "live under"? You can already buy 3rd party parts, nobody is stopping this.

If Apple started bricking devices if they didn't have authentic parts in them... yeah, sure, I can see you point. But they don't, and you're free to repair devices yourself or take them to a repair shop who does this for you.

Frankly I don't see how this is particularly different from Samsung or any other android manufacturer, besides maybe aftermarket parts won't warn you that they're possibly not authentic.

> Frankly, the prices that Apple seems to be charging for common repairs seems quite reasonable nowadays

MacBook Air. Damaged charging chip. Laptop runs fine on AC. Battery is at 100% health. It just can't be charged (this is the summary from Apple after diagnostics).

Fine, I think. Maybe what, $2-300 with parts and labor?

"That will be $890 if you want to repair it. Maybe we can talk about getting you into a new Mac instead?"

$890. To repair a $1,100 laptop that is functioning perfectly other than being able to direct energy into a battery.

No other laptop manufacturer is going to offer you a repair that involves soldering, either. Everyone is just going to offer to replace the motherboard for a failure like that, and that motherboard contains all the most expensive components aside from the display. Nobody wants to lose money on the repairs, which is why soldering is right out and why a replacement motherboard is going to be over half the price of the machine before labor is thrown in. Your expectations were unrealistic.

I've gotten multiple laptops repaired by independent repair shops which did in fact desolder, change, and solder a part.

It's not actually as difficult as you think. The chip itself is likely just a few bucks, and it takes about an hour to make such a repair, so plenty of shops are happy charging a couple hundred dollars to do this.

Yes, some independent repair shops can do this. It doesn't scale. People who can diagnose such problems and solder well enough to make such repairs quickly and reliably are rare, and can usually make more money putting those skills to use elsewhere. There's no way every Apple store genius bar could have such a technician on staff.

It scales fine. Diagnosing and repairing these issues is not as hard as you think, and there aren't that many places that will pay, say, 40$/h for such a skill. It's also something you can train people on. The biggest problem is that you can't get the parts.

That's because if you have a schematic, you can build a diagnosis flowchart from it, so all you need is to know how to use a multimeter and you can follow the flowchart. If you can't figure it out from there, you cut your losses. Then the skill remaining is to be able to hand-solder SMD components - it's not an easy skill, but there are plenty of jobs that pay worse for harder skills and not many places that will pay you well for it (if you know one, I'm all ears).

You don't need to be particularly quick either. Such a repair for a really good technician might only take 20 minutes, an average one maybe 1.5 hours. At 50$/h, with a 50% success rate, you still make 150$ of expected marginal profit if you charge 300$. And of course many repairs are even easier. However most places pay around 25$/h and just ask that you have a high school diploma and some soldering experience.

But the fact that you just can't buy parts means that you need to buy donor boards, and that doesn't scale well.

> You don't need to be particularly quick either. Such a repair for a really good technician might only take 20 minutes, an average one maybe 1.5 hours.

Total bullshit. It takes more than 20 minutes just to disassemble and reassemble a laptop to get the motherboard out without damaging anything. Diagnosing the failed component can be quicker in some cases (eg. scorch marks), but checking the extent of collateral damage isn't that quick. A more realistic estimate would be about two or three repairs per day, unless you want to complicate things by stipulating that all the less skilled parts of the process (disassembly, fetching replacement parts reassembly, verifying repair worked) are to be done by a less skilled technician and only the actual board inspection, probing, and rework are done by the skilled technician. And then you have to consider that such repairs will never have a perfect success rate, so you need to be able to regularly eat the cost of wasted time on failed repairs while still keeping the cost of labor and maintaining an extensive parts inventory cheaper than the cost of a new motherboard.

It really doesn't take more than 20 minutes to get access to the motherboard of a MacBook. Are you under the notion that you need to fully strip down the computer before being able to diagnose it? You don't. You just pop the back cover, replace the battery with a bench power supply, and start testings. You can do most tests without removing the board from the chassis. You might eventually need to get access to the other side of the board, but again it doesn't take 20 minutes to do that.

Here's a video where they remove and put back a MacBook Air motherboard in 13 minutes, on camera (https://youtu.be/Sk8kj_y32mU?si=4fUoXux_zLIGg-9B).

I already took into account a pessimistic 50% repair success rate at a salary double what most shops pay.

So then the parent is right. If disassembling it took 13 minutes, then they’d have 7 minutes left to reassemble and that wouldn’t involve any actual repair.

It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble.

So then you have another 20 minutes to diagnose. If you can repair 50% of boards that make it far enough that you need to dissassemble for diagnosis and then you take an additional 30 minutes to do the repair with 50% success rate, you're spending 3.6 hours per repair, which is perfectly fine if you're charging 300$. These are pessimistic assumptions too - you often don't need to dissassemble the board to diagnose it, the person disassembling the board doesn't need to be paid as much as the person doing the repair, and you'll probably have a better than 50% repair success rate.

> It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble

Try linking to a video that doesn't fast forward the boring bits before doubling down on that 13 minute claim.

I don't understand some people here that are clapping apple for DRM their devices as kind of protection from thefts. There is a way to have a cookie and eat it too in this case if they would allow user easily to remove DRM via iCloud or even better when disconnecting from iCloud.

In the last 10 years I never had any electronics stolen from me but almost every smartphone got broken in some way: worn out USB/lightning port, broken battery, broken screen, shattered glass, broken Face Id.

Imagine if we would apply the same scenario for human organ transplants. Let's enforce (using similar logic) that after someone dies we throw such body straight to oven to burn it because there exist in the world illegal human organs trade - no even if you want to be an organ donor after your death you can't because we want to remove incentive for illegal human organs trade! /s

Given that human organs can currently only be created inside humans, and not mechanically in factories like iphone components can be, I'm not sure that scenario really tells us anything. I can imagine reading a dystopian scifi novel about it though.

(making organs the human body can use, instead of harvesting them from a donor body is a fascinating area of research! https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/bladder-grown-from-3d-bi...)

Then imagine future were we made progress and can make organs the human use in some biolab.

Would you still prefer to enforce burning human body after death just to (supposed to) avoid illegal human organ trade?

What if the company that create such human body organs biolab has monopoly on it, can charge anything they want and force you to use their own privately owned hospitals and their certified doctors for transplant operation?

I definitely wouldn't want to live in such a world.

It's for your own good! Our manufactured organs are designed and tested to ensure consistant quality, you don't want to know what Dave's been doing to his liver these past 20 years.

There's probably a point I could be trying to make, but I have yet to figure out what it is.

Trying to invoke taboos about human remains is weird. There are plenty of things that apply to cellphones that don't apply to human bodies and vice versa. It sounds like a skit out of "Who's line is it anyway". Still, cremation happens in many cultures around the world, for various reasons.

Fascinatingly, in the distant past, protecting cadavers was actually a thing! They used to have to have guards, among other methods, to protect the bodies of the deceased from being used for scientific research in the 18 and 19th century.

Does it actually deter thieves? I can't imagine their decision making process goes much beyond "that looks expensive." Maybe I'm just not cutout to be a theif.

A quick search has turned up little, but I'm curious if anybody collects statistics. It feels like it should be easy to show a drop in theft when Apple released Activation Lock, right?

I think it's less you are cutout for a thief, and you just not considering thieves are real people with functioning brains. Any rational human will do some risk/reward analysis. Furthermore, Apple introduced Activation Lock in iOS 7 in 2013. I doubt any statistics would show a "drop" given smartphone growth exploded over that same time period. Lastly it seems iPhone theft, today, has been regulated to more sophisticated crime rings who will go through the trouble of sending the phones to china where they can be either stripped for parts or trying to trick the original owner into unlocking the phone.

Thieves steal things they can use or that they can turn around and sell. If you can’t use or sell a stolen iPhone, there’s not much of an incentive to steal it. Especially when you could have grabbed a different model that can be easily fenced to someone who will open it up and sell it for parts.

If we are going down the organ analogy road, imagine a world in which organ transplants are easy enough that there are plenty of third parties that will perform organ transplants without limiting themselves to using organs obtained through legitimate channels.

If you want to know how that could turn out badly, read Larry Niven's stories set in the first century of his "Known Space" universe [1]. In particular the stories collected in this [2], but everything in Known Space written through 1980 is great if you like hard science fiction. (I don't know about the Known Space stuff written later, because by then I was out of school and didn't have much time for fiction).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Known_Space

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatlander_(short_story_collec...

> In the last 10 years I never had any electronics stolen from me but almost every smartphone got broken in some way: worn out USB/lightning port, broken battery, broken screen, shattered glass, broken Face Id.

You’re in luck! Apple will happily let you pay $150 for two years of AppleCare+ or $8/mo for AppleCare+ for the life of the device. You can break a screen as often as you wish and it’ll only put you out like $20 to have it repaired.

This is much more in-depth and interisting than the sweary title might lead you to believe.

The bit about ventilators in particular is tragic.

But just as rant-y and opinionated as you might be lead to believe from the sweary title.

I'm not sure I'd use the word "opinionated" here, but yeah he's angry about something which he has a strong opinion on.

Tragic and entirely misleading. Medical devices are regulated beyond belief. You don’t want some random repair tech cobbling together pirate boxes for them. How would anyone know if they’re compromised?

Mark your sarcasm if that's your intent.

DIY ventilators were in fact a vital lifesaving measure at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a little over two years ago:

<https://spectrum.ieee.org/diy-ventilators-for-covid19-could-...>

Why was that?

Couldn't source enough.

Why was that?

Supply chains stretched so taut that a single disruption shut the whole world down.

Why was that?

Profit.

Capitalism is the problem.

My recollection is that there was an intentional limit on what parts were compatible with what ventilators, essentially DRM or filter tying/bundling. This denied healthcare facilities the flexibility to pair consumable components from third-party manufacturers with a specific ventilator.

(I've been looking for articles to support this without joy so far, though there were numerous articles on "open source" ventilator concepts, such as this one: <https://journal.valeriansaliou.name/makair-series-the-incept...>.)

This goes above and beyond basic market function, though yes, I suppose you could say that it was rooted at some level in capitalist short-term-profit-maximising practices.

Far as I'm concerned, medical devices should be "nationalized" to the degree that all designs are 100% open from the most easily-sourceable parts available and must be 100% interoperable. DRM should be outlawed rather than enshrined.

> Supply chains stretched so taut that a single disruption shut the whole world down.

Saying "single disruption" here is almost as bad as saying the dinosaurs were wiped out by a single rock. It's not a matter of the number of underlying causes but a matter of the scale of the disruption.

Changing from Capitalism, does not mean the new solution will be automatically better. could be much worse

At the moment, we are definitely changing - it will either be the introduction of socialism at a reasonable level, or completely unreasonable fascism.

> You don’t want some random repair tech cobbling together pirate boxes for them.

What if I actually do want that for my own self? Shouldn't that be my right to decide?

For yourself? Of course. For a hospital or anyone that would realistically be buying that for use? Absolutely not.

When you sell an old iPhone, the first thing you do is turn off the iCloud bound feature, so someone else can activate it.

There should be a method to do the same for parts.

ie: I broke my phone, it's not functional at all. I should be able to sell it for parts. But I can't. Because the parts are tied to a particular device ID?

It's the other way around: the phone only wants to talk to the parts it shipped with. Not with some knock-off battery that will also be dead in 6 months or TFT replacement screen for an OLED phone.

That's a false equivalency. Phones are also rejecting perfectly good parts, not the parts you cited.

That's the whole problem here, and you try to make it seem as if it's about crappy parts not working.

It's not. At all. Never has been.

In nearly every case this has been claimed, it’s a part that has some security functionality or a part like a display or battery that requires some kind of calibration. Maybe they should put more effort into making that calibration easier but I don’t think anyone that currently uses their devices would trade that if it means the quality of the calibration or the security of the device goes down.

This presumes Apple isn't lying through their teeth, claiming it is about security, or calibration, when it isn't.

Except it is. What part on the phone can't be replaced? What is Apple lying about? Even if you don't calibrate the parts, the phone is still usable, you just don't get the features of the calibration - battery status/level, Touch ID, Face ID, etc.

Can you give me an example of what you're referring to? A part that prevents use and doesn't require calibration or a part that Apple is lying about - either works.

That would make iPhones more attractive for theft, since someone else could then also break down your iPhone and sell it for parts.

Only if they can coerce you to release the lock. Which does happen occasionally (that’s how large-scale crime gangs currently do it, by sending phishing texts/emails in an attempt to get the user’s Apple credentials) but it still raises the cost of the attack dramatically.

No, that is the current situation, that a stolen iPhone has very little value due to the lock. If it could be broken down into reusable parts, as the post I was responding to suggested, you could break down stolen iPhones and make money that way.

I bet that in most cases you'd make more if you got the broken phone repaired and then sold the now working phone.

I was unfamiliar with the practice of "parts pairing" in Apple devices, which it seems can even prevent you from cannibalizing functional parts from an old iPhone to replace damaged parts in your current device. Does Apple even have some kind of consumer friendly justification for this practice, or is it just unabashed fuckery?

Some parts need to be cryptographically linked for security reasons. For example, when the phone used to have a fingerprint sensor I believe all communication between that module and the rest of the phone used public key cryptography so that you couldn't replace the sensor with something less secure.

A second reason for doing this is to make theft of devices less lucrative. If you can't sell a stolen phone for parts, then there's less incentive to steal the phone.

I think there's more that Apple could do to make third party repairs easier without sacrificing security or theft disincentives. Maybe there could be a setting where I, as the owner, can authorize parts salvage of the phone before I sell it.

I love that Apple is doing this. Making thieves not want to steal my phone is 50x more valuable to me than having a slightly easier time repairing my phone.

This is a case of conflicting needs of users.

If security is your primary need, it is great.

If sustainability is your primary need then it sucks.

Apple supports and repairs phones for a long time. It's not about sustainability, it's about the price Apple charges for repairs. What is so sustainable about having and using the right to mount a cheap, bad battery that will have to be replaced again in a year or so?

This.

Things have a long tail. The world is unstable. Politics can suddenly change and now you're throwing tons of things in the trash not because the items cannot be fixed, but that Apple directly cannot sell you parts.

It's not you can magically repair any Apple phone if only they made parts replaceable. The tiny amount of phones that can't be repaired due to 'world unstability' is probably irrelevant to the general climate/environment problem.

But instead of making parts unexchangeable by default, couldn't they blacklist parts that come from phones specifically reported as stolen? And then any phone with a blacklisted part installed could be disabled/reduced in functionality/reported to authorities, etc. Meanwhile people who just wanted to recycle their old screens or whatever wouldn't be penalized.

Deterring criminals requires consistent, accurate, fast reporting by customers which will never happen since customers have no incentive at all to report (not even considering the level of effort of educating the iPhone customer base abotu how to report). You can recycle your phone today by dropping it off at Apple.

It's not the parts that are locked, it's the phone that wants specific parts. If you give people the possibility to change their phones to accept other parts you instantly create a market for stolen parts. Maybe Apple should lock both sides.

Another reason for locking parts to the phone is to prevent non-genuine parts. Those cheap batteries or TFT replacement screens for OLED iPhones will not give the experience Apple intended and will damage their reputation.

It’s an anti-theft measure.

Time was when a person could build and program their own computer using any parts they wanted. Tech types valued their ability to build, diagnose, repair, and optimize their own equipment.

From the responses here, I can only surmise that's attitude is considered old fashioned now.

I lost interest in Apple product after going go through a Kafkian experience trying to use the standard serial port on the early iPod/iPhone connectors. Was trying to build a prototype of a handheld compass app, using a magnetometer board we designed that plugged into the connector and drew power from the phone. Everything worked fine, except I couldn't get the serial port software working in the phone app. Apple wouldn't let me use the serial port without a special MFI chip, requiring me to fill out tons of financial paperwork (Dun and Broadstreet etc), business plans, sales estimates, target markets, etc. They were not interested in helping me out at all.

Not sure why Apple decided that serial ports were off limits. This is about the oldest comm technology out there. sigh

Anyhow, I read that hobbyists were working around the limitations by using the microphone port as a modem. Basically modulate the serial data, send as a waveform into microphone port, then demodulate the audio stream in software. Clever.

So I went and built this. Only to find that Apple had recently decided to close the "audio hole", forcing me to use an MFI chip to get access to the microphone port.

The more I dug, the more I found everything locked down. I realized Apple didn't want me actually using any of the standard interfaces I'd come accustomed to using in my decades long career in tech. Beautiful phone, I just couldn't use it outside of the curated experience. Not without their permission (read: tax).

It was the most anti-consumer piece of electronics I'd ever enountered. I'm assuming it's much much worse now.

If Apple dared, they'd consider locking down WiFi access as well. I'm sure they've toyed with the idea of forcing all WiFi router manufacturers to purchase an MFI chip to interoperate with Apple product.

What the kids here seem to want is a curated experience, and they're willing to pay $$$ every month for a device they can't open, repair, modify, etc.

Good luck to you and your leased phone experience, you only compute at Apple's pleasure. I fear for the subsequent generations raised in a market where this exploitive behavior has become normalized.

/old-timer-rant

> forcing me to use an MFI chip to get access to the microphone port.

How does this work? We are talking about the now-deceased analogue minijack, right?

Well back then (~10 years ago?) it was just a standard three signal minijack (left out, right out, mic in)

I think the audio out was open to software, but the incoming mic data required an MFI chip to be able to open/read the channel in software.

I never did get my hands on an MFI chip, so I never got far enough to figure out what it interfaced with. I assumed at the time it must somehow talk to the phone over the mic line, otherwise how could you build a microphone that used the standard mic jack? I'm sure it's encrypted, I know they were like 10¢ or so in volume, and once Apple approved/blessed your idea you could get tech docs and samples. That's about all I know, as I couldn't get them to work with us, as my company refused to hand over and project plans, market data etc to them. It was going to take multiple months before we got anywhere, and we had weeks to get a demo running. Spent about 3x time and money on that project as it should have taken because of their user hostility. So f*ck em.

Maybe some one else here can add some details on how MFI works on microphones.

Edit: should follow up saying that once I figured out that they weren't locking out WiFi, we added a small WiFi hotspot module to the PCB. So you plugged it into the phone, it drew power from the phone to run a hotspot. You then had to go into the phone and join the hotspot. Then our app would open a port on the local wireless LAN to tunnel a few hundred bytes of data a second. Blew my mind that I could only get around Apple blocks by sticking another radio on the phone.

I don’t know what special chip you’re talking about.

I wrote firmware for both wired USB and wireless IAP2 for external hardware support on iPhones, and it didn’t require anything more than the standard developer account.

Shipping and getting the device certified by Apple, with a literal stamp on the box that says “Made for Apple Devices” or whatever, is where MFi comes into play.

MFi is an account you sign up for to get spec sheets, support, and access to order custom components like lightning connector modules. But that’s all optional for hobby programming.

https://mfi.apple.com/en/how-it-works

Things might be different now, but for sure back when I was doing this there was an "authentication chip" or "authentication coprocessor" needed to unlock almost all available I/O functionality.

There's this [0] which in the 2nd paragraph says that you need an authentication chip.

Here's a few articles from back in the day [1] [2] talking about how you can't use the serial port without the MFI authentication chip. Many sites recommended jailbreaking your phone to use the serial port, which of course doesn't help me with a commercial solution.

There are people complaining about needing a chip to use audio in/out features. [3] [4] Apparently this irritated a bunch of car audio buffs when they locked this down.

We tried using the standard Bluetooth SPP protocol (serial port protocol) as a bypass. Found out that Apple won't support SPP without the chip. [5] [6] For those that don't know, Bluetooth was originally designed to be a wireless serial port to replace RS-232 cables. [7] So support for this should be standard behavior out of the box. But of course Apple wanted to tax this feature as well.

I can't seem to find articles about people talking about using line-in software modem as a bypass, but this stuff is from a long time ago and forums come and go. I certainly didn't come up with the idea on my own, I only attempted it because other people had done this to bypass the serial port lockdown.

Like I said, maybe it's different now, but it wasn't back then. After my bad experience I vowed never to purchase an Apple product again.

[0] https://mywraps.com/blogs/news/what-is-apple-mfi

[1] https://hcgilje.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/iphone-serial-commu...

[2] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/iphone-serial-port-prog...

[3] https://forum.arduino.cc/t/sending-music-from-iphone-to-ardu...

[4] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2660553?answerId=126826...

[5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7420717/iphone-to-rs-232...

[6] https://stackoverflow.com/a/16035512

[7] https://www.androidauthority.com/history-bluetooth-explained...

> I read that hobbyists were working around the limitations...

> It was the most anti-consumer piece of electronics

You're a hobbyist, not a consumer. Consumers don't want to stick a cable into the serial port and do arbitrary stuff. Consumers buy gadgets from businesses supporting them, so that explains the financial paper work.

When people here babble about "anti-consumer", what they really mean is "anti-hobbyists".

Not sure I like the logic here. By labeling me as a hobbyist, you're suggesting that I shouldn't be surprised businesses ignore my needs because I'm not a "real" consumer?

In my world any paying customer buying and using a product was considered a consumer of it. I probably spend more money on tech than the average user. Shouldn't make me part of some core "power user" sub-demographic? I used to build computers. I design and program embedded systems. I'm constantly purchasing/using all sorts of tech both at work and at home. But you're suggesting stuff like this is somehow "not for me"? I can do all of this on on Windows. I can do all of this on Linux. The only place I can't seem to use these features is on Apple product.

Cars are used in many different ways. Some people use them to get to work. Some people work on them themselves, soup them up, restore them, etc. GM doesn't seem to have a problem catering to all of these crowds simultaneously.

Labeling this as a hobbyist problem just seems like handwaving to explain why I shouldn't be alarmed at the trend of taking our ability to use and control our computers away from us.

Is this just Apple apologism, or do you think it's ok when companies generally take away our ability to own and repair the products we purchase?

> There are so many tactics Apple gets to use to sabotage repair. For example, Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on the subassemblies in its devices. This allows the company to enlist US Customs to seize and destroy refurbished parts that are harvested from dead phones by workers in the Pacific Rim:

Dead phones that were potentially stolen? A major reason I choose to buy iPhones is for their VIN-locking. I would rather my phone, if stolen, explode in the theif's hand, than allow for any 3rd party repair, even a battery swap. I want as close to 100% of the phone components to be serialized.

VIN?

That's explained at length about a dozen paragraphs into the article.

I'm familiar with Activation Lock but there are no VINs involved.

It's a reference to the article, and the way the article talks about what's happening here.

The practice came from the automotive sector originally.

RTFM, or quit arguing with those who have.

That, uh, seems unnecessarily violent and vindictive.

That seems the correct amount of violent and vindictive.

R2R activists and open source activists have this insane view that giant corporations are making decisions for the sole purpose of thwarting their movement's goals. These people just can't see past their own agendas and have to portray every mundane decision about hardware and software design as specifically calibrated to inflict maximum harm to them personally. Like the engineers, managers, and executives at Apple literally have nothing else to do all day but contemplate how every decision they make harms R2R and open source advocacy.

These people are just exasperating.

Feel free to vote yourself off the island or, perhaps, simply choose not to engage in topics that you don't care about.

Do google and samsung have similar practices (parts pairing, serialization)?

If Apple gets away with this awful practice for long enough, I'm sure the other manufacturers will follow suit if they haven't already.

Remind me who it was to remove the headphone jack first, again? ;)

https://youtu.be/Lxo6l_whDeE

So much for "we need to do this for security!" lol

They ship you 79 lb. Pelican case to do self service battery swap? And a technician needs to login to review your work!

Thanks Apple for pairing more and more components thus making my phone a less desirable target for thieves. One of the reasons I will keep buying iphone.

Screw the future, just so you don't have to keep your phone in your pocket or in your hand? Are the other reasons equally shitty?

Pairing components doesn't make the device theft proof.

Overwhelmingly phones are stolen and sold as-is, not chop shopped. Chop shopping is generally not a lucrative business because availability of 3rd party parts is a lower cost than the time required to disassemble.

The availability of manufactured parts significantly out scales independent sales.

Contrary to common thought, Apple has a particular issue wherein they are focused upon for repair because their vertical integration results in few models. Less models = more focus on methods to repair.

This means that apples intentional methods to prevent repair are not for your benefit, they're for profits. You can have security and repair.

>Overwhelmingly phones are stolen and sold as-is, not chop shopped.

That's not true. An icloud-locked iphone is a paperweight. Only the components are worth something. Well, were ;)

Which is why thieves will sometimes ask you to unlock your phone.

Most phone thefts are snatch and run. No chance to rob you and demand your passcode. Every second they have to deal with you trying to give your passcode is one they might get caught. Also, it requires your apple ID passward to remove iCloud lock, not just the passcode.

Yes, and they're stolen and sold as-is. It's known as fraud.

Yeah, approximately no one actually repairs their repairable devices, so making them smaller and more integrated might be better and less wasteful overall.

I've replaced the battery at least once in all the phones I've had, and two other parts in my last phone. On the other hand, none of my phones has ever been stolen. And it's not just me, my neighbourhood has several repair shops.

It’s still an optimization problem, and the results might be surprising

Fair enough. I'm open to data on that.

you think losing the right to repair just so that some hypothetical thief can't hypothetically take and resell your phone is a reasonable trade....?

absolute nonsense.

I think cheaply available replacement parts ready from the manufacturer would be a much more desirable deterrent for thieves. Louis Rossman's battle with calibrating the angle sensor on the MacBook Pro is a great indicator that these restrictions aren't always done for security reasons since the part in question is worth pennies.

Louis Rossman is also a dishonest person who makes money off the whole controversy. He purposely does things to make the situations seem worse and has even been called out for outright lying (I stopped following after he claimed there was an issue with MacBooks when he purposely used an unshielded cable to cause the issue he was claiming).

I didn't know that. Mind sharing the source?

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