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iFixit drastically and retroactively reduces ‘Repairability Score’ of the iPhone 14 because of error messages Apple sends if "nongenuine" parts are used
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- Published
- Sep 19 2023
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- 822 words
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I'm reminded of Tivoization - in which the software of the original TiVo devices was released under the GPL and theoretically able to be modified - but a checksum in the hardware would refuse to run modified software.
and as the article says, another parallel is that the use of aftermarket parts instead of OEM parts on a car does not void the car's warranty:
Difference between a car and a phone is that a car has consumable and service requiring parts within the warranty period. Where as a phone is a solid state single product which doesn't require any work outside of physically breaking it or after many years, replacing the battery. I'm not sure why you would even want to put 3rd party parts in your phone since the warranty period would cover putting genuine parts in for free.
supply chain shortages are one reason I can think of.
suppose you break your phone's screen, or charging port, or whatever. the OEM replacement part isn't in stock and is back-ordered for X weeks. a 3rd party part, because there's a much more diverse group of possible suppliers, is much more likely to be in stock. in that scenario I'd be fine with the 3rd-party part, and wouldn't want it to void my warranty for any future repairs.
Usually in this case Apple just hands you a new phone and sends yours to India or wherever to fix on their own schedule.
Dropping the product hard enough to break the screen likely voids your warranty anyway, would be similar to crashing your car. Any of the internal parts could have been damaged in the drop.
this is true...but it's also part of the problem that the "right to repair" is trying to address:
The environmental impact of broken technology and the Right to Repair movement
49 environmental organizations sign letter in support of Right to Repair
The right to repair movement could have a significant impact on global emissions reduction
the environmental impact of smartphones is already quite high. it gets even worse if the standard response to damage is to break out a new phone and ship the old one halfway around the world to be maybe-repaired-maybe-discarded (I'm reminded of "pears grown in Argentina, processed in Thailand")
this is a bigger (literally and metaphorically) issue than just phones, too:
Russia-Ukraine war makes importing tractor parts difficult
there's a tempting assumption to make that spare parts will always be available, replacement phones will always be in-stock, etc etc. one of the things we learned from the pandemic and all the resulting supply chain disruptions is just how precarious some of those assumptions are.
You answered your own question: for out-of-warranty repairs, eg. user damage.
If you've dropped your phone and smashed it, there probably isn't any chance you'd be covered by warranty since you would have tripped the shock sensor warranty voids anyway. It isn't like a car where you might have broken a window or something without any impact on rest of the car. It's pretty hard to break anything without risking damage to everything.
For a lot of phones, you have to pay extra for that warranty, and it usually comes with a 'per incidence' fee as well.
I must be in the minority because I view the pairing as a plus: It makes iPhones unappealing to thieves.
The Apple ID lock makes it a fancy brick unless you can social engineer the activation from the previous owner, there is no other way around it. The component pairing makes it uneconomic to strip it for parts and resell.
Add an IMEI lock to that and you really need to know what you're doing (or be really dumb) to steal an iPhone.
Apple could resolve this by allowing owners to voluntarily un-pair parts from their account so they could be reused in a different phone. This would lower their revenue but have no impact on theft.
Yep, that would work for me too.
I think a that's not as easy as we think though. We get to the problem of "this thing has a key only good guys can use", which tends to not work in the long run.
All thieves do is run the device out of power and sell it to some sucker willing to risk it on a too good to be true deal saying they don't have a charging cord but they swear it really works.
yeah, they don't get as much money that way but they can still sell them for a decent amount cause some one (even if they know it is too good to be true) can be tempted if you just make it cheap enough and the phones are worth enough that even cheap enough is a decent amount of money.
Yea, nothing can fix stupid, sadly.
There are clear instructions everywhere on the internet on what to do and check when buying an iPhone, but some people are in too much of a hurry to get one for cheap from a Really Trustworthy Person on the Walmart parking lot =)
It's not even just stupid. I've seen people post when they fell for it and they thought it was sketchy but the too good to be true excitement of maybe getting a really good deal won out over their common sense. Hell, I've seen people be stopped when the part of their mind that was being sensible asked others for their opinion just to reinforce to the part of their mind that was like, "oooh, I can get it cheap" that it wasn't a good deal and just a scam. All thieves have to do is make it a good enough deal that people who aren't good at weight risks (and wanting it enough to ignore that no one is going to sell a phone that cheap) decide the risk is worth the benefit. People are good at fooling themselves if they want something bad enough.
I really don't think this is the case at all.
For one, there are ways to erase or reset the serialization, but it does require in depth technical knowledge.
But, there are plenty of ways to factory reset an iphone without knowing it's password, Here's one easy solution, which makes it not so difficult to resell as genuine second hand device.
That sounds really skeevy.
Why would FBI and the police pay thousands and thousands of dollars for Graykey if they could just get a Tenorshare 4uKey lifetime license for $70?
Becauae the latter does a factory reset, wiping personal data on the phone? The only place that software advertises no data loss is for a screen time unlock.
Because it wipes the phone clean of any data. That's what factory reset means.
I’m not sure that service you’ve linked is legit. I don’t think there are any legit ones, outside of ones that take advantage of the checkmate exploits on the iphone x and earlier. I don’t believe that there is any method to reset a locked phone, at least none for consumers. They do exist, I personally have worked with cellebrite, but they are expensive and often only for law enforcement.
Why would law enforcement want to factory reset a phone? Again,, we're talking about complete erasure of all the personal data.
I can't vouch for the particular solution I linked, but nowhere I've seen says it's fairly easy to do through recovery mode and iTunes
I think it realistically could be impossible. Even if you could hack the software to allow access to the phone, the apple servers would be able to detect you are using a locked phone and could refuse to allow access.
I guess that could be a plus for some people, but I live a life where I pretty much never have to worry about my phone being stolen so its definitely not something I'm factoring into my purchasing decisions. I'd 100x rather have a easier to repair phone than one that's less attractive to steal
I live in a safe place too, but I do travel. And in those countries a new-ish iPhone might be worth 6 months salary.
Actual errors (as in refusing to function) may take it too far, but I don't see any problems with the OS showing warnings about parts it's unsure of the trustworthiness of. There's plenty of repair shops that will happily use dodgy parts of questionable origin to lower prices for a competitive edge, and there's no telling how these parts will perform. In cases like battery and power management cheap parts can be actively dangerous.
If nothing else if I were buying a used phone, tablet, etc it's good to know that low quality parts were not used to repair it, and if they were then the price should reflect that. Selling a device repaired with cheap parts as if it were the same as one repaired with official parts is at best dishonest.
It also shows error messages for genuine parts. It's just Apple being anti-consumer as usual. Parts pairing only serves to line the pockets of Apple, it's not in your best interest at all.
I would say knowing whether a part is swapped at all or not is a good thing as long as it maintains functionality. What if a repair store replaces a part that I didn't authorize them to? Harvested a camera and replaced it with a genuine part that's not completely functioning, for example?
It's the completely blocking functionality that I don't jell with.
If a part has been replaced with a functioning original replacement part there should be no notification at all. If Apple themselves replace the part there is no notification either. The notification only shows when an “unauthorized” person replaced the part. The goal of the notification is not to protect the end user, the goal is to earn money off of repairs by making third party repair shops less attractive.
The complete blocking of functionality is completely unacceptable. If I choose to replace a part with a knockoff part Apple has no business turning off certain functions, it is MY device.
I really hope the EU will tackle right to repair next, to force Apple to stop this asshattery.
I disagree, because I do think as a customer I have the right to know which parts were swapped regardless of their genuine status- because some things may be "functional", but depleted. Batteries come to mind.
Apple gives you a full itemized list of parts replaced in addition to part history you can access online. There is no legislation compelling third party stores to do so until California's latest right-to-repair bill. So I would say, despite malicious intent, these notifications are useful.
I think the solution would be for the EU to compel Apple to include third party repair stores in their parts history program without the other onerous requirements.
Like I said, when Apple replaces a part there's no notification either.
I don't know about the USA but in the EU shops aren't just allowed to lie about the work they did or didn't do. The work on the bill has to match the actual work performed. They also give you an itemized bill stating the work they did.
A repair shop doesn't repair my phone, or I find it suspiciously worse after the repair?
They won't be a repair shop for long. They'll last maybe a year before word of mouth kills them off.
The non genuine parts will exactly replicate the communication and serial numbers of real parts. So literally the only way to detect non genuine parts is to have them serial number locked at manufacture or reset in an official process.
There is a whole thriving market of fake airpods which can perfectly replicate the proprietary connection stuff so it shows all the normal airpods UI. The whole point of the product being to resell on facebook marketplace to unsuspecting victims who then have to deal with the worse product quality unknowingly owning a fake.
It would be nice if Apple was more transparent about this stuff, but it seems like the majority of it has pretty good reasoning when you see the absurd amount of fraud, theft, and deception going on. Fake products and parts hurt both the end users and the company when users think the product must be bad since it didn't work well for them.
Features like TrueTone require calibration data for the screen in order to be able to do the thing they say they do. If you just swap the screen from one iPhone into another without calibrating it, this feature now produces potentially significantly incorrect results. This is especially important for OLED displays where there can be significant deviation between panels.
How should this case be handled? Notifying the user that this feature will not work with the new part seems like a reasonable compromise, but it would be nice if there was some way to perform this calibration yourself if you have the necessary equipment.
Allow third party repair shops to use the tools necessary to do the work and not keep everything proprietary like Apple is doing now.
The whole TrueTone thing is just another example of Apple being a dick. Currently, "unauthorized" shops have to use third party programmers to get around limitations set by Apple to enable True Tone again. By the way True Tone is just the phone adjusting the display based on ambient lighting conditions, it's not like each display has a unique calibration profile. Or as Apple describes it:
When a screen gets replaced the phone turns off True Tone (even when an original part is used) because the replacement screen isn't paired with the main board. With a programmer the repair shop moves the serial number and other data from the original screen to the replacement screen so the phone doesn't know a swap took place and True Tone can be enabled again. It functions perfectly after that.
It does often refuse to function. From the IFixit article: https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2023/09/18222059/image.jpg. This is about using official parts that the OS does recognize, but have not been paired to the specific device. Since Apple doesn't provide any way to un-pair and re-pair a part (if you sell your phone to a repair shop for example), this effectively makes the device unrepairable.
I would agree but the warnings appear to be persistent and pretty annoying. Like, it should show up once, then stay in Settings.
I guess the point is some third party repair shops will ask for your password and so would be able to dismiss the notification, but, like, I'm fairly sure there's a smarter solution for that. Samsung apparently has a repair mode that allows the stores to test everything without your PIN code.
Basically, there should be a way for the customers themselves to consent to parts swapping but not a repair store. It's difficult, but not unsolvable.
All I can say is I just bought a refurb iPhone SE (previously always had Androids) and I'm pretty glad the phone itself is telling me the battery is not a genuine Apple part. Place I bought it from buried that in the fine print and I never would've known.
You still have the freedom to put a 3rd party screen in. Apple just lets you know it isn't genuine and that if the screen seems off, that's why.
I can't see any reason to argue for giving the user less information.
That's a different discussion. It's probably related to calibration info, but they should be publishing the details and providing the tools to calibrate it yourself if you want to try.
Still should be showing a non genuine warning. Even if just to inform the user that the calibration could be completely off since it wasn't done to the official process.
Sadly Apple doesn't care at all. They've been anti-consumer for years and an iFixit score isn't going to change that. We need laws to get Apple to change. Hopefully the EU will get on this next.
Apple has been mistreating their customers for decades and still the fans continue to support them. As long as people keep buying this equipment Apple will continue to treat them badly.
You're not wrong at all. However, apple is much better on privacy than most other tech companies. They also make their devices mostly idiot-proof. Those are the only two reasons I support them over the other evil tach companies. I don't have access to better, more consumer-friedly products, so I will hold my nose and buy apple over android. Without knowing how to (and having lots of difficulty with learning how to) protect my privacy on an android phone, I'd rather it be ready to go out of the box, even if it's more expensive. Because both will screw with you in any way they can in the name of profit.