Apple pairs well with profits, not repair shops As you were. It would appear that Apple's overtures to the tech repairability movement and associated legislation like California's SB 244 were just leading us all on, at least according to repair gurus at iFixit. Everything was going so well. The company's iPhone 14 from 2022, soon to be superseded, received plaudits from …
And also the one from The Verge, which states:
"To do this, you must purchase a genuine part from Apple, enter your device’s serial number, and then pair the new part to the phone by contacting Apple".
Shops harvest parts from broken devices
From the data I've seen, iPhones are not stolen to be resold as working phones because Apple's approach locks them pretty solid after a few tries. They are stolen for parts, and it's apparently quite a buoyant market.
I can only see one type of business being in need for those parts.
Is this maybe the source of all the "hassle" with Apple? Parts that have been harvested, but not from broken devices but stolen ones? If so I can imagine there being a lot of nervousness about authentication of replacement parts - at some point, Apple may decide to start correlating those magic numbers with devices reported stolen.
No, I'm not saying that all repair shops are dodgy, but the demand and size of the market for stolen phones suggest there are quite a few around that desperately need Apple to stop this pesky verification thing - in other words, they have quite a different agenda to complain about things being difficult..
Phones are stolen to harvest personal data, banking information, content for blackmail and so on.
Then phones are sold for parts if they can't be wiped and otherwise resold.
There would be no need for this if Apple has not actively blocked sales of spare parts.
They have to break into the phone to do that, which a common criminal would not be able to do. No one is stealing phones to harvest data, unless they are forcing the person to unlock the phone for them at gunpoint when they steal it.
If what you say was true no one would be stealing brand new iPhones - there was even a smash and grab at an Apple Store a couple years ago. Apple knows the serial numbers of those phones, so they will never be able to be activated as a new phone. They don't have any personal data on them to steal. The only reason they would do that is to part them out. If they can't do that, that greatly reduces the incentive to steal iPhones.
Not saying the inability to use parts from used iPhones isn't a problem. What Apple could/should do is provide a way for an iPhone known to not be stolen (i.e. the owner removes the activation lock) have the "lock" on its parts removed.
Uh, common criminals are very much stealing iPhones. Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal has been covering this all year. Shoulder surf the passcode, then steal the phone. With the phone passcode, you can reset the AppleID giving you not just the phone data, but access to email, billing information, potentially a credit card, etc etc.
>> Uh, common criminals are very much stealing iPhones. Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal has been covering this all year. Shoulder surf the passcode, then steal the phone.
Right, because people always use the pin even though iPhones have had biometric unlock for over a decade (hint: typing in the pin takes longer than FaceID unlocking the phone by looking at it).
>> With the phone passcode, you can reset the AppleID giving you not just the phone data, but access to email, billing information, potentially a credit card, etc etc.
More nonsense. To remove the or reset an Apple ID you need the Apple ID password. You can't do anything with just the phone pin.
Sounds like you don't actually have any idea how Apple stuff works.
Ah, not something you've read about or looked up then?
Basic social engineering can require the passcode to be entered - e.g. crook offers to take a picture of a group of friends in a bar, then squeezes the side buttons when handing the device back. That locks it, disabling FaceID, and requiring the password. Accomplice observes the passcode, crook steals the phone later.
Assuming you have an iPhone, go to Settings > Apple ID > Password and Security > Reset Password. Then read the text where it explains that you can reset the AppleID password "because you are signed into iCloud and have a passcode enabled".
I'm surprised at all your 13 upvotes, a lot of The Register readers are clueless. You can reset an Apple ID password with just the phone lock code, which you have called a "phone pin". If you go into the user iCloud settings you can reset the Apple account password with only the phone lock code. I know this because I had to do it yesterday!
"If what you say was true no one would be stealing brand new iPhones - there was even a smash and grab at an Apple Store a couple years ago. Apple knows the serial numbers of those phones, so they will never be able to be activated as a new phone. They don't have any personal data on them to steal. The only reason they would do that is to part them out. If they can't do that, that greatly reduces the incentive to steal iPhones."
You are making two assumptions there.
One, the criminals actually know they can't be activated and didn't just think it might be a good wheeze to go steal a load of very expensive and highly sought after phones because they are too dumb to realise they can't be activated.
Two, they actually DO know they can't be activated, and don't care a jot because they can still easily sell "brand new, still sealed in the box" iPhones at a knock down price to buyers who can't exactly demand their money back when they get them home and can't use them.
Have you considered that people might be stealing devices to scrap for parts precisely BECAUSE those parts are being made arbitrarily expensive? They’re creating a rod for their own backs. Make the parts cheaper and the repairs actually possible and the need for stolen bits drops dramatically. No need to stuff about with all this pairing nonsense. Win-win.
If all they wanted to do is prevent phone theft for parts, Apple could just have extended the existing iCloud locking mechanism to a phone's individual parts.
iPhone with a new display from a locked phone (or better even, a phone reported as stolen) refuses to work.
iPhone with a new display from an UNlocked phone does some calibration thinggy and then works normally.
Takes one request to Apple's servers for the iPhone to know what it should do with its new donour organ. It could even display a prominent message along the lines of "this phone contains stolen replacement parts", which would be a way better deterrent to thieves than "TrueTone doesn't work, which you might or might not notice".
I'm aware there are some excuses about how Battery Health can't work without the battery's history stored in the donour phone, or TrueTone needs to be calibrated properly, but I call BS on all of them. All of those donour spare parts already have a chip on them that could/should have stored all relevant information ready for the new device to query.
The sensible thing if theft was actually an issue would be to have a system to record phones as stolen, which would then block use of the phones or parts of them, If the phone isn't recorded as stolen, there should be no reason why its parts cannot be used in another phone.
But of course none of this is about reuse of parts from stolen phones in reality...
Many years ago, I had a Sony Vaio laptop which needed a new HDD (just) out of manufacturer's warranty but within extended (3rd party) warranty. Repair was performed by a non-Sony shop, but they had to send the whole thing to Sony for them to pair the HDD with the laptop. Added weeks to the repair.
Apple, I think, were the inventors of the scam where they'd try and force you to only use their hard disks in Macs, the disk utility would refuse to initialise any SCSI disk that didn't recognise as genuine Apple.
There was an easy way round it but it was a blatant attempt to control the spares market.
HP, Lenovo, Dell and probably others have taken a leaf from their book and whitelisted hardware components as well so you can't add, for example, a faster WiFi card or larger HDD/SSD etc.
Don't be fooled by their bullshit claims about security, quality, reliability etc, it's pure money grabbing.
"HP, Lenovo, Dell and probably others have taken a leaf from their book and whitelisted hardware components as well so you can't add, for example, a faster WiFi card or larger HDD/SSD etc."
Which models? Never had any issues with Del, but not had cause to install third-party parts for a while. A few years back I replaced most of the remaining spinning-rust drives we still had with SSDs from Crucial and they all worked fine (some are still in use and workijng fine).
"You can also forget about aftermarket parts – "only Apple-authorized repairs can truly restore the device to full functionality"."
In which case, I hope that a consumer repair court case arises about this and other mending matters. That is probably the only way to really get Apple to allow personal and third party repairs to their products.
On consumer versions of Windows, you can’t change the wallpaper (among other things) following a parts replacement without Microsoft needing to validate your repair either. iFixit rates Framework laptops a 10/10 despite a similar software lock to what iOS has being present in Windows. The fact that it’s piss poor DRM that can be easily bypassed like every other form of “protection” Microsoft includes is irrelevant, it’s the exact same kind of trickery Apple uses and has the same effect on legitimate repairs.
Perhaps iFixit should review all their scores derived from assessing anything which isn’t shipping with unlocked ChromeOS, Android, Linux or FreeDOS?
"On consumer versions of Windows, you can’t change the wallpaper (among other things) following a parts replacement without Microsoft needing to validate your repair either. "
I assume that'll be OEM licenses which lose their activation due to a motherboard change or similar (I would expect this to hit all OEM licenses, not just home one, if it's going to)?
WIth most major OEMs the key is in the UEFI firmware, so motherboard replacement doesn't cause the issue. If it's a home-build or local builder machine which has a separately-purchased OEM license then that's the only situation where I would anticipate that this issue might occur. Even then, I've generally found that Windows is fairly tolerant and with most parts apart from motherboards it won't trigger the reactivation requirement.
I've lost count of the number of times I have shared my opinion that Apple were only and will only ever be interested in complying wth right to repair to head off legislation that forces them to.
I've been repairing Apple products for over 30 years and they have *NEVER* played fair with repairers, they throw lawsuits, injunctions, tie you into agreements which bind your hands and generally do whatever they can to make it impossible for private enterprise to repair their stuff for reasonable prices.
It's absolutely no surprise they have thrown all sorts of technical hurdles in the way of anyone who dares attempt to do something as life threateningly dangerous as replace a screen on a phone they own.
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