We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

There is also another issue why Apple is restricting &quot;part harvesting&quot;: theft. iCloud locks or Samsung&#x27;s KNOX lock entered the field because the manufacturers were pretty pissed that customers using their devices in public became a target for &quot;enterprising&quot; robbers who&#x27;d factory-wipe the devices and flip them to a pawn shop or second-hand store in a matter of half an hour. When people are afraid to use your products because it paints a phone-sized target on them, they won&#x27;t buy your product.<p>That cut down on a lot of the robbery bullshit, but then criminals simply found new buyer classes - they&#x27;d simply part stolen devices out and resell everything but the iCloud&#x2F;Knox&#x2F;whatever locked mainboard. Displays, cameras, speakers, batteries, flex cables, cases, everything.<p>So now, at least Apple is tagging the most &quot;valuable&quot; parts in new phones, simply to make stealing them unattractive for thieves, which frankly sucks but is necessary because it&#x27;s a public safety issue.<p>(If anyone at Apple is reading this: ffs, allow the legitimate owner of a device to &quot;unpair&quot; all components in their phone in iCloud so that legitimate second-hand shops can strip a broken device at least for its parts)

I completely fail to understand the anti-theft argument, help me out here.<p>So the theory is that, once thieves will see you&#x27;re carrying an Iphone, they won&#x27;t bother taking it. But why? You&#x27;re already being mugged, everything that&#x27;s even remotely valuable will be taken. Why would they let their victims go, just because their valuables are more difficult to flip? &quot;Give me all your valuables - oh wait, that&#x27;s an iphone, nvm my bad you&#x27;re free to go&quot; is that the idea here?<p>And on being less of a target for getting robbed in the first place - you&#x27;re carrying an expensive af iphone, chances are you can afford to carry a lot of other expensive valuables too. If you&#x27;re worried about getting robbed, start with not carrying a device that&#x27;s more expensive than a fridge.<p>My condolences to everyone who actually had to survive through a robbery. But I doubt it could&#x27;ve been avoided just because your Iphone was currently difficult to sell. People can get robbed regardless of their perceived wealth, it&#x27;s a happen-stance crime.

Reminds me of a Louis Rossman video [0] where he shares his frustration with Apple&#x27;s independent repair shop program. He says that to get access to genuine Apple parts (and the ability to pair them to devices), Apple requires that his shop not be able to do certain things like fix a broken angle detection sensor.<p>It&#x27;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 :)

When people stop robbing phones for them to end up in Shenzen and stripped for parts, this will stop. This is a deterrent to make stealing iPhones less convenient and I’m all for it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>For everyone else, including myself, please continue to make it annoying for thieves to target iPhones.

That is <i>one of the many reasons</i> why use ThinkPads.<p><pre><code> * 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 </code></pre> Side story. I ordered a X13 Gen 3 (because the new reverse notch is “meh”) AMD (because Intel is “meh”) but the HiDPI was not selectable. So I ordered it without HiDPI, ordered the HiDPI display and cable (yes!) from the repair website and replaced both :)<p>And the best thing…it was shipped with Linux and it reacted “Oh. Should I turn on scaling?” :)<p>Probably not was Lenovo intended but in the end both sides are happy.

Good.<p>I replaced the battery in an iPhone 5 earlier this year and it&#x27;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&#x27;t likely to be recycled into new devices: they&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;s measures like pairing that make me question whether Apple&#x27;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?

AIUI, these restrictions are primarily intended to curb the market for stolen iphones? I think Apple has taken it too far here, but I also think it is disingenuous to have this discourse without at least mentioning the other considerations. There is no &quot;right&quot; answer, only tradeoffs...

Most comments in this thread:<p>I don&#x27;t want to have ownership of devices I pay money for, because if I don&#x27;t own anything, nobody can steal it from me.

One thing I dislike about this decision is, that it conflates the limitations for third parties repairing an iPhone with the ability to repair a device at all. Yes, in an ideal world it would be easy and cheap to repair a device. Good points have been raised in the discussion, why this might be limited by necessity. Like theft-protection and just technical questions of calibration of part.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

I agree with the two conclusions of iFixit&#x27;s accompanying article:<p>&quot;How Parts Pairing Kills Independent Repair&quot; [2023-01-17] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;News&#x2F;69320&#x2F;how-parts-pairing-kills-independent-repair" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;News&#x2F;69320&#x2F;how-parts-pairing-kills-in...</a><p>TDLR: &quot;Put Pairing in the Peoples’ Hands&quot; and &quot;Unpair the Future&quot;<p>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.)<p>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&#x27;s like iFixit.<p>My u&#x2F;unpopularopinion:<p>Counterfeit and grey&#x2F;black markets are a scourge. I absolutely want parts pairing for any new devices. Doubly so if my threat model included espionage or surveillance.

I don&#x27;t find the &quot;theft prevention&quot; argument raised by many of the comments here particularly convincing.<p>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.<p>Instead, the current system effectively assumes that ALL parts coming from a different device must&#x27;ve been &quot;illegally obtained&quot;, which is nonsense.<p>You can do theft prevention without actively making independent repair shops&#x27; lives miserable. But Apple&#x27;s goal <i>is</i> to make independent repair shops&#x27; 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.

Tough question as someone who got an iphone 14 to replace their iphone 12 that was stolen after being choked out and held at knife point, presumably to be sold for parts.<p>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.

I&#x27;m always suspicious when I open comments and see a whole lot of people posting variations of the same talking points as top-level threads... even if I happen to agree with those points.

I remember this thread (from the person working of Asahi Linux) that explains why Apple does this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;icosahedron.website&#x2F;@marcan@treehouse.systems&#x2F;110803358824190673" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;icosahedron.website&#x2F;@marcan@treehouse.systems&#x2F;110803...</a>

&gt; Forget harvesting parts—which is a huge part of most independent repair and recycling businesses.<p>Isn&#x27;t that also why most stolen phones end up in SE Asia where they&#x27;re disassembled for parts?

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.<p>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.

They could have written iPhone 14 in the title. This way it seems like they&#x27;re riding a wave of negative press following the &quot;wanderlust&quot; event.<p>Not that I care, I gave up my iphone and macintosh 12 years ago, I&#x27;m just noting a pattern of negative press being upvoted and this is among it.

We should take the security aspect of this more seriously. In a world where hardware manipulation is possible, from ATM skimmers to tampered routers, it&#x27;s not nothing for only authenticated parts to function.<p>As always, security has to play against other factors - like eWaste and convenience.

Damn if you do, retroactively damn if you don’t. IFixit is existentially tied to their antagonism to any official repair policy. I like their work, but this is bonkers. Retroactively degrading a rating? How should people even think that their ratings actually mean anything then?

Everyone is debating whether &quot;theft prevention&quot; is the valid argument.<p>That&#x27;s like banks blaming you for &quot;identity theft&quot;. No, the bank failed to safeguard your identity or validate your transactions.<p>Similarly here, the valid argument, and target of such changes, is <i>unscrupulous “repair” shops</i>, aka the <i>market makers</i> for these stolen parts.<p>Whether cars, or phones, after-market repairs are riddled with hazards, and it&#x27;s not those shops that end up in the news when someone&#x27;s brakes fail, tire treads separate at speed, or a Samsung or iPhone explodes their face off.

I live in Vietnam, phone theft is relatively prevalent here.<p>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.<p>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 tried to recall how many instances of theft vs damage there were in my social circle and the ratio is at least 10:1, with damage being the higher number.<p>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?

Phones need to be standardized the same way desktop pc where standardized.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t fall in that condition.<p>But production will...<p>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.<p>Shale oil production in the US, oil sands in alberta, took over the increasingly disapearring share of the conventionnal oil.<p>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.<p>In fact, it&#x27;s not completelly a lie from IEA, in a sense that demand will be forced to decline... But it&#x27;s far less worrying to say we will need less bread in the future than say we will not have enough of it...<p>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.

I’ve never had to repair my iphone (just get a new one every 4yrs) and appreciate that my phone is less profitable to steal, “repairability score” be damned. But I live in a dense city and take public transit, so the trade off is worth it to me. If I wanted something repairable I’d buy a different phone.

The average Apple fanboy&#x27;s ability to rationalize every single anti-consumer decision made by Apple is impressive. Literally all Apple has to do is say &quot;it&#x27;s for your own safety!&quot; and they will defend it to the death.

Which Apple marketing person invented that &quot;theft&quot; argument?<p>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.<p>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.<p>What&#x27;s going on?<p>Kudos to iFixit for at least showing some stance, but even their post is weirdly excusing in places:<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>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 &quot;taking meaningful steps&quot;?<p>Would you applaud Microsoft for &quot;taking meaningful steps&quot; 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?

Framework should eventually move into phones. Repair-first devices are needed for sustainability and also innovation in hardware.

iFixit is so fantastic. For any of their flaws or shortcomings, they are really trying to grow and improve on a regular basis. They have helped my family save so much stuff from the scrap heap.<p>These are the types of actions that help the ethos of &quot;REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE&quot;.<p>But it comes at the cost of capitalism and pure profit making. There&#x27;s going to have to be a hard reckoning sometime soon that we can&#x27;t keep just throwing stuff away (and paying again and again), just so the stock market keeps moving up.

&gt; &quot;It’s Literally Not Re-Pairable&quot;<p>making things worse under the guise of listening, that&#x27;s oh so pro.

After reading all robbery comments: Sweet Jesus on motorbike. Where do you live people?

Computing is something I&#x27;ve loved ever since I was first introduced to it, something I love, something that I always dreamed would empower every person to be connected to everyone else and have a better life, to help society become a fairer place.<p>When I first hand-etched my own PCB to attach LEDs to my Commodore 64, controlled by software that I&#x27;d written, it was amazing.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s even more efficient milking machine.<p>So much unnecessary bullshit, and more and more every year.<p>In the old days computers would improve each year. They wouldn&#x27;t remove stuff. This years device was like last years, but with added features. If you were thinking about upgrading, you didn&#x27;t have to make a spreadsheet for yourself with what you&#x27;re gaining this year and what you&#x27;re losing, and how much the monthly subscription will be. Buying new tech was an easy decision.<p>Nobody would have tolerated any of this in the 1990&#x27;s or 2000&#x27;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?<p>Apple championed non-replaceable batteries, no headphone sockets, locked bootloaders, had to be forced to use USBC. Now they&#x27;re championing remote hardware pairing. Every time there&#x27;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.<p>Just the worst most consumer-hostile company.<p>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&#x27;s actually a good thing and why they&#x27;re happy they&#x27;re getting milked even more this time, and everyone who doesn&#x27;t want to be milked is actually in the wrong or just cheap or poor or something.<p>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&#x27;s half a step forward and half a step back, with an iCloud subscription tacked on.<p>It&#x27;s so infuriating.<p>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.<p>Line must go up, and they&#x27;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&#x27;t care because they&#x27;re just dying to put their special release-day dunce cap on again. This one has magnesium!<p>Somehow USBC is revolutionary because people can now save videos to external storage. What? My Galaxy Note from 2012 had microSD.<p>Soon will come the subscription-based hardware with remote hardware disabling. A subscription for access to particular phone features. Mark my words.<p>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&#x27;re not. The trickle-down from Apple is ruining the whole industry.<p>Of course, I&#x27;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.<p>I hate Apple for what they&#x27;re doing to the computing landscape, and I don&#x27;t care if their M2 is better on power per watt or whatever. I&#x27;d plug in and use a device I actually own.<p>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.<p>No bullshit and just the best product. I would buy five.<p>But not any of this, this is shit.<p>Fuck Apple.

Thanks Apple for making my phone a less attractive target for thieves by making its pieces useless when used in other phones.<p>Ifixit: you are not on my side.