There is also another issue why Apple is restricting "part harvesting": theft. iCloud locks or Samsung's KNOX lock entered the field because the manufacturers were pretty pissed that customers using their devices in public became a target for "enterprising" robbers who'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't buy your product.
That cut down on a lot of the robbery bullshit, but then criminals simply found new buyer classes - they'd simply part stolen devices out and resell everything but the iCloud/Knox/whatever locked mainboard. Displays, cameras, speakers, batteries, flex cables, cases, everything.
So now, at least Apple is tagging the most "valuable" parts in new phones, simply to make stealing them unattractive for thieves, which frankly sucks but is necessary because it's a public safety issue.
(If anyone at Apple is reading this: ffs, allow the legitimate owner of a device to "unpair" all components in their phone in iCloud so that legitimate second-hand shops can strip a broken device at least for its parts)
While anti-consumerist practices such as this authentication mechanism sometimes accidentally protect the consumer, it is not the reason why companies do it. If it were, they would also allow you to say “yes this replacement is desired.” Similarly, if it was about security and preventing backdoored parts, they could allow you to authorize the replacement.
But no, it is of course about money grabbing, and then the consumer is the opponent.
Such an ignore button would allow theft to continue and would allow users to make poor security decisions. I agree that something needs to happen to enable easier or maybe more privacy focused 3rd party repairs but I also appreciate my device being less of a target.
No need to try to defend them based on unsupportable benefit of the doubt possibilities. If their motivations were actually for the users benefit, then the user would have these options and be benefitting.
Yes. I could see a better system being made. Perhaps alerting you that the screen was marked as stolen and refusing to have it operate. Hell, for screens in particular you could display a “please return to <original owner>” message and nothing else.
The solution for a phone is put a vin on the display and other valuable parts and upload those to the carrier/manufacturer.
Imagine how happy someone would be if they had their display replaced with a stolen one and next thing they know their phone is both bricked and of no value even for parts.
I don't know why iFixit doesn't even touch on that point.
I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets, because noone will take the phone off of them, so it's not worth it. Phones are still being stolen but imagine if they could sell to a global market of repair shops.
You couldn't go to any tourist location without having your phone stolen if it wasn't bolted to your person.
I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)
Apple should offer a better repair program and offer the ability to "unlock and relock" it in a apple store with proper proof of ownership. Or anything else in that direction.
> I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)
Do you think thieves are that descending? I know someone whos iPhone 14 was stolen in London. If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?
>I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets
If the whole part won't be used it will be stripped to components and resold to the same repair shops anyway. Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more.
Apple doesn't want phones fixed because Apple wants to sell more phones, plain and simple. There is no other incentive.
What is the relative rates of occurrence of phone theft vs. phones breaking in a way that requires repair? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that far far far more people have a phone that needs to be repaired than have a phone that gets stolen.
So making repair worse to make theft "better" seems like a bad tradeoff to me. And that's even presuming that this stated goal actually works. I would expect that a very non-trivial amount of phone theft happens without knowing the model. Assuming that's the case, having 1 manufacturer make selling parts non-viable doesn't really help that much.
So A) even if it was 100% effective that seems like a bad tradeoff to me and B) I'm skeptical of how much difference this actually makes in theft rates.
I know that I personally, if choosing between a phone that I knew for a fact would 100% never be stolen, but also couldn't be repaired, vs. a phone that could easily be repaired but was subject to theft, I would choose the repairable phone every time. It's an anecdote, but I've never had a phone stolen and literally every single phone I've ever had has needed repair at one point or another.
Luckily, for like $4/mo (and $29 per incident), Apple will replace the screen for you. You can break your screen every year and it will cost you less than the $100 that screen would cost on the open market.
> What is the relative rates of occurrence of phone theft vs. phones breaking in a way that requires repair?
i would think having a permanently useless phone would stop the first rate from ever increasing much. you are walking around with a grand in your pocket everywhere you go so to lower the risk of violent robbery is good.
> (If anyone at Apple is reading this: ffs, allow the legitimate owner of a device to "unpair" all components in their phone in iCloud so that legitimate second-hand shops can strip a broken device at least for its parts)
I was robbed at gunpoint (but not in a 'problematic' part of town) and the thief outlined all the steps he needed me to take to remove my phone from Find My and from iCloud. I think a lot of these mitigation measures could make sense but there's no perfect solution.
IMHO this is a huge problem. A thief just wants to steal your phone. To ensure the value of the device, it’s now common to force you to provide your passcode. This gives access to all your data, can be used to reset your Apple ID password, lock you out of your account, and erase and lock all your other devices. This problem never existed before, and it’s significantly worse! Like, way way way worse. It’s so bad I wonder if I should really be signed into my Apple ID on my phone at all. Because I don’t give the slightest care of someone stealing my phone. But I do care if they have access to all my data, erase and lock me out of all my other devices. I really care about that. And this problem only exists because Apple locks down the device and all parts.
Apple should have a duress system. You have say 48 hours to contact Apple and tell them the change was made under duress--and you do so with the *old* credentials, not the new ones. All changes to your account revert and the phone locks itself to your account once it sees the network.
There's a significant difference in risk in robbing someone at gunpoint vs just slipping their phone out of their pocket. It's awful that that happened to you, but it's important to realize that just because a specific security measure could not prevent what happened to you, that doesn't mean it's wholly ineffectual or not worth having.
I mean the perfect solution (from a theft perspective) would just be only allowing Apple to remove the phone from your iCloud account at a physical location when presented with ID. Annoying for people selling their phone, sure. But that plus the hardware paring would make it functionally worthless to anyone but you.
Unpairing a device from icloud should probably require a second factor or a mandatory safety wait period. Same for every potentially really harmful action.
I do not accept this as a reasonable answer. I've lived in not even very good areas, with very lax physical security (often not locking my car) and have never had this issue, ever. Nobody has ever stolen my phone. Not in downtown Detroit, not in not-downtown-Detroit, not in SF, not in Chicago. If crime really is this bad, it's not an Apple or Samsung problem. It's a societal problem that extremely badly needs to be addressed seriously and not just worked around with convenient anti-consumer garbage.
“No one has stolen my phone so I don’t believe that actions to stop phone theft is necessary”
I’ve heard plenty of stories of people getting their phones stolen in public. Especially when I was in school, we’d hear of plots like kids coming up to students and asking to call their parents because they’re scared and alone only to run over to a car waiting around the corner and drive away.
You can argue it’s unnecessary, but it certainly chilled the market for stolen phones. They’re pretty obvious targets and they’re very personal. Not worrying about it as much is a big win, but some people have other priorities and that’s ok too.
Phone theft was pretty common in the US 10 years ago. This article (based on a population of 20 million people) says about 1 million phones were stolen in 2013:
It's much less common now, since all the major brands brick themselves when stolen (though it's starting to be common to either shoulder surf the pin, or to grab an unlocked phone out of people's hands, then rapidly reset 2FA and email passwords).
I agree with the GP comment that it should be possible to make phones theft-proof and also repairable though.
Counter anecdote: My coworker in SF had his phone stolen by someone who grabbed it from his hand and leapt through a closing BART door, so that my friend had to watch the thief walk off as the train pulled away from the platform.
Most people haven't had their phone stolen. That doesn't mean phones aren't stolen.
> It's a societal problem that extremely badly needs to be addressed seriously and not just worked around with convenient anti-consumer garbage.
The societal problem is that people got used to paying over a grand for a thing that fits in their pocket.
> Nobody has ever stolen my phone.
Put yourself in the position of the thieves. You would want an easy target; one that if push came to shove that they wouldn't be able to injure or detain you. How big are you, physically?
My wife had her iPhone stolen in the north side of Chicago maybe 15 years ago - in a good area no less. Some big guy followed her to her apartment asking to make a phonecall for some made up emergency. She's 5'2" and was like 90 pounds at the time. She did the math on how it was likely to go and just handed it over, as it was late at night and she was alone. Predictably, he ran off. (As an aside, I think it's hard for men to understand exactly how vulnerable women feel in general - as ne'erdowells see them as easy targets compared to even men of similar size)
The same thief may have thought twice if it was me - because I'm a man rather closer to 6' and 200lbs. He may win that fight and get the phone, but not without me getting some licks in - an unattractive proposition, since a broken orbital or finger cuts into those profits.
It's a big world. Haven't you seen videos of phones getting stolen out of peoples hands from thieves on scooters in places like Brazil? Or the millions of tourists in Spain and Italy whose cell phones would become major targets.
In other parts of the world where the cost of a new iPhone is much more expensive relative to local earning power it does happen. I've had coworkers who had their phones stolen in Spain and Brazil for example.
Someone tip toed carefully into my house while I was sleeping in it, in the Mission near Valencia St., and cat-burgled* my wife's phone off her nightstand, at around 3am. We have some pictures of his legs (?) that he took in some bathroom later that evening. Finally it winds up pinging its location at a Mission phone repair shop, which of course the guy there is saying he has no idea what we're talking about and maybe the phone is "upstairs."
We didn't report, because last time I reported someone breaking into my garage, the two SFPD officers were talking about people interested in my "printer." Nothing was stolen, because it woke me up and I yelled at them from above.
I don't really know what the economy is around stolen phones. It surely exists. I don't know why you would want to die on this hill of ignorance. It's a quintessentially social media thing to do! You have no dog in this race.
There have been recent stories about how thieves were looking at people entering their passcodes into their phones, snatching the phone when it was unlocked and using the pin to disable iCloud/Find My.
Your sample size is pretty small. That said, the self-selecting population of people whose phones were parted out in the bug report have the exact opposite experience.
If that were true, Apple would only require the replacement part to be verified, but they also require the device receiving the part to be verified. That's the "pair" in "pairing".
Not speculation at all. I can tell you for certain this is what they're trying to combat.
The "require the device receiving the part to be verified" is just a consequence of how it's currently implemented. There are ways to implement this without the need to do per-device pairing, but doing so in a secure way is quite difficult. I suspect they'll eventually remove the requirement to pair devices using system configurator, if only because this removes the need to have chat assistance with pairing. That's costing them money to have a call center, and they want to avoid it I suspect.
The problem, as I see it, with having a method to 'pair' and 'unpair' components right now... is that I don't think Apple is really doing anything too special to 'pair' devices. My guess is they're just using a serial number of the device (display, camera, whatever) and making sure that serial matches the what is programmed into the mainboard. If you allow any random person to change the paired serial number for say, the display, then you no longer have any guarantee that the new display is actually an authentic device. Maybe someone aftermarket makes a bunch of devices with 0xDEADBEEF as the serial number so you just always pair that.
If Apple knows that serial number 0x12345678 was sold to you, and that it is the component you want to install, then they have a guarantee that this part is authentic and should work properly.
So, Apple needs a way for you to pair a serial number, but also that the serial number you're pairing is authentic. I'm not sure they have the second piece today.
The rationale of putting engineering time into developing sophisticated anti-repair schemes instead of selling spare parts directly under some threat of a part black market is completely bonkers to me.
Sorry, I'm not buying it, this is Apple protecting their exclusive repair turf and nothing else.
It seems pretty easy to implement the "unpair" functionality you ask for.
If "Find My iPhone" (the anti-theft subsystem) is disabled, then the serial numbers for all the parts could be sent to an Apple database, and/or the components could have a "ready to be re-used" bit set that caused them to factory reset themselves if the phone they're plugged into changes (so any state on the re-used thing wouldn't somehow leak into the other phone).
I'm not sure how to define "phone they're plugged into" though. Whatever board has the NAND + security coprocessor on it, maybe?
That does sound like a pretty good solution, if it can be done for a broken phone. The major issue I see is that refurbish companies are already complaining about "bricked" MacBooks, because nobody actually cared enough to ensure that those laptops where reset before being sold. I don't see the same industry being capable of guiding users through resetting permissions for spare parts.
A better solutions is to take the direction FairPhone has chosen and make the things that break user-serviceable and offer the parts for sale on Apples own website. If the issue is that phones are being stolen and sold for parts, just flood the market with cheap parts. The new iPhones are absolutely massive, so I'm not buying that you can't make them a bit thicker and allow a user to take them apart. How many people use their phone without a cover anyway?
If Apple is serious about being more environmentally friendly, then make a user serviceable phone. Not replacing your phone because fixing it is either impossible or impossibly expensive is going to have a much bigger impact than buying carbon credits for people who charge their watch. My best guess is that Apple is so obsessed with just-in-time production and so hostile to the idea of stocking parts, that they can even see the potential benefits.
I would be surprised if Apple does what you suggested, but I do think it's an excellent suggestion, thank you. It just won't be a priority unless some sort of legislation forces their hand.
You can try to push that as a marketing strategy, but I would say the share of the market that looks for smartphones specifically because they are less of a target for theft is minuscule, the reason being because nobody shop for phones thinking about getting robbed. They shop mainly guided by ecosystem (android Vs ios) brand perception (how good their aftersales support is), budget and cost-effectiveness. In this sense, device lockdown is clearly a anti-consumer practice, not pro-consumer.
You can do a search and you'll find many articles and comments about how back in the day people were warned not to wear the white iPod ear buds as not to be a target for thefts.
> West Midlands police have issued a stark warning to iPod users: ditch the white headphones or pay the price.
> nobody shop for phones thinking about getting robbed
I don’t know the safety situation of where you live but I literally had this conversation with friends two weeks ago where we loved the idea that the iPhone is a better purchase because it’s less prone to theft (because of the reasons GP mentioned).
> (If anyone at Apple is reading this: ffs, allow the legitimate owner of a device to "unpair" all components in their phone in iCloud so that legitimate second-hand shops can strip a broken device at least for its parts)
If you've lived in certain places, you'd know this isn't a solution at all.
Thieves will start holding people at gunpoint forcing you to unpair it all while they wait.
They can already "unpair" the phone by removing it from iCloud, as you say. The phone could simply check whether the serial number on a part is already associated with an iCloud registered device and if not, allow it to pair. Fairly obviously, they don't do this because it would reduce the demand for their parts, which is a multibillion dollar business.
> iCloud locks or Samsung's KNOX lock entered the field because the manufacturers were pretty pissed that customers using their devices in public became a target for "enterprising" robbers who'd factory-wipe the devices and flip them to a pawn shop or second-hand store in a matter of half an hour.
It wasn't just the manufacturers who were pretty pissed at that. Minnesota passed a law requiring smartphones to have a kill switch that would allow the owner to remotely render the phone inoperable [1]. Then California did, with the California law also making kill switch support be turned on by default. Those laws have been in effect since mid 2015 and were quickly followed by a huge drop in smartphone thefts.
Phone theft is also a big deal at music festivals. Last year an entire backpack full of phones was recovered. People who lose them either never hear from them again, or see them in Find My as a brief blip somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away. Sometimes they're shucked on site and all you find is your empty phone case on the ground.
It's already awful to lose your phone, but even more so when you're at a multi-day event you paid hundreds to attend.
>That cut down on a lot of the robbery bullshit, but then criminals simply found new buyer classes - they'd simply part stolen devices out and resell everything but the iCloud/Knox/whatever locked mainboard. Displays, cameras, speakers, batteries, flex cables, cases, everything.
This would be way less valueble to do if the companies just sold the parts are reasonable prices.
The extreme ways fixers have to go to to source parts for legitimate repairs concerns is insane.
The entire reason there even is a whole ecosystem of people picking apart phones in Shenzen is because it's so darn difficult to source it any other way!
I agree, and I think there's a compromise. Allow the pairing of harvested parts, but also allow users to report their unit as "stolen" so the parts can't be paired.
However, this is probably fraught with problems that Apple doesn't want to deal with. Users will want to know if someone tried to pair their parts and they'll be hit with a large number of subpoenas daily from people who want to know which repair shops had their stolen phones.
If Apple has a record of the individual serial numbers on parts contained in each phone, that seems like a wonderful way of backtracking stolen phone parts to the thieves.
"Oh you're trying to replace your phone screen with one from a stolen item. Please provide your contact details so we can pass that on to the police."
How much were you paid to shill Apple for this top post?
If this were a real issue, then I as the device owner should be able to toggle this on and off as needed. But that hits deeper, since this is a device that's being sold as "purchase" when I don't have real control - Apple does.
At best, this is a rental being mis-advertised as a purchase.
> How much were you paid to shill Apple for this top post?
Unfortunately, I don't get paid by anyone except my employer lol. 16k HN and 160k Reddit karma points in about a decade isn't exactly influencer-worthy.
> If this were a real issue, then I as the device owner should be able to toggle this on and off as needed.
Phone theft is a real issue, even in places not suffering from open street markets with people fencing stolen shit, like London [1].
Absolutely not. The cases for repairs vastly outnumber the cases for theft to a degree it isn't comparable in the slightest. This should be the basis for any honest discussion.
Not putting that in perspective cannot lead to sensible considerations.
Well I think you hit the nail on the head. They aren’t working on the most important aspect of the puzzle (your last point), not because they aren’t reading HN comments, but because that would have a very negative effect on their bottom line.
Or they could just sell official replacement screens for $50. The price of an entire budget smartphone. Thefts of iPhones would plummet. The phones would be worth more to consumers. A small drop in sales perhaps due to more repairs.
It's really stupid. How many people get their devices not stolen vs stolen. I would bet 99% is conservative? sounds like an excuse to just make it harder to repair and make the product useless much earlier.
Even if that's their motivation, doing that is still a terrible practice at least in the way they're doing it. It's certainly one of the big reasons why I won't buy these devices.
I completely fail to understand the anti-theft argument, help me out here.
So the theory is that, once thieves will see you're carrying an Iphone, they won't bother taking it. But why? You're already being mugged, everything that's even remotely valuable will be taken. Why would they let their victims go, just because their valuables are more difficult to flip? "Give me all your valuables - oh wait, that's an iphone, nvm my bad you're free to go" is that the idea here?
And on being less of a target for getting robbed in the first place - you're carrying an expensive af iphone, chances are you can afford to carry a lot of other expensive valuables too. If you're worried about getting robbed, start with not carrying a device that's more expensive than a fridge.
My condolences to everyone who actually had to survive through a robbery. But I doubt it could've been avoided just because your Iphone was currently difficult to sell. People can get robbed regardless of their perceived wealth, it's a happen-stance crime.
> oh wait, that's an iphone, nvm my bad you're free to go" is that the idea here?
In Brazil I've heard stories of muggers holding up e.g. a bus and not bothering to get iPhones. This was a while ago, before the trade routes to get stolen phones across the world for disassembly and parts resale were as developed as they are today.
There are more robberies than a mugging. Pick pockets are a real scourge. If you have a reliable way to turn stolen goods into currency, you are incentivized to take that item. Jewelry -> pawn shops for example.
The anti-theft measure here makes it not profitable, or much harder to profit, from taking a phone because you can't resell it or strip the valuable parts. I had a friend get pick pocketed in spain, and the next day the phone was several countries away.
Just because people can get mugged regardless of perceived wealth doesn't mean that we don't try to reduce the risk.
I was under the impression that a typical theft is more of a grab-and-run. At least all the thefts I’ve witnessed have been that way. So picture not a back alley mugging from the movies but tourists in a crowded area or commuters on public transit, already holding their phones out in front of them.
It sounds like you are visualizing the typical robbery as a thief stops you in some location secluded enough that they have time to get you to remove all your valuables and hand them over.
It actually is typically a grab and run in a crowd.
We know making smartphones harder to flip deters this because in 2015 when it become mandatory for smartphones to require a remote kill switch the owner could use to kill a stolen phone the theft rate for such phones dropped significantly.
> You're already being mugged, everything that's even remotely valuable will be taken. Why
That's your mistake right there, the challenge to steal isn't identical for different things, and also depends on the things.
For examle, there are plenty of cases where the thiefs snatch the phone from your hand (even while you're still talking), so making resale value low helps here
> you're carrying an expensive af iphone, chances are you can afford
That's the second easy mistake - the "chances" can be low, so the fact that you hypotheticall can afford doesn't help the actual criminal much (if you're jogging with a phone chances that you carry much valuable besides the phone is very low).
A lot of phone thefts are quick pickpocketing/snatch-and-run, or snatch-off-a table, not some Hollywood "stick-em-up, give me everything you have" type of situation.
People target expensive phones, period.. but having fewer ways to turn those stolen phones into enough money to justify the risk means people will be less inclined to directly target them (especially when other brands' expensive flagship phones may be easier).
Similar concept in general physical security/theft deterrent, really.. put up a bigger challenge than others in your vicinity and you're less likely to be targeted.
It makes no sense at all and is clearly just an excuse.
Criminals do not want your iPhone. It is an instant tracking device that even if they sold it in an hour would still lead the cops to where they sold it.
I was robbed at gunpoint in the late 2000s and even then the criminals did not want the phone. They did want everything else tho.
It’s anti consumer bullshit and absolutely nothing else.
Reminds me of a Louis Rossman video [0] where he shares his frustration with Apple'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.
It'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 :)
> 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.
is this a loaded framing for the proposition that "you can't perform component-level repairs if you're presenting yourself as an apple authorized service center"? because the point of apple authorized service centers is you get the apple authorized service, not someone drilling and reflowing your board to replace components.
it's great that rossman can do this, but he's N=1, and apple can't make their entire network out of rossmans. I think it's pretty obvious why they have to enforce minimum standards and standardized repair protocols in an authorized service program.
this is the "rossman doesn't like any repair solution in which rossman doesn't get paid" thing in action. component-level repair isn't the only kind of repair, it's just the one that results in rossman getting paid the most.
But you do know that apple authorized service center service is often worse because instead of reflowing components they go for stuffing your device with shoe rubber to push chips with defective connections tighter to the pcb? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGHcBZjmWA
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.
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.
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.
For everyone else, including myself, please continue to make it annoying for thieves to target iPhones.
This is complete nonsense, if apple cared about phones being stolen for parts, they would just start selling the damn parts so people could repair their phones. Right now the reason parts are so valulable is because there's no other way to get them! Apple's unrepairability policy FUELS theft not the other way around.
And there’s no way for Apples policy to fuel theft when the stolen phone and parts from that phone can’t be used for anything. You might have had a point a few years ago when they neither sold parts nor did the pairing stuff.
I think they’re moving in the right direction. But like many here have pointed out they should allow you to unpair parts in a phone you own.
There are comments here from people who have been robbed at gunpoint and forced to unlock their phone and disconnect it from iCloud. I think Apple could solve it by making it a 24 hour process that can be reversed. But that just illustrates that it’s actually a hard problem to solve properly.
I don’t care at all about 3rd party parts. I’ve been burned too many times. It’s not environmentally friendly if you buy a brand new shitty part that you end up discarding along with the phone a few months later because the part was bad. Just force Apple to sell good quality genuine parts at a low price. The sum of the parts should equal the price of the phone. Yes that will be unprofitable for Apple, but governments can force it through regulation in the name of sustainability
If they stop selling parts then they should be forced to disable parts pairing for that model… then relying on 3rd party market as a fallback is an fallback
I assumed the reason Apple’s phones are stolen for parts are that, unlike a lot of Android counterparts that can be reset, Find My is so bulletproof that (without phishing) iPhones are essentially expensive paperweights in terms of reselling whole. So people started getting creative and selling the parts, so Apple started to serialise those too.
Either way, I don’t think Apple set out to make the iPhone unrepairable just because. There just weren’t letting repairability getting in the way of the design and aesthetic they want, and I think it’s fine for them to have this opinion. They couldn’t achieve both so they biased towards design, and look to slowly iterate towards repairability compromising as little on design as possible.
> This is complete nonsense, if apple cared about phones being stolen for parts, they would just start selling the damn parts so people could repair their phones.
>> When people stop robbing phones for them to end up in Shenzen and stripped for parts, this will stop.
Once such practice is started it will never stop. If it benefits Apple why would they wver stop it.
Thieves have existed since forever. There are many things which get stolen and don't integrate such protection and people live with that. No tech things like gold bars, gold rings with diamonds. Some people simply look after their stuff. And it is possible to buy insurance, tracking devices, lock boxes and other services to help.
I’ve heard that take many times, but is there any actual data to back this claim? I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is or how to tell iPhone models apart to know which ones to steal. They steal your purse, bag or just anything and sight and only then deal with the loot, discarding what’s useless. I would be very surprised if serializing the battery or screen is putting any significant dent in the number of stolen iPhones worldwide.
Apple has already created a pretty good deterrent to prevent iPhone theft - the Find My iPhone system. It’s better because it’s actually useful to the user and works even if you turn the phone off. The way I see it there’s absolutely no need to serialize the parts as an additional measure to prevent theft (given also what I said in the first paragraph)
> I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is
It doesn't matter. The market will dictate behaviour. As soon as the value of iPhone parts drops at the end of the chain (Shenzhen et. al) this will propagate all the way up to the street criminals.
Perhaps they will not discriminate by iPhone submodel (will not matter after a while of the serialisation policy), but they will (and do) discriminate by brand.
Much smartphone theft includes robbers grabbing the phone out of unsuspecting victims' hands, forcing them to surrender it at gunpoint, or pickpocketing it.
I don’t know if there’s data to back this up. I’m simply assuming based on what I know. What I know comes from people I went to school with who have stolen phones before telling me at the pub. There is a price for the type of device you bring in. The ones on the bikes or mugging people actually drop it off to the people who send stuff off to China. Those people give a standard price for the type of phone, he quoted £100 for an iPhone 11 and £120 for a Samsung Galaxy.
He corroborates your point regarding not discriminating the phone he stole, to be fair.
Making the parts useless won't immediately stop theft, sure. It's the same with making catalytic converters hard/impossible to fence. People still steal them, because they're working off an older state of the world. But once you've stolen enough stuff that you couldn't market, you figure out not to steal that anymore. (Although if you're stealing bags, harvesting cash and throwing the bags in the river, phones in the bags are still gone)
Regarding your second point, I agree with the Find My praise, however Find My itself illustrates why every little thing done to make it “more of a ballache” to steal an iPhone, more costly for the thieves, is reducing the demand and these “papercuts” can add up in a sizeable way.
But your point is valid, and I can understand why you hold that opinion.
When this eventually makes it to “basically every iphone out there”, and thieves stop being able to go to the local repair shop to trade in the iphone they stole for a wad of cash, they will stop targeting people with iphones.
I take it you’ve never been to an impoverished area? Holding an iphone paints a massive target on your back.
That is one of the many reasons why use ThinkPads.
* 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
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 :)
And the best thing…it was shipped with Linux and it reacted “Oh. Should I turn on scaling?” :)
Probably not was Lenovo intended but in the end both sides are happy.
I get how this is helpful for hobby hardware, but the last time I had a problem with a Lenovo, I sent it to the on-site authorized repair depot (my employer had a special gold plated contract with them), who couldn't replace it because it needed a replacement display cable they didn't stock. They diagnosed it, and sent it to Lenovo, who said it would take 30 days to replace the cable.
I bought a cheap desktop in the meantime, which still works fine, ten years later.
When the laptop came back, Lenovo diagnosed it "no fault found", and didn't replace the faulty cable. Not only was the display still intermittent (due to the bad cable), but their technician removed and then improperly installed the insulator for the backlight's high-voltage transformer, so it was painful and unsafe to touch the laptop if the display was on.
Compare this to Apple, where I drive into any big city, hand them the broken shiny thing, a bag of money containing about 10% its retail price, and it Just Works when they hand it back to me (almost always on the same day).
Maybe Lenovo can repair their own stuff these days? I haven't observed this anywhere I've worked since.
(My evidence that they can't fix their stuff is that there is usually a pile of broken Lenovos in the back of the IT office.)
Anecdata: if you need a Lenovo repaired and you’re covered for onsite service, have them come to you.
I had a similar experience with sending an X1 Carbon to Lenovo’s repair center: “No problem found”.
When I called to complain, I was told they recommended on site service over sending machines in. The repair tech was prompt, pleasant, and skilled. The machine was fixed in 30 minutes.
> a bag of money containing about 10% its retail price
...or, if you bought AppleCare and it's still within that time frame and not an egregiously obvious user error situation, no (additional) money at all.
Lenovo once told me that extreme image persistence on the display was "normal" and there was nothing to repair. You could display some sensitive information on the screen, lock the screen, and still be able to read the previous information on the lock screen around 3 minutes later.
I just finished reading the comment thread for the "Snowden leak: Cavium networking hardware may contain NSA backdoor" news item and so security and privacy issues were at the forefront of my mind.
So, when I read your comment about "That is one of the many reasons why (we) use ThinkPads." I think people need to be reminded about Lenovo's (POST IBM SALE) controversies.
I replaced the battery in an iPhone 5 earlier this year and it'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't likely to be recycled into new devices: they'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.
It's measures like pairing that make me question whether Apple'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 "right" answer, only tradeoffs...
This is stated elsewhere in this thread, but if this is the case then Apple should allow users to unpair their parts and allow them to be reused. Gouging users by forcing them to buy a new part that they already have because their current one is "unverified" despite working perfectly can only be interpreted as greed.
The intent of the restrictions does not change the repairability, hence as far as the repairability score is concerned, that intent should not matter for the resulting score.
If an actor with that sort of capability has physical access to your device for long enough to replace a part in it with a custom one, you are pwned pretty much no matter what you do at that point. They could just as well stick in a keylogger for touch inputs and know all your passwords.
Is there a single documented case of someone's phone being hacked because of a replaced hardware component like a screen? That sounds like fantasy land to me.
Maybe the NSA can do it? But I suspect they could more easily hack phones in software.
Well, yeah. Ownership is responsibility, and the world is shifting towards more convenience, so less responsibility. So we're also going towards less ownership as well, with products being turned into services and leases. And frankly, in a lot of cases, I don't mind it.
Readit News
That cut down on a lot of the robbery bullshit, but then criminals simply found new buyer classes - they'd simply part stolen devices out and resell everything but the iCloud/Knox/whatever locked mainboard. Displays, cameras, speakers, batteries, flex cables, cases, everything.
So now, at least Apple is tagging the most "valuable" parts in new phones, simply to make stealing them unattractive for thieves, which frankly sucks but is necessary because it's a public safety issue.
(If anyone at Apple is reading this: ffs, allow the legitimate owner of a device to "unpair" all components in their phone in iCloud so that legitimate second-hand shops can strip a broken device at least for its parts)
But no, it is of course about money grabbing, and then the consumer is the opponent.
How does that not completely bypass any of the reasons for wanting to do this?
And it is “anti-consumerist” to make my property a less desirable target for theft?
No need to try to defend them based on unsupportable benefit of the doubt possibilities. If their motivations were actually for the users benefit, then the user would have these options and be benefitting.
Imagine how happy someone would be if they had their display replaced with a stolen one and next thing they know their phone is both bricked and of no value even for parts.
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I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets, because noone will take the phone off of them, so it's not worth it. Phones are still being stolen but imagine if they could sell to a global market of repair shops.
You couldn't go to any tourist location without having your phone stolen if it wasn't bolted to your person.
I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)
Apple should offer a better repair program and offer the ability to "unlock and relock" it in a apple store with proper proof of ownership. Or anything else in that direction.
Do you think thieves are that descending? I know someone whos iPhone 14 was stolen in London. If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?
Doesn't sound like it.
If the whole part won't be used it will be stripped to components and resold to the same repair shops anyway. Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more.
Apple doesn't want phones fixed because Apple wants to sell more phones, plain and simple. There is no other incentive.
So making repair worse to make theft "better" seems like a bad tradeoff to me. And that's even presuming that this stated goal actually works. I would expect that a very non-trivial amount of phone theft happens without knowing the model. Assuming that's the case, having 1 manufacturer make selling parts non-viable doesn't really help that much.
So A) even if it was 100% effective that seems like a bad tradeoff to me and B) I'm skeptical of how much difference this actually makes in theft rates.
I know that I personally, if choosing between a phone that I knew for a fact would 100% never be stolen, but also couldn't be repaired, vs. a phone that could easily be repaired but was subject to theft, I would choose the repairable phone every time. It's an anecdote, but I've never had a phone stolen and literally every single phone I've ever had has needed repair at one point or another.
Perhaps because it's known to many thieves that iPhones are a useless thing to steal due to Apple's tight account-tied software locks?
I'd say the polar opposite, as long as you're excluding screen and battery replacement which aren't what's being talked about here.
I don't know anybody who's ever had a non-screen/battery component replaced. On the other hand, I know tons of times someone's phone has been stolen.
Times I’ve been mugged and had my phone taken: one
i would think having a permanently useless phone would stop the first rate from ever increasing much. you are walking around with a grand in your pocket everywhere you go so to lower the risk of violent robbery is good.
I was robbed at gunpoint (but not in a 'problematic' part of town) and the thief outlined all the steps he needed me to take to remove my phone from Find My and from iCloud. I think a lot of these mitigation measures could make sense but there's no perfect solution.
IMHO this is a huge problem. A thief just wants to steal your phone. To ensure the value of the device, it’s now common to force you to provide your passcode. This gives access to all your data, can be used to reset your Apple ID password, lock you out of your account, and erase and lock all your other devices. This problem never existed before, and it’s significantly worse! Like, way way way worse. It’s so bad I wonder if I should really be signed into my Apple ID on my phone at all. Because I don’t give the slightest care of someone stealing my phone. But I do care if they have access to all my data, erase and lock me out of all my other devices. I really care about that. And this problem only exists because Apple locks down the device and all parts.
Sell me the phone that can be stolen please.
I’ve heard plenty of stories of people getting their phones stolen in public. Especially when I was in school, we’d hear of plots like kids coming up to students and asking to call their parents because they’re scared and alone only to run over to a car waiting around the corner and drive away.
You can argue it’s unnecessary, but it certainly chilled the market for stolen phones. They’re pretty obvious targets and they’re very personal. Not worrying about it as much is a big win, but some people have other priorities and that’s ok too.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/fcc-smartphone-theft-re...
It's much less common now, since all the major brands brick themselves when stolen (though it's starting to be common to either shoulder surf the pin, or to grab an unlocked phone out of people's hands, then rapidly reset 2FA and email passwords).
I agree with the GP comment that it should be possible to make phones theft-proof and also repairable though.
Most people haven't had their phone stolen. That doesn't mean phones aren't stolen.
The societal problem is that people got used to paying over a grand for a thing that fits in their pocket.
> Nobody has ever stolen my phone.
Put yourself in the position of the thieves. You would want an easy target; one that if push came to shove that they wouldn't be able to injure or detain you. How big are you, physically?
My wife had her iPhone stolen in the north side of Chicago maybe 15 years ago - in a good area no less. Some big guy followed her to her apartment asking to make a phonecall for some made up emergency. She's 5'2" and was like 90 pounds at the time. She did the math on how it was likely to go and just handed it over, as it was late at night and she was alone. Predictably, he ran off. (As an aside, I think it's hard for men to understand exactly how vulnerable women feel in general - as ne'erdowells see them as easy targets compared to even men of similar size)
The same thief may have thought twice if it was me - because I'm a man rather closer to 6' and 200lbs. He may win that fight and get the phone, but not without me getting some licks in - an unattractive proposition, since a broken orbital or finger cuts into those profits.
Someone tip toed carefully into my house while I was sleeping in it, in the Mission near Valencia St., and cat-burgled* my wife's phone off her nightstand, at around 3am. We have some pictures of his legs (?) that he took in some bathroom later that evening. Finally it winds up pinging its location at a Mission phone repair shop, which of course the guy there is saying he has no idea what we're talking about and maybe the phone is "upstairs."
We didn't report, because last time I reported someone breaking into my garage, the two SFPD officers were talking about people interested in my "printer." Nothing was stolen, because it woke me up and I yelled at them from above.
I don't really know what the economy is around stolen phones. It surely exists. I don't know why you would want to die on this hill of ignorance. It's a quintessentially social media thing to do! You have no dog in this race.
*Our cat helpfully ran out the door for fun.
If that were true, Apple would only require the replacement part to be verified, but they also require the device receiving the part to be verified. That's the "pair" in "pairing".
The "require the device receiving the part to be verified" is just a consequence of how it's currently implemented. There are ways to implement this without the need to do per-device pairing, but doing so in a secure way is quite difficult. I suspect they'll eventually remove the requirement to pair devices using system configurator, if only because this removes the need to have chat assistance with pairing. That's costing them money to have a call center, and they want to avoid it I suspect.
If Apple knows that serial number 0x12345678 was sold to you, and that it is the component you want to install, then they have a guarantee that this part is authentic and should work properly.
So, Apple needs a way for you to pair a serial number, but also that the serial number you're pairing is authentic. I'm not sure they have the second piece today.
Sorry, I'm not buying it, this is Apple protecting their exclusive repair turf and nothing else.
If "Find My iPhone" (the anti-theft subsystem) is disabled, then the serial numbers for all the parts could be sent to an Apple database, and/or the components could have a "ready to be re-used" bit set that caused them to factory reset themselves if the phone they're plugged into changes (so any state on the re-used thing wouldn't somehow leak into the other phone).
I'm not sure how to define "phone they're plugged into" though. Whatever board has the NAND + security coprocessor on it, maybe?
A better solutions is to take the direction FairPhone has chosen and make the things that break user-serviceable and offer the parts for sale on Apples own website. If the issue is that phones are being stolen and sold for parts, just flood the market with cheap parts. The new iPhones are absolutely massive, so I'm not buying that you can't make them a bit thicker and allow a user to take them apart. How many people use their phone without a cover anyway?
If Apple is serious about being more environmentally friendly, then make a user serviceable phone. Not replacing your phone because fixing it is either impossible or impossibly expensive is going to have a much bigger impact than buying carbon credits for people who charge their watch. My best guess is that Apple is so obsessed with just-in-time production and so hostile to the idea of stocking parts, that they can even see the potential benefits.
Implementing any functionality over two billion devices is non-trivial, especially when it requires aspects of transactional behavior (as this would).
> West Midlands police have issued a stark warning to iPod users: ditch the white headphones or pay the price.
https://www.theregister.com/2004/03/30/ipod_this_seasons_mus...
Apple could be very well front-running this and trying to prevent it before it becomes a problem. This is clearly a possibility.
I don’t know the safety situation of where you live but I literally had this conversation with friends two weeks ago where we loved the idea that the iPhone is a better purchase because it’s less prone to theft (because of the reasons GP mentioned).
If you've lived in certain places, you'd know this isn't a solution at all.
Thieves will start holding people at gunpoint forcing you to unpair it all while they wait.
It wasn't just the manufacturers who were pretty pissed at that. Minnesota passed a law requiring smartphones to have a kill switch that would allow the owner to remotely render the phone inoperable [1]. Then California did, with the California law also making kill switch support be turned on by default. Those laws have been in effect since mid 2015 and were quickly followed by a huge drop in smartphone thefts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_kill_switch
It's already awful to lose your phone, but even more so when you're at a multi-day event you paid hundreds to attend.
https://www.wftv.com/news/local/lost-your-cell-edc-backpack-...
This would be way less valueble to do if the companies just sold the parts are reasonable prices.
The extreme ways fixers have to go to to source parts for legitimate repairs concerns is insane.
The entire reason there even is a whole ecosystem of people picking apart phones in Shenzen is because it's so darn difficult to source it any other way!
However, this is probably fraught with problems that Apple doesn't want to deal with. Users will want to know if someone tried to pair their parts and they'll be hit with a large number of subpoenas daily from people who want to know which repair shops had their stolen phones.
"Oh you're trying to replace your phone screen with one from a stolen item. Please provide your contact details so we can pass that on to the police."
Doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. ;)
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-65105199
If this were a real issue, then I as the device owner should be able to toggle this on and off as needed. But that hits deeper, since this is a device that's being sold as "purchase" when I don't have real control - Apple does.
At best, this is a rental being mis-advertised as a purchase.
Unfortunately, I don't get paid by anyone except my employer lol. 16k HN and 160k Reddit karma points in about a decade isn't exactly influencer-worthy.
> If this were a real issue, then I as the device owner should be able to toggle this on and off as needed.
Phone theft is a real issue, even in places not suffering from open street markets with people fencing stolen shit, like London [1].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-65105199
Absolutely not. The cases for repairs vastly outnumber the cases for theft to a degree it isn't comparable in the slightest. This should be the basis for any honest discussion.
Not putting that in perspective cannot lead to sensible considerations.
Another solution would be to have a database of parts, and a repair using a stolen part wouldn't work.
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"iPhone's have become too mainstream to steal, I rather get a crappy phone nobody wants“ – nobody said.
So the theory is that, once thieves will see you're carrying an Iphone, they won't bother taking it. But why? You're already being mugged, everything that's even remotely valuable will be taken. Why would they let their victims go, just because their valuables are more difficult to flip? "Give me all your valuables - oh wait, that's an iphone, nvm my bad you're free to go" is that the idea here?
And on being less of a target for getting robbed in the first place - you're carrying an expensive af iphone, chances are you can afford to carry a lot of other expensive valuables too. If you're worried about getting robbed, start with not carrying a device that's more expensive than a fridge.
My condolences to everyone who actually had to survive through a robbery. But I doubt it could've been avoided just because your Iphone was currently difficult to sell. People can get robbed regardless of their perceived wealth, it's a happen-stance crime.
In Brazil I've heard stories of muggers holding up e.g. a bus and not bothering to get iPhones. This was a while ago, before the trade routes to get stolen phones across the world for disassembly and parts resale were as developed as they are today.
The anti-theft measure here makes it not profitable, or much harder to profit, from taking a phone because you can't resell it or strip the valuable parts. I had a friend get pick pocketed in spain, and the next day the phone was several countries away.
Just because people can get mugged regardless of perceived wealth doesn't mean that we don't try to reduce the risk.
Pickpocketers will fish anything that is in your pocket and in crowded public transport immediately pass to other partner in crime.
Same with thefts on scooter that rob woman with bags - they don't check if it's prada bag or if has any valuables inside.
Same with thefts that can even break your car window to get some bag that they see is inside but in the end has only groceries.
It actually is typically a grab and run in a crowd.
We know making smartphones harder to flip deters this because in 2015 when it become mandatory for smartphones to require a remote kill switch the owner could use to kill a stolen phone the theft rate for such phones dropped significantly.
That's your mistake right there, the challenge to steal isn't identical for different things, and also depends on the things.
For examle, there are plenty of cases where the thiefs snatch the phone from your hand (even while you're still talking), so making resale value low helps here
> you're carrying an expensive af iphone, chances are you can afford
That's the second easy mistake - the "chances" can be low, so the fact that you hypotheticall can afford doesn't help the actual criminal much (if you're jogging with a phone chances that you carry much valuable besides the phone is very low).
A lot of phone thefts are quick pickpocketing/snatch-and-run, or snatch-off-a table, not some Hollywood "stick-em-up, give me everything you have" type of situation.
People target expensive phones, period.. but having fewer ways to turn those stolen phones into enough money to justify the risk means people will be less inclined to directly target them (especially when other brands' expensive flagship phones may be easier).
Similar concept in general physical security/theft deterrent, really.. put up a bigger challenge than others in your vicinity and you're less likely to be targeted.
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Criminals do not want your iPhone. It is an instant tracking device that even if they sold it in an hour would still lead the cops to where they sold it.
I was robbed at gunpoint in the late 2000s and even then the criminals did not want the phone. They did want everything else tho.
It’s anti consumer bullshit and absolutely nothing else.
It'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 :)
is this a loaded framing for the proposition that "you can't perform component-level repairs if you're presenting yourself as an apple authorized service center"? because the point of apple authorized service centers is you get the apple authorized service, not someone drilling and reflowing your board to replace components.
it's great that rossman can do this, but he's N=1, and apple can't make their entire network out of rossmans. I think it's pretty obvious why they have to enforce minimum standards and standardized repair protocols in an authorized service program.
this is the "rossman doesn't like any repair solution in which rossman doesn't get paid" thing in action. component-level repair isn't the only kind of repair, it's just the one that results in rossman getting paid the most.
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.
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.
For everyone else, including myself, please continue to make it annoying for thieves to target iPhones.
They do. Have you been living under a rock?
https://www.selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home
And there’s no way for Apples policy to fuel theft when the stolen phone and parts from that phone can’t be used for anything. You might have had a point a few years ago when they neither sold parts nor did the pairing stuff.
I think they’re moving in the right direction. But like many here have pointed out they should allow you to unpair parts in a phone you own.
There are comments here from people who have been robbed at gunpoint and forced to unlock their phone and disconnect it from iCloud. I think Apple could solve it by making it a 24 hour process that can be reversed. But that just illustrates that it’s actually a hard problem to solve properly.
I don’t care at all about 3rd party parts. I’ve been burned too many times. It’s not environmentally friendly if you buy a brand new shitty part that you end up discarding along with the phone a few months later because the part was bad. Just force Apple to sell good quality genuine parts at a low price. The sum of the parts should equal the price of the phone. Yes that will be unprofitable for Apple, but governments can force it through regulation in the name of sustainability
If they stop selling parts then they should be forced to disable parts pairing for that model… then relying on 3rd party market as a fallback is an fallback
Either way, I don’t think Apple set out to make the iPhone unrepairable just because. There just weren’t letting repairability getting in the way of the design and aesthetic they want, and I think it’s fine for them to have this opinion. They couldn’t achieve both so they biased towards design, and look to slowly iterate towards repairability compromising as little on design as possible.
Sounds like a sensible strategy.
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They did that. https://selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home
all of them had parts replaced, some of them multiple times
I'd much rather pay for theft insurance than have to pay 10x for parts replacement
Once such practice is started it will never stop. If it benefits Apple why would they wver stop it.
Thieves have existed since forever. There are many things which get stolen and don't integrate such protection and people live with that. No tech things like gold bars, gold rings with diamonds. Some people simply look after their stuff. And it is possible to buy insurance, tracking devices, lock boxes and other services to help.
Apple has already created a pretty good deterrent to prevent iPhone theft - the Find My iPhone system. It’s better because it’s actually useful to the user and works even if you turn the phone off. The way I see it there’s absolutely no need to serialize the parts as an additional measure to prevent theft (given also what I said in the first paragraph)
It doesn't matter. The market will dictate behaviour. As soon as the value of iPhone parts drops at the end of the chain (Shenzhen et. al) this will propagate all the way up to the street criminals.
Perhaps they will not discriminate by iPhone submodel (will not matter after a while of the serialisation policy), but they will (and do) discriminate by brand.
Much smartphone theft includes robbers grabbing the phone out of unsuspecting victims' hands, forcing them to surrender it at gunpoint, or pickpocketing it.
He corroborates your point regarding not discriminating the phone he stole, to be fair.
But your point is valid, and I can understand why you hold that opinion.
I take it you’ve never been to an impoverished area? Holding an iphone paints a massive target on your back.
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And the best thing…it was shipped with Linux and it reacted “Oh. Should I turn on scaling?” :)
Probably not was Lenovo intended but in the end both sides are happy.
I bought a cheap desktop in the meantime, which still works fine, ten years later.
When the laptop came back, Lenovo diagnosed it "no fault found", and didn't replace the faulty cable. Not only was the display still intermittent (due to the bad cable), but their technician removed and then improperly installed the insulator for the backlight's high-voltage transformer, so it was painful and unsafe to touch the laptop if the display was on.
Compare this to Apple, where I drive into any big city, hand them the broken shiny thing, a bag of money containing about 10% its retail price, and it Just Works when they hand it back to me (almost always on the same day).
Maybe Lenovo can repair their own stuff these days? I haven't observed this anywhere I've worked since.
(My evidence that they can't fix their stuff is that there is usually a pile of broken Lenovos in the back of the IT office.)
I had a similar experience with sending an X1 Carbon to Lenovo’s repair center: “No problem found”.
When I called to complain, I was told they recommended on site service over sending machines in. The repair tech was prompt, pleasant, and skilled. The machine was fixed in 30 minutes.
In my experience that is a low value. It has always been repair this one, or buy current model for 20% more than repair cost.
...or, if you bought AppleCare and it's still within that time frame and not an egregiously obvious user error situation, no (additional) money at all.
So, when I read your comment about "That is one of the many reasons why (we) use ThinkPads." I think people need to be reminded about Lenovo's (POST IBM SALE) controversies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in...
I replaced the battery in an iPhone 5 earlier this year and it'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't likely to be recycled into new devices: they'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.
It's measures like pairing that make me question whether Apple'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?
Maybe the NSA can do it? But I suspect they could more easily hack phones in software.
I don't want to have ownership of devices I pay money for, because if I don't own anything, nobody can steal it from me.
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