Does the iPhone still display warnings about "genuineness" of replacement parts, even if they're the original/official Apple parts?
That kind of ruins the whole idea of "officially letting people repair their stuff" as if I replace my own battery, I can no longer trust other parts won't be switched by someone else at a later point, as I'll see the same warning regardless...
> Compared to prior iPhone models, the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus are easier to repair. Apple is using an electric battery removal process, and the steps for accessing a battery to replace it are outlined in a separate support document <https://support.apple.com/en-us/120642>. Per Apple's instructions, a 9-volt battery and 9-volt battery clips can be applied to the iPhone 16 battery to remove the adhesive that holds it in place.
Removing a battery attached with previous type of adhesive is torture - the elastic tab frequently tears off, and I ended up a few times having to bend the old battery a lot, to get it out (very unsafe, it starts heating).
So, to me, this is a huge progress. Plus, don’t you normally have 9v battery and some connectors for it already?
I remember dropping my treo 650 while hiking. The back cover came off, the battery went flying and worst of all - my memory card was dislodged and disappeared in the woods.
In contrast, the Treo 650 battery was considerably smaller in terms of capacity and significantly bigger in terms of physical size, leading to a bulkier device that had a significantly lower resolution, colour and physically sized screen. Lets not pretend the state of the art has not moved on.
The last few are just for your safety and can obviously be skipped if you feel like being a cowboy. And to me, “zero tools” makes it sound like that’s your preferred approach. So why count them against one phone but not the other?
> almost like Apple is maliciously complying by overcomplicating the procedure
Sorry, which of a 9-volt battery, alcohol wipes, safety glasses or sand (and a container for it) screams inaccessible? (And everything there is technically optional. I doubt most Treo 650 users drained the battery before touching it, or bothered with a suction cup.)
Removing the back glass takes special tools, but I'll take that over having to replace my phone every time it gets wet.
Not this again :). Just taking a random example: the Samsung S5 was IPX67 rated (up to 1m for 30min), was thinner than an iPhone 16, and had a replaceable battery. Admittedly, it has fewer mAh, but it's also older battery technology and the volume of the phone case is slightly smaller (and probably has bigger electronics).
Is should be totally possible to make a good 2024 flagship with replaceable batteries, but we'd have to forgo the fancy glass back panels.
(Kidding. I did love mine and I did not protect it, and I'm sure it got rained on many times, but I don't know if I ever literally hosed water through it. :)
They only do it because they have to. Not because they are that consumer friendly. And now? Another arse move, were you have to pay for not that cheap special apple-tools.consumer milking at it's best.
This is great, and most of the comments here seem to either miss the days of the StarTAC _or_ would gladly enjoy a physically bigger device.
So, I can now change the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro _and_ reset its status in the Settings->Battery field, which is great. I already have all of the tools apart from the Apple specific ones, which to be fair are very useful for someone that does this everyday, I don't - so I can replace them with manual alternatives.
Apple did the good thing and y'all still act like children.
> This is great, and most of the comments here seem to either miss the days of the StarTAC _or_ would gladly enjoy a physically bigger device.
If HN had its way, iPhones would be made from through-hole components and 7400 logic. The battery would last all of approximately 13 minutes… so it would be not just possible, but actually necessary to swap the battery in seconds.
Ideally, the phone would be slightly unreliable (MTBF of no more than 200 hours) so that every user could experience the joy of troubleshooting the bad component and soldering in a replacement themselves.
Maybe Apple could even include a sacrificial capacitor in the power supply that is just slightly under-spec’d. That would also give users the opportunity to “soup up” their iPhones by installing a better capacitor in that one location.
It would be illegal to sell them without including (in the box with the phone) a 3000 page printed service manual containing not just schematics, but a detailed theory of operations and full source listing. Nobody would actually look that these, of course, but it’s the principle of costing the manufacturer money that matters.
Such a device would be not small. After all, you need to have room to work inside the engine bay^H^H iPhone and you don’t want the components packed in too tight to support easy maintenance. That space would also promote airflow from the three fans necessary to cool all those 7400 ICs.
This is also true of early smartphones. They were made to have easily replaceable batteries, and I assume you could buy those batteries too.
But that turned out to be irrelevant because of the replacement schedule. It seems clear that the frequency with which people replace their phones is what drove the decisions to make maintaining them difficult. If nobody ever needs to maintain the phone, why would you put any effort into helping them hypothetically do so?
The analog of Moore's Law for smartphones is already dying and there was a lot of news coverage a while ago of how people seem to be keeping their phones. That may drive the development of phones that can last longer than two years.
Something that every PocketPC user rapidly learned to be adept at because without the boosted Chinese batteries the thing didn't last that long. Amazing for the time, but looking back, what a primitive device. And you had to pay for OS upgrades!
The cost of the tools required for device repair and the cost of genuine components make self repair almost as expensive as getting a repair from an Apple retail location or an Apple Authorized Service Provider
Malicious compliance accomplished.
Apple's instructions for all of the battery repairs include expensive equipment like an iPhone battery press to put a replacement battery back in place.
It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.
Apple is known for their... interesting attitude towards repair, even in the previous manuals that have leaked. It somewhat reminds me of German automotive engineering --- lots of special tools and fixtures when a simpler and more conventional process would work just as well.
In just about any other situation in life, you will have to make some investment in tools with the understanding that you can use them multiple times.
For example, I bought the iFixit repair kit nearly a decade ago and I have used it for any minor work for all that time. $80 spent once and I’ve never once needed to fish for some strange bit or tool no matter what device I’ve opened. In fact, the iFixit kit will still be sufficient for this entire repair plus the 9 volt battery of course.
Unless you’re saying all these are one time use tools but I didn’t see that from the parts lists.
Obviously it is bullshit to suggest that a consumer would buy these tools. But it is also bullshit to suggest that you actually "need" a 'battery press' just because it is on the parts list.
The average phone repair shop will know how to loosen some battery adhesive very well with various techniques. So I don't think they will be discouraged by the Apple documentation.
Malicious compliance? Seems like it, a little bit. Still useful though.
The Apple provided tools are the ones used at first party Apple stores to perform authorized repairs. At some point, some bean counter tabulated the cost of building X000 machines and shipping them across the globe for a marginal increase in repair quality and deemed it a worthy tradeoff.
If you want to repair phones to the equivalent quality of Apple stores, Apple makes it possible via their "overengineered" machines. There's nothing in Apple's ToS that forces you to make repairs this way, you're welcome to buy the Apple genuine part and use your own heat mats and press and whatever and knowingly make that tradeoff.
I was holding out for the EU DMA third party app store, but it's clear that Apple is not on a good trajectory. The fact that they slept on Siri for so long only to then finally add "Open"AI to it with limited availability is, but another dot in the pattern.
When MacOS was still called OSX and developers were the Macbooks greatest contributors and cheerleaders, things looked a lot different. A lot of the current framework components were copied from community components back then.
I'll miss the closed loop payment card support from iOS, but for everything else, I'll just say good riddance ...
> I'll miss the closed loop payment card support from iOS
I was definitely hurting for a while for lack of this (and iMessage) on Windows. While I haven’t gotten over iMessage (and use a KVM with my iPad to resolve that), the additional friction for payments has actually been a boon for my bank account.
The more friction we feel with payments, the fewer payments we make. Cash is higher friction than cards. Manual card input is higher friction than password manager autocomplete. Autocomplete is higher friction than apple pay. I haven’t found anything lower friction than apple pay.
By switching back to password manager autocomplete (which is unreliable at best), I’ve found my spending has gone down, because the cost of friction in payment is higher than the value of the item.
(I clearly also have too much disposable income, but that’s a whole other tangent)
If you think something like German automotive engineering or iPhone production can be substitute by a “simpler and more convenientional process”, you probably don’t understand how it works. These things have evolved and have been optimized to within parts of a percentage; almost everything is there for a good, time tested reason. (Except for ultra-novel stuff that has been around for a year or two - there they may pay with process inefficiencies for novelty)
don’t glorify german automakers too much. they’re 5-10 years behind Tesla when it comes to manufacturing optimization, sw/hw integration, BEV efficiency, etc.
The cost of the tools required to cut my lawn is far more than hiring someone to cut it.
Likewise for almost every home or car repair.
The whole point is that the tools are largely a once off purchase and repairing your phone is something you might do throughout your life. Therefore the initial costs should be spread over a longer period.
Do you expect your iPhone 16 battery press tool to still be useful in 2 phone generations ? How many times do you see yourself replacing the iPhone 16's battery ?
If Apple was also promising to keep the same process for the next 7 years I'd see a point to this, but this of course not the case.
You are both wrong and contradicting yourself. If it isn't necessary, then complaining about the tools is moot since as you wrote yourself, it's not necessary.
But, if you design a portable consumer device and you know to what tolerance you need a battery to be adhered to the case to make it not come loose, you know what pressure, movement, adhesive etc. are needed to make that happen for the form factor the battery is going to fit in. You know who doesn't know that? Pretty much everyone who isn't an engineer, and for most people who are an engineer, they might know that these are parameters that exist, but they aren't going to know every variation for every device ever produced. So now that nonsense about it being "clearly" is not so clear anymore.
Engineering things to be safe and reliable is pretty difficult. Add in batteries and it's suddenly one or more orders of magnitudes more difficult. That much is definitely clear, because when you cut corners, just guess or think to yourself "it is just a battery and some adhesive, how hard can this be" you get phones self-igniting on airplanes.
If we take your full line as a quote:
> It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.
Do you really think there are a bunch of people using manual hand tools mass producing every aspect of a phone? Sure, there might be a bunch of steps where manual labour was effective and efficient, but it's not like you show up at the factory with your suitcase of tools and go to work at your desk.
What they reproduced is the parameters. And that is exactly what you want. A repaired product should be as close to a freshly manufactured product as possible if you're going to be liable for it.
> What they reproduced is the parameters. And that is exactly what you want. A repaired product should be as close to a freshly manufactured product as possible if you're going to be liable for it.
This has some sense to it, mostly from the liability point of view, but this
> if you design a portable consumer device and you know to what tolerance you need a battery to be adhered to the case to make it not come loose, you know what pressure, movement, adhesive etc. are needed to make that happen for the form factor the battery is going to fit in.
as someone who works in this field, this is overstating the matter quite a bit. The tolerances for something like pressure in this instance are going to be wide enough that "press firmly" would suffice in a rework document. It's made to be very simple on purpose for manufacturing, and a lot of slop is built in so that we're not in this situation where microns or milli-newtons matter and cause a battery fire somewhere down the line. The fixtures are primarily for efficiency gains, and in that sense I would agree with the gp that press fixtures are not practically necessary in an at-home version of this process.
Sorry, but have you ever repaired anything? The number of things the price and complexity of a phone, that can be repaired for less than the replacement cost, when you include tools, is…very small.
I've repaired older Androids. The only tools I needed were a set of screwdrivers, which I already had. The fact that Apple is trying to make it seem like you need special tools only for their devices is the problem.
I also repair my white goods, black goods, car, HVAC, etc. Most of those don't require special tools either.
I was gonna say, iPhones are way more reliable than German cars, it’s not a fair comparison! Then I thought about their respective depreciation curves…
I wonder if aliens exist, what technology they have for basics like transportation. Do they just load themselves into a cannon and shoot them to the destination? Just completely different ways of doing everything.
Readit News
That kind of ruins the whole idea of "officially letting people repair their stuff" as if I replace my own battery, I can no longer trust other parts won't be switched by someone else at a later point, as I'll see the same warning regardless...
"Easier" is relative I guess:
Here’s every tool you’ll need to replace the iPhone 16’s battery https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/20/heres-every-tool-youll-need-t...
* 9-volt battery
* 9-volt battery clips (923-10726)
* Battery press (923-02657)
* Ethanol wipes or isopropyl alcohol (IPA) wipes
* Nylon probe (black stick) (922-5065) or suction cup
* Safety glasses with side shields
* Sand
* Sand container
By contrast, the Treo 650 battery replacement took a few seconds and zero tools.
So, to me, this is a huge progress. Plus, don’t you normally have 9v battery and some connectors for it already?
Batteries don't need to be glued on in the first place.
Torque driver (blue, 0.65 kgf cm) (923-0448)
Torque driver (green, 0.45 kgf cm) (923-00105)
Security bit (923-0247)
Micro stix bit (923-01290)
Nylon probe (black stick) (922-5065)
ESD-safe tweezers
Adhesive removal tool (923-09176)
Adhesive cutter (923-01092)
Ethanol wipes or isopropyl alcohol (IPA) wipes
6.1-inch repair tray (923-10712)
Camera cap (923-10716)
Display press (661-08916)
Cut-resistant gloves. Gloves may vary by region.
Heat-resistant gloves. Gloves may vary by region.
Safety glasses with side shields
https://support.apple.com/en-us/120638
And the rest is just for safety.
But I guess Apple caters to the people who think getting grease in their hands is beyond them.
CDMA Network Update https://www.verizon.com/prepaid/cdma-network-update/
> Starting Dec 31,2022 we no longer support 3G/4G Non-VoLTE. To keep your service active, upgrade your phone.
Sorry, which of a 9-volt battery, alcohol wipes, safety glasses or sand (and a container for it) screams inaccessible? (And everything there is technically optional. I doubt most Treo 650 users drained the battery before touching it, or bothered with a suction cup.)
Removing the back glass takes special tools, but I'll take that over having to replace my phone every time it gets wet.
Is should be totally possible to make a good 2024 flagship with replaceable batteries, but we'd have to forgo the fancy glass back panels.
When they remove the battery cover -- "oh, waterproofing"
When they glue the battery amd remove all screws -- "oh, waterproofing"
When they eventually require an approved persons blood sample to perform repair, will I also hear the "oh, waterproofing" thing?
(Kidding. I did love mine and I did not protect it, and I'm sure it got rained on many times, but I don't know if I ever literally hosed water through it. :)
Older devices could generally handle splashes, e.g being used in light rain. Water damage seemed far less likely than drop damage.
You can still do all the same shit with iFixit tools. These are just the genuine tools aimed at repair shops.
This is a state of the art micro computer. Of course it will require tools to handle correctly.
And removable batteries require far more internal space which is why they fell out of favour.
No they don't. Less than 1% extra volume.
Nobody is going and buying the Apple 9v battery or "Apple sand"
https://cdsassets.apple.com/live/SZLF0YNV/images/tp/bucket_3...
https://xdaforums.com/t/official-google-repair-guides-for-va...
So, I can now change the battery on my iPhone 12 Pro _and_ reset its status in the Settings->Battery field, which is great. I already have all of the tools apart from the Apple specific ones, which to be fair are very useful for someone that does this everyday, I don't - so I can replace them with manual alternatives.
Apple did the good thing and y'all still act like children.
If HN had its way, iPhones would be made from through-hole components and 7400 logic. The battery would last all of approximately 13 minutes… so it would be not just possible, but actually necessary to swap the battery in seconds.
Ideally, the phone would be slightly unreliable (MTBF of no more than 200 hours) so that every user could experience the joy of troubleshooting the bad component and soldering in a replacement themselves.
Maybe Apple could even include a sacrificial capacitor in the power supply that is just slightly under-spec’d. That would also give users the opportunity to “soup up” their iPhones by installing a better capacitor in that one location.
It would be illegal to sell them without including (in the box with the phone) a 3000 page printed service manual containing not just schematics, but a detailed theory of operations and full source listing. Nobody would actually look that these, of course, but it’s the principle of costing the manufacturer money that matters.
Such a device would be not small. After all, you need to have room to work inside the engine bay^H^H iPhone and you don’t want the components packed in too tight to support easy maintenance. That space would also promote airflow from the three fans necessary to cool all those 7400 ICs.
But that turned out to be irrelevant because of the replacement schedule. It seems clear that the frequency with which people replace their phones is what drove the decisions to make maintaining them difficult. If nobody ever needs to maintain the phone, why would you put any effort into helping them hypothetically do so?
The analog of Moore's Law for smartphones is already dying and there was a lot of news coverage a while ago of how people seem to be keeping their phones. That may drive the development of phones that can last longer than two years.
Malicious compliance accomplished.
Apple's instructions for all of the battery repairs include expensive equipment like an iPhone battery press to put a replacement battery back in place.
It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.
Apple is known for their... interesting attitude towards repair, even in the previous manuals that have leaked. It somewhat reminds me of German automotive engineering --- lots of special tools and fixtures when a simpler and more conventional process would work just as well.
For example, I bought the iFixit repair kit nearly a decade ago and I have used it for any minor work for all that time. $80 spent once and I’ve never once needed to fish for some strange bit or tool no matter what device I’ve opened. In fact, the iFixit kit will still be sufficient for this entire repair plus the 9 volt battery of course.
Unless you’re saying all these are one time use tools but I didn’t see that from the parts lists.
What I think the parent is referring to is this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120983
Obviously it is bullshit to suggest that a consumer would buy these tools. But it is also bullshit to suggest that you actually "need" a 'battery press' just because it is on the parts list.
The average phone repair shop will know how to loosen some battery adhesive very well with various techniques. So I don't think they will be discouraged by the Apple documentation.
Malicious compliance? Seems like it, a little bit. Still useful though.
If you want to repair phones to the equivalent quality of Apple stores, Apple makes it possible via their "overengineered" machines. There's nothing in Apple's ToS that forces you to make repairs this way, you're welcome to buy the Apple genuine part and use your own heat mats and press and whatever and knowingly make that tradeoff.
When MacOS was still called OSX and developers were the Macbooks greatest contributors and cheerleaders, things looked a lot different. A lot of the current framework components were copied from community components back then.
I'll miss the closed loop payment card support from iOS, but for everything else, I'll just say good riddance ...
I was definitely hurting for a while for lack of this (and iMessage) on Windows. While I haven’t gotten over iMessage (and use a KVM with my iPad to resolve that), the additional friction for payments has actually been a boon for my bank account.
The more friction we feel with payments, the fewer payments we make. Cash is higher friction than cards. Manual card input is higher friction than password manager autocomplete. Autocomplete is higher friction than apple pay. I haven’t found anything lower friction than apple pay.
By switching back to password manager autocomplete (which is unreliable at best), I’ve found my spending has gone down, because the cost of friction in payment is higher than the value of the item.
(I clearly also have too much disposable income, but that’s a whole other tangent)
Likewise for almost every home or car repair.
The whole point is that the tools are largely a once off purchase and repairing your phone is something you might do throughout your life. Therefore the initial costs should be spread over a longer period.
If Apple was also promising to keep the same process for the next 7 years I'd see a point to this, but this of course not the case.
You are both wrong and contradicting yourself. If it isn't necessary, then complaining about the tools is moot since as you wrote yourself, it's not necessary.
But, if you design a portable consumer device and you know to what tolerance you need a battery to be adhered to the case to make it not come loose, you know what pressure, movement, adhesive etc. are needed to make that happen for the form factor the battery is going to fit in. You know who doesn't know that? Pretty much everyone who isn't an engineer, and for most people who are an engineer, they might know that these are parameters that exist, but they aren't going to know every variation for every device ever produced. So now that nonsense about it being "clearly" is not so clear anymore.
Engineering things to be safe and reliable is pretty difficult. Add in batteries and it's suddenly one or more orders of magnitudes more difficult. That much is definitely clear, because when you cut corners, just guess or think to yourself "it is just a battery and some adhesive, how hard can this be" you get phones self-igniting on airplanes.
If we take your full line as a quote:
> It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.
Do you really think there are a bunch of people using manual hand tools mass producing every aspect of a phone? Sure, there might be a bunch of steps where manual labour was effective and efficient, but it's not like you show up at the factory with your suitcase of tools and go to work at your desk.
What they reproduced is the parameters. And that is exactly what you want. A repaired product should be as close to a freshly manufactured product as possible if you're going to be liable for it.
This has some sense to it, mostly from the liability point of view, but this
> if you design a portable consumer device and you know to what tolerance you need a battery to be adhered to the case to make it not come loose, you know what pressure, movement, adhesive etc. are needed to make that happen for the form factor the battery is going to fit in.
as someone who works in this field, this is overstating the matter quite a bit. The tolerances for something like pressure in this instance are going to be wide enough that "press firmly" would suffice in a rework document. It's made to be very simple on purpose for manufacturing, and a lot of slop is built in so that we're not in this situation where microns or milli-newtons matter and cause a battery fire somewhere down the line. The fixtures are primarily for efficiency gains, and in that sense I would agree with the gp that press fixtures are not practically necessary in an at-home version of this process.
I also repair my white goods, black goods, car, HVAC, etc. Most of those don't require special tools either.
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Dead Comment
If they copy-pasted their production line processes the parts would cost less than $40 total.
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