This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair.
The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware, not the traces on the PCB.
About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way.
Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID, etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might need repair.
It's not really useful for most repairs. These PCBs are very dense. The traces and even vias are buried below the surface. At best it might give them some hints about where to probe if they've never worked on that phone model before, but in a practical sense they're not going to be doing many repairs based on the schematics.
The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.
> This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair. The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module".
I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.
I mean, even the firmware binaries would be a game changer. But really, it'd be the appropriate tool chain to re-sign a replacement chip so that the overall device doesn't reject it. Provided there isn't some kind of mutual key exchange that gets fused out upon factory programming.
I'm not a repair tech, but I do enjoy watching them work and I suspect they'd strongly disagree with you. It is always useful to know part numbers and how they are connected with each other even of the components are themselves "black boxes".
In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy.
At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.
Eh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty. You just replace the PCB or tell the customer to buy a new phone.
> it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
Schematics are extremely valuable!
Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
> It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
None of this is true.
Competitors save no R&D at all because these chips are custom to Apple.
The schematic doesn't show routing of the PCB. It shows logical connections between components. The routing is not represented.
Decoupling capacitor placement is also chip specific so it does not translate to other vendors. At this level of PCB design the board is simulated in very expensive software to determine how the power distribution network performs.
> but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
Not in the slightest. This shows logical connections between Apple specific parts. There are no portable industry secrets hidden in this document.
I'm sorry but no. Unless you are producing a 1930s radio these sorts of schematics are next to worthless. There's nothing super clever about PCB routing or resistor placement and it is completely dependent on the chips used (which are increasingly including the actual resistors and capacitors internal to the chip).
Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs an AMD motherboard schematic.
You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB design. But that's just not how hardware works.
The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going into the design of their M series chips and their software/firmware.
It is valid to say they do not have the majority of trade-secrets in the schematics.
However having high quality documentation that is easily accessible is always the first step, and if there are information there that are important it is _much_ more likely it will be known.
It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.
It's interesting seeing the sheer number of tiny inductors and capacitors required to keep internal RF noise down. It's amazing that they can cram all those tiny discrites in there.
I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court, and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not have a right to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them. The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any administration, and there's no way that the Supreme Court would cede the idea that the government has an absolute obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a tort.
> I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires.
Statute of Limitations is about how long you have to file the case, by no means is it a deadline by which you must fully prove damages and have no opportunity to continue your case after it passes.
It's just very hard to sue a government agency. The FCC, as a federal agency, is subject primarily to lawsuits that challenge its rulemaking, implementation, or enforcement actions. This falls outside that scope.
Given how friendly Tim Cook is to Trump, and how being friendly to Trump gets you special carveouts/exemptions, I tend to think they are not afraid of retaliatory tariffs. But, in this day and age you really never know, so definitely a possibility.
There must be some sort of legal agreement governing the data sharing. NDAs tend to have something like:
> The parties acknowledge that monetary damages may not be a sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure or use of Confidential Information [...list ways Apple is allowed to nail disclosing partner...]
The law is that you have to submit your schematics to the FCC if you want to sell a device with wireless communications so the FCC can validate that you aren't improperly using the wireless spectrum.
The US might be corporate captured but it's not THAT corporate captured. The US government still has a bigger stick than apple does.
Hot take: Publicly available schematics, part lists and utilities for service and maintenance should be part of FCC certification requirements, at least for mass-market goods like phones and TVs.
For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even offer.
But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.
I’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is).
However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private.
The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients.
Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer.
Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
I share this sentiment for the most part. The only nuance is we probably shouldn't give away core technologies that are closely related to cutting-edge weapons, which would spark an arms race. Let's accelerate competition for everything else, though.
For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that has been salvaged from something and try that.
Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.
I've seen a whole lot of videos of laptop repairs where the only problem was a bad capacitor, and replacing the capacitor removed the short and fixed the laptop.
> It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density.
There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
I would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a certain market share. It might be too much for smaller companies and reduces innovation and competition.
Hotter take: consumer devices should always have publically available schematics.
It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese companies will have to publish their schematics too.
Schematics cannot be copyrighted and are extremely useful from R&D point of view. Competition can absolutely copy it verbatim with no consequences. Only thing that can somewhat be copyrighted is exact layout (the same way a photograph would be copyrighted), but that is tenuous.
For complex products that is maybe no big deal, but for smaller businesses, having all details laid out is a gift for cloners to get a cheaper device to the market based on original designs - when it would be not feasible otherwise to reverse engineer it.
Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic.
However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk.
In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
Yeah, that's why I specified mass-market products as a target for such a regulation. The big guns certainly don't have anything that cloners could want to use, their "secret sauce" is in the display technology (for TVs) and their userspace applications (for phones) and neither would be exposed by an extensive right-to-repair legislation.
Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
One, what you can learn from this is what good production documentation looks like, more than how to hook up Apple's SoCs, which you don't really need to know. If you get used to that sort of detailed parts specifications on your schematics, you'll miss them most places. I also particularly like how they call out the i2c addresses of the chips with i2c interfaces.
Two, take a look at the system specification and block diagram also.
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The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware, not the traces on the PCB.
About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way.
Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.
I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.
But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them.
A trace on PCB is much more important. Boardview is a must to do board repair.
In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy.
At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.
It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
Schematics are extremely valuable!
Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
None of this is true.
Competitors save no R&D at all because these chips are custom to Apple.
The schematic doesn't show routing of the PCB. It shows logical connections between components. The routing is not represented.
Decoupling capacitor placement is also chip specific so it does not translate to other vendors. At this level of PCB design the board is simulated in very expensive software to determine how the power distribution network performs.
> but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
Not in the slightest. This shows logical connections between Apple specific parts. There are no portable industry secrets hidden in this document.
Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs an AMD motherboard schematic.
You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB design. But that's just not how hardware works.
The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going into the design of their M series chips and their software/firmware.
However having high quality documentation that is easily accessible is always the first step, and if there are information there that are important it is _much_ more likely it will be known.
It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.
But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them.
If anyone is curious
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Very nice to see these out in the open though. Saves some work. Even if it is the 16e.
I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court, and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not have a right to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them. The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any administration, and there's no way that the Supreme Court would cede the idea that the government has an absolute obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a tort.
Statute of Limitations is about how long you have to file the case, by no means is it a deadline by which you must fully prove damages and have no opportunity to continue your case after it passes.
Examples of this happening in the past?
Dead Comment
Apple fears the tariffs.
> The parties acknowledge that monetary damages may not be a sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure or use of Confidential Information [...list ways Apple is allowed to nail disclosing partner...]
The law is that you have to submit your schematics to the FCC if you want to sell a device with wireless communications so the FCC can validate that you aren't improperly using the wireless spectrum.
The US might be corporate captured but it's not THAT corporate captured. The US government still has a bigger stick than apple does.
For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even offer.
But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.
However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private.
The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients.
Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer.
Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.
There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese companies will have to publish their schematics too.
Schematics are absolutely copyrighted.
Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic.
However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk.
In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
Two, take a look at the system specification and block diagram also.