this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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It's the practice of preventing you from even using genuine parts. If you buy two identical iPhones, you can't even use parts from one to repair the other. The one phone won't accept the genuine part from the other because it's not paired to that phone by the manufacturer's proprietary tool.
This stops theft significantly.
iPhone were one of the easiest devices to steal and sell. Even conventional anti theft measures wouldn't deter theft significantly. Because they are so popular and common stealing an iPhone just to sell parts would still be worthwhile. Making stolen iPhone parts worthless reduces incidence of theft significantly.
This is less of an issue for other manufacturers. They often have more models serving a small customer base, with significantly less retail value.
I don’t actually know the details of how Pairing or Find My iPhone works, but couldn’t they just have the parts individually report their position since they apparently already “know” which device they belong to?
They wouldn't know their location or have a means of sending that location. This would require every subsystem to have a gps antenna, radio and battery. It would be expensive, heavy and wasteful.
I mean when they’re on a working device. The device detects that the part is not original and uses the usual system to send the position as if it was the entire iPhone. Is that not feasible?
That's a good approach for a single device. But for millions it's not as good. Apples current approach significantly reduces theft and the industry around theft of their phones.
Why would it not be good? Doesn’t Find my iPhone already work with the whole network?
There would be an excuse that your using your friends components to fix the phone. But they didn't deregister it. It would be enough to create a viable business.
Repairers could use stolen parts and the owner wouldn't know until apple locked their device.
It can be stopped by controlling the internet traffic to the device. Various methods, even simple DNS systems. Especially in developing economy organised crime can get cooperation with phone networks to do this.
For organised crime this problems can be worked out. But it very difficult to workaround a whitelist of only one part.
Other manufacturers don't have the same issue as their phones don't last as long. Nor do they have as high a resale value. Old iPhones still sell well 5+ years after release.
Google will give you big discounts for trading in iPhones that were cheaper than pixels when released when they won't offer you anything but recycling for an equivalent year pixel. All because the iPhone resale value remains so high.
Obviously you’d ask your friends to deregister the part before giving it to you.
And if they already have methods to control internet traffic and prevent the devices from pinging their location why wouldn’t they directly sell the entire phone?
Because you could, you could argue you forgot. It's a way to get around it. It's easier if apple controls who fixes phones.
It's easier to block the part checking for individual parts than the entire os. You would still have people with bricked phones once they got home and the faulty part phones home.
If apple didn't do this their phones would be stolen at a very high rate. Especially from tourists. The phone would also get a reputation for being stolen. Or stopped working once you got home from the repair store.
Apple sells the convince of a device that works reliably. This makes it of very high value. Especially to those that don't want to worry about their tech. So apples repair methods keep this value. If they changed their phones would be less valuable to most consumers. If this wasn't the case then fair phone would outsell iPhones.
The phones are still repairable, but it's restricted to apple and those apple have authorised to do it. The solution is to make repairs cheaper, not make interchangeable parts. It doesn't work on the scale apple operates, for devices of significant value that can be pick pocketed and shipped to another country.
I'd rather stop the company from stealing from me in unpreventable ways than the random petty thief who I can beat senseless.
I'd rather have an easily repairable phone than a supposed "deterrent" for which workarounds are eventually found.
Yeah, but I've never had a phone stolen, but I've broken a whole bunch of them.