[wfunction]

> Do you really think that Apple, who prides themselves on having outstanding customer satisfaction, would deliberately try to brick their customers phones through something this obvious?

Yes I do think that they would attempt to discourage unauthorized repairs in such a way for less-than-noble reasons.

If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?

[__jal]

A thought experiment: suppose you are in charge of handling repairs for a multinational fleet of hundreds of millions of devices.

One thing you'll probably do is triage: by looking at the numbers of devices that fail in various ways, you can optimize your parts channels, training, processes, etc. in various ways. This is business 101.

Now try to guess how many people have been experiencing this error. My guess is it is a pretty small percentage of several hundred million. I also guess that there are a number of other failure modes affecting similarly small groups of users. In a device as complex as the iPhone, with a population that large, there has to be.

But wait! Now the press is hammering you over one of those small-population failure modes. Everything else equal, you're an idiot if you don't handle that one first.

Of course, thought, this is Apple. So the reasonable, simple explanation makes no sense and instead Occam's Second Exception indicates that when Apple is involved, skullduggery and shenanigans are the only reasonable explanation.

[mmmBacon]

Triaging by data is just the first step. Once you decide it's an actual problem you have to be able to reproduce it. To confirm this is happening, you have to get production phones, then do an out-of-process rework, then do this for different OS versions, OS upgrade methods, iTunes version, etc... Reworking this sensor is not an easy task so you have to have someone do it for you and get their time, etc... It's actually a pretty big project to do this correctly.

[mmmBacon]

> Yes I do think that they would attempt to discourage unauthorized repairs in such a way for less-than-noble reasons.

Repairs are not really a revenue stream. Apple Care is a revenue stream but the incentive is to not repair. Since every repair logged against Apple Care is a cost, it doesn't make sense that Apple would want to do this themselves from a purely economic perspective.

I've been in HW all my working life. Any field return is expensive and resource intensive to handle and you cannot pass all those costs onto your customers. You do it to provide good service to your customers. You eat the repair cost as part of internal warranty cost which is built into the pricing of every unit sold.

What you are saying just doesn't make sense to me.

As a user I don't want any yahoo being able to replace my touch ID sensor. I have tons of sensitive information on my phone. I want that thing disabled if touch ID breaks or has been tampered with.

>If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?

How do you know that they didn't "bother to do anything" on this issue until someone ran an article?

[rasz_pl]

Precisely. Repairs are a cost. Turning people away because of pink dot, visible signs of 3rd party repair or Error 53 avoids that costs and provides opportunity for a new sale.

[ceejayoz]

> If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?

That hardly takes too much imagination. One possible explanation is that higher-ups in Apple read the news, but not necessarily every single "the Apple Store won't replace my broken phone" complaint.

[wfunction]

> That hardly takes too much imagination. One possible explanation is that higher-ups in Apple read the news, but not necessarily every single "the Apple Store won't replace my broken phone" complaint.

For a company that takes so much pride in supporting its customers, you'd think the stores would have been able to contact Apple internally to find out what the error even is before saying they won't fix it, right? Which would have led them to realize it was not meant to be running in production?

[ceejayoz]

It seems entirely probable to me that most of the Apple Store incidents for this went along the lines of "I got this repaired at a repair shop and now it doesn't work!" "Unfortunately, we can't fix an issue caused by an unauthorized repair. Go back to them." I certainly don't think I'd have dug much further if I worked retail.

[exw]

<<Yes I do think that they would attempt to discourage unauthorized repairs in such a way for less-than-noble reasons.>>

I have added some additional information to the parent comment (i.e., only bricked updates via iTunes, not OTA) that further undermine the theory that this was a deliberate change. I realize that you could still argue that the actual bug was that the OTA update did not brick the phones, but Occam's razor really starts applying...

<<If you think it was a mistake, then can you explain why Apple wasn't bothered to do anything until someone ran an article on it and publicized it?>>

I do agree with you that Apple has a long record of dragging their feet to issue fixes for pretty significant bugs, so it is possible that the press caused them the issue the patch faster.