[kemayo]

> By activating a dormant software lock on their newest iPhones, Apple is effectively announcing a drastic new policy: only Apple batteries can go in iPhones, and only they can install them.

I really dislike the phrasing attached to this story.

It's not a lock: a third party installed battery still works, the phone isn't refusing to start up until you go to an Apple Store and have an authentic Apple(tm) battery installed. Rather, it's a warning in the "battery health" section basically saying "we don't know if your battery is any good, you might need to get it replaced".

That said, I'd prefer a clearer phrasing of their error message. It looks like it's just triggering the generic "your battery may need service" warning, which is more of a scare tactic than I'd like. "You don't have a certified Apple battery" would be completely sufficient.

Given the existence of refurbishment scams, where substandard parts are put into old phones to make them look good briefly, I can understand where Apple is coming from on this point. Someone who buys a second-hand iPhone and finds the battery dies after a month isn't going to be very happy with iPhones.

[kuzehanka]

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair.

That message destroys the consumer's trust in 3rd party repair shops. It says battery health issue. Are sure you put in a real Apple battery? Did you even change my battery at all?

Outright locking the battery out would cause backlash and possible legal action. This 'technically works but will nag you forever unless you pay Apple to run a program to clear the message that they refuse to share with 3rd parties' solution is genius. Evil genius.

Imagine the car equivalent of this situation. Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible. There are laws that require carmakers to release repair manuals to 3rd party repairers and honour warranty after 3rd party repairs. Tech companies are shitting on their users because equivalent laws don't exist for electronic goods.

[0ld]

> Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible.

You wouldn't believe it, but that's almost exactly how it works with bmws since around 15 years. The unofficially replaced battery won't function properly until "registered /converted/(or even) programmed" [0] at the official bmw service. The difference is that the software to do that is pirated and thus available to the 3rd parties

[o] https://bimmerscan.com/bmw-battery-registration/

[kuzehanka]

3rd party repairers have the ability to do this for you because they have BMW-compatible programmers. Because BMW must release make that possible for them. By law.

It's also there for a reason: the charging system needs to be told that the battery was changed and what type of battery it was changed to. Otherwise it charges it the wrong way. Unlike Apple batteries, the car batteries are dumb and can't tell the car about themselves.

The warning light won't come on just because you replaced a battery. It'll come on a few days later if you replaced a battery and didn't tell the system about it so now the battery is performing poorly because it was being charged incorrectly.

3rd party manufacturers, by law, have access to the programming tools required to do this for you. Apple holds the equivalent of these programming tools away from everyone and aggressively sues anyone that manages to obtain them or reverse engineer them.

I guess a better analogy would have been '3rd party repair shops installs genuine BMW battery but is unable to register it because the tools to do so are held hostage'.

https://oppositelock.kinja.com/replacing-bmw-batteries-yes-i...

[neuralRiot]

There are 3rd party tools to register the battey not only pirated software, most automotive software now uses the same interface (j-2534 passthrough) so you pay to download the needed files for programming which is totally acceptable. Apple instead have a battery ransomware.

[systemtest]

> a permanent warning light on your dashboard

A better metaphor would be a service warning when you go into the iDrive system, to the "CAR" submenu, scroll to the maintenance icon, go into the submenu and then ask the system to list all possible issues. Then it would show up.

Also a 1/5th of the price is not entirely fair. The difference between Apple and 3rd party shops is half at most. And even that is not a fair comparison, because the non-BMW-authorised repair station will use an OEM-equivalent battery from VARTA or BOSCH. Your iPhone repair shop will use a random battery imported from AliExpress with no know history of it being a safe battery.

[yoz-y]

I am on the fence. On one side I would love if it were possible to repair your phone whenever wherever.

On the other hand, let me tell you a personal anecdote. After my wife’s iPhone got stolen we wanted to buy another one for cheaper. We chose to buy it from a big retailer in here. The phone was marked as renewed and under warranty. It cost a bit less as a refurb from Apple would.

When we got it it was immediately apparent that the screen was changed for a non first party one. The phone was thicker than original (a case would not fit) and the colors were shit.

No warnings were displayed on the phone. I have returned it immediately for refund.

Now, if somebody who does not know how an iPhone should look and behave it is quite possible that they would pay a lot of money for a subpar product and then tell about it to people around.

I think Apple should absolutely put in warning lights for any non genuine components or genuine components installed by non authorized repair shops.

But, the message here is off as it does not actually help to describe the problem.

[kuzehanka]

The phone knows that the battery is a genuine Apple component, because the battery cryptographically identifies as one. What it's detecting is that a genuine Apple battery was installed in the phone, but not by Apple.

It displays the warning to scare the user and make them mistrust the 3rd party repairer. The only way to make that warning go away is to use a secret-sauce Apple programming tool that they withhold from 3rd party repairers and sue anyone that manages to reverse engineer it.

They are not doing this to protect you. They're doing this to make you distrust 3rd party repairers, or to make you avoid the nag warning, and go to their overpriced store instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlvlgmjMi98

[esmi]

> The phone knows that the battery is a genuine Apple component, because the battery cryptographically identifies as one.

But that’s not the error. The error is the health is unknown.

To be a devil’s advocate: How do you know the health of this first party battery is good? For example, maybe it wasn’t stored properly.

[logfromblammo]

I'd probably take objective measurements of physical properties over a "profile new battery" charging cycle, and not solely rely on supply-chain QA personnel, protected by DRM nonsense.

My charger for rechargeable AA (LR6) batteries can do that, recondition batteries to eke out a few more cycles, and also tell me when a battery is finally gone beyond its powers to revive.

And my charger is not a $1000 device that utterly relies on the health of its battery to function, either.

What Apple is doing is slapping an opaque cover over the report screen until someone comes along that has a company-issued "remove report cover" pass. What if someone put alkaline batteries in there, instead of metal hydride? What if they put in AAA batteries instead of AA?

The charger can detect wrong chemistry types, like alkaline and NiCd, by objectively measuring the physical properties. And it can still charge AAAs. They just have a lower capacity. The battery subsystem in the phone could analyze a new battery and report its condition, but that would require Apple to admit to itself that a battery is a 3rd-party replaceable part that will require replacement some time over the projected lifespan of the device.

How do you know? You measure. High-tech batteries have some of that capability built-in, and high-tech devices with charging circuits connected to high-powered general computing processors can certainly run automated tests after their case-intrusion sensors and/or power-interrupt sensors detect events.

[kuzehanka]

> maybe it wasn’t stored properly.

Then it has a smaller capacity than a brand new battery should, but still larger than a heavily used battery. It's something the phone can report on, and android phones do. Apple can't guarantee your replacement battery was 'stored properly' either. All they can do is run their little programming tool to remove the warning regardless.

This scenario is completely outside the realm of 'new genuine Apple battery detected + no Apple warning reset = permanently harass the user with false warning'.

Let's be really clear here. The warning is 'unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine Apple battery'. Which is complete bullshit. The phone is perfectly aware that the battery is genuine because it carries a crypto signed identifier.

[esmi]

So if Apple rephrased this message to state, “unable to verify the health of this battery,” but still had the exact same system response, you would be happy?

[yoz-y]

I think the message could have been clearer. But to add to your point, wasn't there a case when car repair shops would rewind odometers on cars/engines to make them seem newer that they actually were?

[littlestymaar]

> Now, if somebody who does not know how an iPhone should look and behave

If you don't know exactly how an iPhone should look and are not annoyed by the thickness difference, how is it a problem ? You paid less for a slightly less good product that's good enough for you, and if the product is not good enough for you (like in your case) you returned it and good a refund. That sounds pretty good for me!

[yoz-y]

No. I paid slightly less for a very inferior product (non compatible with cases due to thickness, colors off by a large margin).

In this case I knew that I got a bad product and returned it, but it makes me wonder how many times I got some shoddy fake instead of the genuine thing (e.g.: because of Amazon stocking shenanigans). My reaction to bad products is usually to distrust the seller and the manufacturer brand.

This is also why brands fight fakes, if you can get a visually extremely similar object that is sold as product made by B, but it falls apart after a few months then there is a big chance that you won't buy B anymore even though their products are actually good.

Also in my case the problems were visible. If the problem was with a badly repaired internal component, the phone would have died, I would have brought it to Apple and they would refuse to repair it under warranty because it was voided by some random technician. Had the repair been done badly by an authorized repair shop, they would take the cost of re-repair or exchange on themselves.

[millstone]

Apple burying a message in the battery subsection of settings is "extreme lengths" and "by far the most effective"? God help us if they discover how to log to console.app.

[addicted]

How is it burying when it’s probably the first thing someone would look at after a battery replacement.

Also, I bet none of the Apple defenders were phrasing the location of the battery health meter as “burying” it when Apple released it as a response to their own battery fiasco (which they liead about for months, if not years, until they were proven to have lied).

[Shorel]

I am a cheap customer using the fifth battery in my very old Nexus 5.

What Apple says is exactly correct. Battery replacements never hold charge as well as the original battery (in my case no longer manufactured). And spare batteries are of lesser quality.

They are also very cheap, about $9, so I don't care if I have to charge the phone twice every day, until it dies.

However, knowing the sue-for-anything culture in the USA, I back Apple on this one. The message about the battery is accurate, according to my own experience.

Now, the shenanigans with their special screws and tools, the everything glued inside, and removal of the audio plug, I will always be against.

[turk73]

Yeah, uh, BMW sucks and so a lot of auto makers. Instead of making an additional menu in the ridiculously over-complicated dashboard computer system, I had to buy a $150 tool that can do a "battery registration" so that the smart alternator knows that there's a new battery installed and not to charge it so much. You don't have to buy BMW brand batteries, though. But Jesus BMW, get over yourselves. There could be a button right by the battery in the trunk to do this, it doesn't have to all be locked down.

[Despegar]

>Rather, it's a warning in the "battery health" section basically saying "we don't know if your battery is any good, you might need to get it replaced".

That's not what the message is. It's really weird that everyone keeps getting this wrong given there's a screenshot of it in the iFixit post.

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2019/08/07170827/iphon...

[dymk]

I don’t know who’s taking crazy pills, but the GP paraphrasing seems perfectly reasonable given your screenshot

[rtkwe]

The damning part is that even if the repair place uses an actual Apple battery with all the circuitry exactly the same the phone treats it as a complete unknown because it hasn't been approved by Apple and authenticated. If I open up two identical iPhones and swap the batteries I shouldn't have diminished functionality, the phone should still fully report everything it knows about the battery health.

[jpttsn]

What if you let the battery get wet/warm when replacing? Should the software trust that you replaced it correctly?

[rtkwe]

What if Apple's installer screws the same thing up? And if that was really a huge issue just locking out any battery monitoring is... worse because now there's just the meaningless 'You're battery isn't Apple approved and installed' warning.

[Despegar]

The people taking crazy pills are the one's suggesting it just says "Service" rather than not knowing if the battery is genuine.

[kemayo]

Yeah, it's actually a bit less forceful than I was remembering it when I wrote that paraphrase. :D

[dfg74fcgp]

Considering the level of psychological analysis that goes into products like this and others, I would not be surprised to learn they have selected the phrase most likely to cause distress to the owner making them want to take the product to an authorised repair centre. It seems some US manufacturers are trying to make their products a service of sorts, when you look at what other companys are doing. John Deere springs to mind with farmers.

[temporaryvector]

>Considering the level of psychological analysis that goes into products like this and others

Don't need to do any analysis or anything. The mere fact that the message doesn't go away is enough to push a lot of people towards getting an authorized repair. If this truly was for consumer protection against bad batteries, they could have implemented a "Check my battery" button which returns the same message instead of having an always-on message.

[hobofan]

Notifications that can't be dismissed or are recurring without a way to turn them off are one of the most annoying things about current operating systems, and Apple is one of the worst offenders.

On my Macbook, I currently get:

- A request to log in to Facetime every time I restart it (I've never used Facetime, and don't intend to, and have lost access to my AppleId)

- A daily recurring notification to update my OS, which again I can't do without my AppleId

- A notification that comes every ~10mins reminding me that I'm low on disk space (like I don't know it)

[auggierose]

Seriously, running an Apple OS without an Apple ID doesn't make any sense.

[pranau]

If you had made the same statement but replaced Apple with Google or Microsoft, your comment would have been downvoted to death already.

You shouldn't need an online ID to use a laptop. It makes perfect sense to use it without any sort of manufacturer provided profile.

[Dylan16807]

Are you interpreting that comment as supportive of Apple? I'm not...

[hobofan]

I haven't had any of those problems before Mojave. No Facetime bugging me, updates were no problem, and there was an easy terminal command to turn off the disk space notification.

[briandear]

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/254485/silencing-y...

Literally 12 seconds worth of Google.

FaceTime issue: FaceTime menu > Turn FaceTime Off

Software update without Apple ID:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3269337/how-to-install-maco...

It feels that people just love to complain about and hate on Apple. I get it, it’s trendy. But a good portion of the complaints are either disingenuous or an acute case of FTFM.

[dymk]

This kind of nit picking seems so petty, I don’t understand why people are getting boiled up about it. You can still get non official batteries, the phone still works.

[thedevilslawyer]

Except where the error is still displayed even when you transfer in an apple original battery from another phone.

[GeekyBear]

Legitimate parts that fail quality control testing in China have a way of "falling off the truck" onto the loading dock of the fulfillment center used by unscrupulous third party vendors instead of being destroyed.

[kuzehanka]

Cool story. But when I get a replacement battery pulled from a brand new iphone with the 3rd party repairer providing warranty on their work, I still have no way to make that message go away other than to pay Apple's extortion fees.

[lloeki]

Fun local fact: unless you order your battery at iFixit and DIY, it’s cheaper to go to the Apple Store to change an iPhone battery than any of the repair shops nearby.

[liability]

Fun reality check: for many people, going to an Apple store means driving several hours, or even purchasing a plane ticket. Any reasonable accounting of that would massively inflate the cost of 1st party repair.

[briandear]

.. not if you go to an authorized Apple repair center. Unless you live in some wilderness area, there is almost certainly an authorized repair center near you — and those repairs are backed by Apple. Going to some sketchy shop that cannibalizes new phones to sell a replacement battery? That is bizarre. I am starting to understand why Apple has apparent hostility towards unauthorized third party repair. Someone is likely going to go buy one of those “new” phones and think Apple is crap. Meanwhile, the repair shop made money selling you the battery from a new iPhone, then money selling a fake-new iPhone with a garbage battery to someone else.

[briandear]

Why would a repair shop rip a battery from a brand new phone to sell the battery to you? They ruin a new phone to sell you a $20 replacement battery? Now what will they put into the formerly new phone without a battery? Third party junk that some unsuspecting buyer is going to buy thinking it’s a “new” phone?

[masonic]

... which reflects Apple not policing their supply chain.

[wingspar]

As per the iFixit report, the Apple chip that identifies it as an 'Apple Battery' can be moved to another battery from any/dubious source. Given this, how can software KNOW that it's truly an Apple original battery.

Therefore, Apple is only 'vouching' for the battery health of batteries replaced via a confirmed 'chain-of-custody'.

Could the message allow the health to be shown anyway? Sure... but it's not like a message pops up every time you wake your phone.

[Dylan16807]

> As per the iFixit report, the Apple chip that identifies it as an 'Apple Battery' can be moved to another battery from any/dubious source. Given this, how can software KNOW that it's truly an Apple original battery.

Doesn't that work against your argument? If you put in the effort to move the chip, the phone will never know you replaced the battery at all.

It's no riskier to trust the chip post-replacement than it is to trust the chip any other day of the year.

[flukus]

> Given the existence of refurbishment scams, where substandard parts are put into old phones to make them look good briefly, I can understand where Apple is coming from on this point.

Last I checked apple did not make parts available to third party repairers, at least without signing on to some draconian anti-consumer agreements. If they were really interested in protecting consumers from counterfeits then they'd be doing more to make genuine apple parts available and doing less to limit third party repairs.

[jaclaz]

>"You don't have a certified Apple battery" would be completely sufficient.

The whole point is more towards the fact that it actually means:

"We don't know (or don't care) if you have a certified Apple battery or a (crappy) third part one, all we know is that it has been changed by non-Apple-Authorized personnel, so we are giving you this warning message as a lesson"

[CaptainZapp]

They specify that in the next paragraph explicitly that the phones are not bricked.

That very next paragraph, which you omit in your "quote".

[Jgrubb]

this is some next level irony. Read the sentence he wrote after the first one.