[abalone]

> Now, I’m not sure that Apple has thus far triggered that kill switch. But they can do so at any time.

This is just scaremongering. Apple has not, in fact, triggered a "kill switch" or "locked" anyone out of using a 3rd party battery.

All it does is display a message that it's not a genuine Apple part. Deep in the battery settings. That's it.

Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts.

[ChickeNES]

> Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts.

I think this is lost on the HN audience. There's a lot of people out there being scammed by counterfeit parts, recycled parts, shoddy repair jobs, and straight up cobbled together FrankenPhones. Not to mention the danger in using lithium batteries from unknown provenance.

[microtonal]

...which is caused by making batteries irreplaceable to start with. If a phone's battery is user-repleacable, the user could buy it from Apple or any other reliable manufacturer. Now they have to go to either Apple or some third-party show who may use problematic batteries.

[rland]

If the battery was user replaceable, how would that improve the issue? If anything, it would make it worse from the standpoint of Apple’s customers getting a subpar product.

Batteries are the worst possible offender when it comes to counterfeits. If you’re not getting them straight from the source, it’s basically the wild west. I don’t order them online any more because it’s a 50/50 chance of getting a significantly worse product, even from reputable vendors (ahem amazon)

I think Apple is nudging their consumers towards getting an official replacement and honestly it makes perfect sense why they would do that in light of the market offerings.

Imagine an iPhone with a user replaceable battery. 30% of customers are gonna order the replacement from Apple anyway. 20% are going to order a mid high priced good battery from Anker. And 50% are gonna get swindled by an Alibaba drop shipper. The end result: the iPhone winds up behaving like a commodity android phone to the consumer.

[jyounker]

We in the geek community tend to forget that Apple is in the business of making reliable things with a long life cycle.

We tend to forget that Apple is the company that made the original mass-produced open platform. We forget that Apple's closed ecosystem is a response to the failures of that original experience.

Supporting the wide variety of hardware and software restricted the speed at which they could introduce new hardware and software features while simultaneously increasing their customer support costs and decreasing the perceived reliability of their products.

We forget that abandoning that open ethic is what allowed them to repeatedly capture the most lucrative portion of the consumer market for high technology products.

[bubblethink]

>You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts.

But the message is triggered even if you insert an Apple part. So you would want to know if the phone was blessed by an apple genius when you buy/sell ? It's surprising the lengths people go through to defend these asinine decisions. I don't even care about Apple, but the problem is that everyone will follow suit since the rest of the industry lacks any sort of vision/spine.

[ChickeNES]

That's to prevent people from taking old batteries and modifying them to appear new.

>So you would want to know if the phone was blessed by an apple genius when you buy/sell ?

Very much so, I don't want my phone catching fire in my pocket or while charging, or people with little technical knowledge being scammed.

Would you want to know if the home you were buying was wired by a licensed electrician, designed by a licensed engineer, etc?

[temporaryvector]

>Would you want to know if the home you were buying was wired by a licensed electrician

No, not really. I'd want it inspected, of course, but that's about it. Same with buying used cars. If the house wiring or my used car fucks ups, I'm safe in the knowledge that I can just hire someone to fix it for a reasonable price, and I can be reasonably confident that they'll do a decent job because the knowledge and the parts to fix it are freely available to anyone.

>designed by a licensed engineer, etc?

Maybe, but then designing a product is different than repairing an already designed product. We also have regulations for that kind of thing, so even if I have no idea who designed the house, I can be fairly confident that it's going to be fine because the house was built in the first place, and as before, I can also have it inspected and repaired if something is wrong.

Nothing of this is new, people have been going through the same shit for a couple of centuries now, we went through it with cars and appliances earlier in the last century. Don't let Apple and other electronic manufactures convince you that they're somehow special or different. It's not arcane magic and these problems are not unsolvable. They're just not willing to solve them in a way that's not user-hostile because they have not real incentive to do so.

[ChickeNES]

I think you miss my point. The average person just wants their phone fixed, not to be able to fix it themselves. And they want to have confidence it was done right.

Also, a fun fact: an iPhone XR replacement battery is $80USD from iFixit (the only vendor I'd trust) vs $69 for out-of-warranty replacement from Apple themselves, labor included.

[temporaryvector]

I specifically avoided mentioning anything about people doing repairs themselves because that's not the most important consequence of right-to-repair.

Also, good luck finding an Apple store or getting your battery replaced in reasonable time anywhere outside the major cities, and especially anywhere outside the US.

[ChickeNES]

> Also, good luck finding an Apple store or getting your battery replaced in reasonable time anywhere outside the major cities, and especially anywhere outside the US.

No need! That's why Apple has certified third-party affiliates, including Best Buy in the US [1]. Prices are identical to service from the Apple Store.

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-partners-with-b...

[magashna]

Being able to fix a battery used to be as simple as popping it open and putting in a new battery, rather than having an Apple "Genius" hold my hand and whisper sweet nothings while they charge me an exorbitant amount for the most basic of fixes.

[jpttsn]

The bigger issue is when Ford put the motor inside the car. Now I need a mechanic to replace the motor. Horrible. Use to be anyone could just switch it out.

[gandalfian]

Yes but almost no one needs an xr battery yet. They are still all new and under warranty. In two years when people actually need new batteries they will be much cheaper, as are the older iPhone batteries today.

[michaelt]

  That's to prevent people from
  taking old batteries and
  modifying them to appear new.

Strange that, for all their security chops, Apple can't make or buy a battery fuel gauge with a trustworthy cycle count.

[ChickeNES]

You mean like they just did with this change?

[bubblethink]

>That's to prevent people from taking old batteries and modifying them to appear new.

But the phone is old. That is known. You are buying/selling an old phone which has old parts. Whether the old part was genius blessed or not is of little concern as long as it is a genuine part. It is common knowledge that batteries age and that is implied when you buy an old device. If you are unhappy with that, ask for user replaceable batteries, not more DRM in batteries. I don't get this warped logic at all. Some amount of risk is assumed whenever you buy anything used. That's just life.

[ChickeNES]

>Whether the old part was genius blessed or not is of little concern as long as it is a genuine part.

How do you know it's a genuine part? Maybe even the seller truly believes it is a genuine battery, but counterfeits getting into a supply chain is common unless very tightly controlled.

[bubblethink]

Battery and other checks have existed forever. Even my ancient thinkpad does it, and lenovo/ibm are kings of whitelists. They've been nickle and diming people for a few decades now. Long before the iphone existed. That's not what is being discussed. This goes a step further and requires an apple store employee to sell and insert the battery. That's how your freedoms erode. Slowly, and in the name of safety/security.

[ChickeNES]

I have no use for conspiratorial ramblings. Again, how do you propose protecting consumers from faulty batteries? This goes beyond Apple to other devices, for example vaporizers, which have caused burns and even deaths from improper use of batteries not designed for end-user replacement.

[rtkwe]

> Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts.

That's something they could display without disabling the entire battery monitoring screen though. They could do that for every single part of the phone but instead they remove functionality if you don't do things the apple approved way. If I open two identical iPhones and swap their batteries there shouldn't be any degradation in the phone but Apple has decided there should be and that I can't see the battery info any more under any circumstances unless I go through them.

[briandear]

How can they accurately monitor a non-Apple battery? Are they to test their systems against every possible junk battery?

For those complaining, you’ve never dealt with airplane repairs. If you want a draconian system, try using non-Garmin SD cards in Garmin avionics. A blank Garmin SD card costs $300 and your avionics won’t work without it.

[rtkwe]

The batteries have chips in them that do most of the reporting and for capacity Apple can monitor how much is being added during charge and use that to evaluate the capacity on an ongoing basis so there's no need to even trust the provided capacity 100%.

That's also a terrible system. The existence of a worse company doesn't excuse any company that does slightly better.

(At least with Garmin I could see a regulatory liability reason for it, Garmin's equipment is certified with a particular configuration so if we're being blindly legalistic it's not the same equipment with a different card. What's the card used for? To be clear I don't think they should be doing it the Garmin is just the GPS right? Every pilot should be 100% able to fly and navigate without it.)

[VvR-Ox]

Thank you for clarifying this.

It's not an excuse for Apples policy to fight "the right to repair" etc. but it's less worse than I thought.

Of course if you own new Apple products you are completely screwed when in need of repairs and no store is in sight.

That's why I still like to use the MBP from 2012 (the one with all the great ports that can be repaired still). They've done a really shitty job in the development of their devices and lost a lot of pro-users like me who won't buy the new series of devices anymore.

When they don't act on this they'll lose a fair amount of customers completely, once their cool old devices aren't usable anymore. It's their decision while governments are too afraid to do the right thing and force all companies to allow people to repair and use resources efficiently.

It should be mandatory in a world that counts it's remaining days because their ancestors just burned through the resources we have without thinking about consequences.

But we'll see if there are enough smart people who are powerful enough to fight this crap. Mother Earth won't care if we'll be here in some centuries and it will recover without us.

[arsenico]

I'm just curious - what are your alternatives, when you actually need more processing power/GPU, than your 2012 MBP?

[VvR-Ox]

1. GPUs can be used as external devices did you know that? 2. I don't. 3. If I would, there are plenty other computers to buy that I can still repair way easier than this crap from Apple.

[johnmarcus]

it doesn't display a message that it's not a genuine apple part though, it displays a message that the battery might need be servicing, even though there is no technical indication that the battery needs servicing. it's a deceptive message.

[anilgulecha]

> All it does is display a message that it's not a genuine Apple part

The error is displayed even if you put in a genuine apple battery.

[a9entroy]

You are wrong. The message doesn't read anything like that. It says that the battery needs replacement and they explain it like this:

> "When a battery gets closer to the end of its lifespan, the amount of charge and the ability to provide power reduces. As a result, a battery may need to be charged more and more frequently and your iPhone might experience unexpected shutdowns."

This is dishonest. Because you put in a battery from a third party, you are making the user believe that it is near the end of its lifespan. I know the language says "may" but then most users are not language lawyers. Any layman is gonna read this as: Oh shit, my battery is almost completely degraded... I need to replace this.

A better thing to do would be to say "This battery is not a genuine battery installed by an authorized technician and may not perform as well"

[Despegar]

You apparently didn't read the iFixit post because the message does say that the battery may not be genuine.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/apple-is-locking-batteries-to-ip...