[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?

[kuzehanka]

It would still be a lie. And it would still be ransomware since there's no way for the user to remove that message without paying a ransom to Apple.

I don't need apple to change anything to be happy. I vote with my wallet.

[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.