[userbinator]

The iPhone 12 camera, when transferred to another iPhone 12, appears to work on launch, but fails miserably in actual use. It refuses to switch to the ultrawide camera, responds only to certain camera modes, and occasionally hangs and becomes completely unresponsive.

There is zero doubt in my mind that this is completely deliberate, and doing some deep reverse-engineering would likely yield how it is done (if anyone does decide to investigate it, that is an article I would love to read about.) It's like the copy protection schemes in games that appear to be defeated easily, but have more hidden traps later on.

The wankers at Apple who implement this sort of thing should be ashamed of themselves. I hope the Chinese cracks this, as they are apt to do for the third-party repair industry, just to show that it can still be done.

[pacamara619]

> There is zero doubt in my mind that this is completely deliberate

It is, and there is proof. A two cameras have been swapped and didn't work, they worked again when swapped back so there was no damage while disasembling it.

Louis Rossmann has pointed this out in one of his recent YouTube videos, just like he points out so many other scams Apple is getting away with.

[qppo]

This doesn't sound like a scam, it sounds like the peripheral is calibrated and mapped to the device in software. It doesn't surprise me that it would fail, kind of like that video where someone swapped the board out and expected everything to work when to the device it appears every single peripheral has had a failure condition and needs to be recalibrated and verified.

I don't have an issue with requiring software tools to repair software problems in modern electronics. The issue at hand is whether that tool is available for consumers and repair shops, which I doubt.

[userbinator]

It's absolutely NOT about "calibration" or whatever other excuses, because (every other manufacturer's) phone cameras use a more or less standard interface based on MIPI CSI, and are basically designed to be plug-and-play to allow ease of integration and development. The only things that could be considered calibration in camera modules are presets that are stored in an EEPROM, and affect the quality of the image at most. It would not cause any of the symptoms outlined in the article.

In other words, Apple went out of their way to do this. They probably use the EEPROM to store some additional serialisation data, check whether it matches the data stored on the mainboard, and then subtly sabotage the behaviour of the app based on that. It won't be long before the truth surfaces.

They've already done similar shady shit with even simpler parts like batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20641424

[ksec]

May be people are putting in Non Apple Cameras in those phones for repair or returns. Or start selling those as parts from these exchange and stolen parts online . And while it is a relatively small in percentage, at Apple scale it is still massive amount of money.

I am not sure if there is a solution that solves "both" side of the equation.