Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throwawaysleep 1248 days ago
Well this is the second level of security that is needed. A phone should not function with any parts from a phone that had the lock.
3 comments

And now we're into John Deere levels of "fuck you, pay me" whenever anything breaks.

No thanks. The secondary repair market is extremely important to keep on life support.

If you cede all repair work to manufacturer blessed shops the amount of waste and expense skyrockets.

I want patched together laptops working 12 years from now, just like I have old T-series laptops from back in the day with various replacement parts humming away right now in my homelab. It's silly to just toss everything in the trash the moment is breaks.

That secondary market is made up almost purely of stolen phones.
this is a terrible idea that will lead to massive waste for hundreds of years
> A phone should not function with any parts from a phone that had the lock.

That would be extremely expensive to design. Probably impossible.

Especially when component level repair ala Louis Rossmann is possible.

https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup

At component level, yeah no impossible but for general resale it wouldn't be too hard. I'm pretty sure the Face ID and Touch ID modules already do this.

You would need to add some general identifiers to parts with a GUID and at production/official repair time, register those parts to an iPhone S/N. If Activation locked, those parts would need to not be able to be registered to another iphone until the original device is unlocked, thus clearing those parts.

Look - I get that it's probably not too hard to do with most of the parts that contain active electronics, but the comment I was replying to said all the parts.

How are you going to lock down the phone body? Or the screen (not including the digitizer)? Which, coincidentally, are probably the 2 most damaged parts of a phone.

I suppose there's probably some way Apple could lock them down. But that seems like an expense wildly out of proportion to the potential benefit.