[adesanmi]

When people stop robbing phones for them to end up in Shenzen and stripped for parts, this will stop. This is a deterrent to make stealing iPhones less convenient and I’m all for it.

People already have to try to phish people’s iCloud details after stealing their devices to resell, costing them time and money and making it more annoying to try and steal.

I do think people who want to repair their phone should have access to a version without this stuff and deal with the consequences themselves.

For everyone else, including myself, please continue to make it annoying for thieves to target iPhones.

[LightHugger]

This is complete nonsense, if apple cared about phones being stolen for parts, they would just start selling the damn parts so people could repair their phones. Right now the reason parts are so valulable is because there's no other way to get them! Apple's unrepairability policy FUELS theft not the other way around.

[audunw]

> they would just start selling the damn parts so people could repair their phones.

They do. Have you been living under a rock?

https://www.selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home

And there’s no way for Apples policy to fuel theft when the stolen phone and parts from that phone can’t be used for anything. You might have had a point a few years ago when they neither sold parts nor did the pairing stuff.

I think they’re moving in the right direction. But like many here have pointed out they should allow you to unpair parts in a phone you own.

There are comments here from people who have been robbed at gunpoint and forced to unlock their phone and disconnect it from iCloud. I think Apple could solve it by making it a 24 hour process that can be reversed. But that just illustrates that it’s actually a hard problem to solve properly.

I don’t care at all about 3rd party parts. I’ve been burned too many times. It’s not environmentally friendly if you buy a brand new shitty part that you end up discarding along with the phone a few months later because the part was bad. Just force Apple to sell good quality genuine parts at a low price. The sum of the parts should equal the price of the phone. Yes that will be unprofitable for Apple, but governments can force it through regulation in the name of sustainability

If they stop selling parts then they should be forced to disable parts pairing for that model… then relying on 3rd party market as a fallback is an fallback

[kmeisthax]

The problem with SSR is that they give you the shit AASPs/Genius Bar gets, which is finished assemblies designed to be swapped out by low-skill workers for minimum wage. This dramatically increases the price of the repair because you're now swapping out a large number of components instead of just one.

Louis Rossmann used to beat Apple on the price of repair specifically by desoldering individual chips and swapping them, which is far cheaper per repair. But it's more expensive to train workers to do this kind of repair, and Apple doesn't like paying for skilled labor in America, so they just make the consumer eat the cost of whole assemblies.

At the same time Apple has also insisted on locking down their supply chains so that you cannot buy factory original components at all. They don't want you to be able to buy the chips that go into their phones, because they're worried you might pull a Strange Parts and cobble together a whole iPhone out of them.

It's oddly convenient how all of these things - the need to stop iPhone chop-shopping, the need to stop product cloning, and the need to have cheap labor costs - all just so happen to result in a really shitty repair experience that makes buying a new one always the best option.

[riscy]

> they give you the shit AASPs/Genius Bar gets, which is finished assemblies designed to be swapped out by low-skill workers for minimum wage

> all just so happen to result in a really shitty repair experience

You're saying getting genuine parts and instructions directly from Apple that are simple for a low-skill person to install is a shitty repair experience?

All this uproar is about is needing to contact Apple for them to link the part to my phone. How is that a shitty experience?

[lesuorac]

> You're saying getting genuine parts and instructions directly from Apple that are simple for a low-skill person to install is a shitty repair experience?

He's saying when the screen doesn't work because a 1/5 penny transistor broke he'd rather pay $15 in labor for the tech to replace it than >$15 for a new screen assembly.

And related, people are saying they'd rather be able to pay the $15 in labor when Apple End-of-Lifes the device and no longer produces that assembly.

[adesanmi]

I assumed the reason Apple’s phones are stolen for parts are that, unlike a lot of Android counterparts that can be reset, Find My is so bulletproof that (without phishing) iPhones are essentially expensive paperweights in terms of reselling whole. So people started getting creative and selling the parts, so Apple started to serialise those too.

Either way, I don’t think Apple set out to make the iPhone unrepairable just because. There just weren’t letting repairability getting in the way of the design and aesthetic they want, and I think it’s fine for them to have this opinion. They couldn’t achieve both so they biased towards design, and look to slowly iterate towards repairability compromising as little on design as possible.

Sounds like a sensible strategy.

[jestarray]

Then "just because" is profit. You can't excuse inventing a new screw and passing it off as "security."

[adesanmi]

I think inventing a new screw would be a design thing? In a perfect world a screw that is easily replaced and allows them the design they want would be used.

However if that doesn’t exist, as an engineer, I am aware of the concept of tradeoffs and ever since that company has existed they’ve always biased towards design.

They would rather 1mm of thinness or an angle a specific shape and if that means that this normally standard screw won’t fit, then “oh well”. Like I said above, it’s an opinion. My FairPhone has the opposite opinion where everything in the design was made around repairability.

Both of them have different, diverse, opinions on what design is. Neither are right or wrong, per se. That’s why the market is so awesome, go to the stall that fits your need, don’t try to make all the stalls make the same thing.

The “security” feature is the serialisation of said screws, no? Even if they were standard and freely available, the serialisation would still cause this issue. Unless it’s somehow not possible to serialise a standard screw but I don’t know how that would differ from the process of doing it to custom screws.

[triceratops]

The counterargument to that is cars are regularly stripped for parts even when spares are easily available to buy.

[deely3]

Does this counterargument mean that DRM is actually good, and in the future all cars should be unfixable without approval of producer?

[kmeisthax]

Elon Musk seems to think this way, and every other car manufacturer has let this cancer metastasize in otherwise perfectly fine EV designs because dealers won't sell a car without something to keep people coming back every six months for maintenance.

[eddythompson80]

Phones are stripped for parts that can be sold, which almost never include the main board or the TouchID or FaceID modules.

[kemayo]

> This is complete nonsense, if apple cared about phones being stolen for parts, they would just start selling the damn parts so people could repair their phones.

They did that. https://selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home

[specialist]

Both you and u/agentultra are correct. Manufacturers must make parts available and reasonably priced.

[lm28469]

none of my phones have been stolwn

all of them had parts replaced, some of them multiple times

I'd much rather pay for theft insurance than have to pay 10x for parts replacement

[neop1x]

>> When people stop robbing phones for them to end up in Shenzen and stripped for parts, this will stop.

Once such practice is started it will never stop. If it benefits Apple why would they wver stop it.

Thieves have existed since forever. There are many things which get stolen and don't integrate such protection and people live with that. No tech things like gold bars, gold rings with diamonds. Some people simply look after their stuff. And it is possible to buy insurance, tracking devices, lock boxes and other services to help.

[M4v3R]

I’ve heard that take many times, but is there any actual data to back this claim? I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is or how to tell iPhone models apart to know which ones to steal. They steal your purse, bag or just anything and sight and only then deal with the loot, discarding what’s useless. I would be very surprised if serializing the battery or screen is putting any significant dent in the number of stolen iPhones worldwide.

Apple has already created a pretty good deterrent to prevent iPhone theft - the Find My iPhone system. It’s better because it’s actually useful to the user and works even if you turn the phone off. The way I see it there’s absolutely no need to serialize the parts as an additional measure to prevent theft (given also what I said in the first paragraph)

[quenix]

> I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is

It doesn't matter. The market will dictate behaviour. As soon as the value of iPhone parts drops at the end of the chain (Shenzhen et. al) this will propagate all the way up to the street criminals.

Perhaps they will not discriminate by iPhone submodel (will not matter after a while of the serialisation policy), but they will (and do) discriminate by brand.

Much smartphone theft includes robbers grabbing the phone out of unsuspecting victims' hands, forcing them to surrender it at gunpoint, or pickpocketing it.

[adesanmi]

I don’t know if there’s data to back this up. I’m simply assuming based on what I know. What I know comes from people I went to school with who have stolen phones before telling me at the pub. There is a price for the type of device you bring in. The ones on the bikes or mugging people actually drop it off to the people who send stuff off to China. Those people give a standard price for the type of phone, he quoted £100 for an iPhone 11 and £120 for a Samsung Galaxy.

He corroborates your point regarding not discriminating the phone he stole, to be fair.

[toast0]

Making the parts useless won't immediately stop theft, sure. It's the same with making catalytic converters hard/impossible to fence. People still steal them, because they're working off an older state of the world. But once you've stolen enough stuff that you couldn't market, you figure out not to steal that anymore. (Although if you're stealing bags, harvesting cash and throwing the bags in the river, phones in the bags are still gone)

[adesanmi]

Regarding your second point, I agree with the Find My praise, however Find My itself illustrates why every little thing done to make it “more of a ballache” to steal an iPhone, more costly for the thieves, is reducing the demand and these “papercuts” can add up in a sizeable way.

But your point is valid, and I can understand why you hold that opinion.

[explaininjs]

When this eventually makes it to “basically every iphone out there”, and thieves stop being able to go to the local repair shop to trade in the iphone they stole for a wad of cash, they will stop targeting people with iphones.

I take it you’ve never been to an impoverished area? Holding an iphone paints a massive target on your back.