> What’s incredible here is not that Apple’s internal videos leaked, but that the third-party repair teams have done such an incredible job replicating its procedures without having seen these videos or having access to Apple’s tools.
How do we know that the third-party teams hadn't previously seen these videos? If they had a source that was getting them the videos, they probably wouldn't broadcast that information.
I don't see any need for the repair companies to have inside information beyond what is already available. They get detailed schematics of the electronics and as far as how to disassemble, that is generally figured out quickly by companies like ifixit that race to be the first company to post a teardown video on youtube when a new device comes out.
They use elaborate equipment and even x-ray to figure out what is going on inside these things.
Taking apart an iPhone is absolutely trivial, relatively speaking. Good repairers can do component-level repairs, even on the weird sandwich PCB on the iPhone X. They can splice together two flat-flex PCBs to repair a TouchID home button. They can restore iCloud-locked devices by removing and reprogramming the flash memory. They can separate the individual layers of a sandwich LCD screen to replace just the cover glass or the digitizer. There are aftermarket suppliers of iPhone X screens, complete with the notch and 3D touch. Third-party iPhone repair represents the absolute cutting edge of electronics repair. The level of precision and ingenuity on display is simply staggering.
That takes a pretty shady turn when they start checking serials to see if they're already activated. That's why people with a brand new iPad complain they can't activate it.
Thanks for sharing. This whole video is really mindblowing. The level of sophistication is very intense. There's a lot of really cool hardware and software reverse engineering going on here, and it's worth a watch.
Also unlikely; the lock is not in the device but in Apples servers denying activation. To fool it you need to put a legitimate identifier into to locked device. You can’t just make up numbers because Apple has them in a database. And you can’t duplicate them because then one of the devices gets locked.
It’s more likely they use identifiers, chips or boards from unlocked but broken devices.
With the right setup, PCBs are basically source provided. There's only so much you can obfuscate when all of the chips still have to be connected the right way.
>How do we know that the third-party teams hadn't previously seen these videos?
The best third-party repairers are vastly more advanced than Apple's own warranty repair service. They're constantly pushing the limits of what is considered possible in SMD rework. None of these videos would have provided any useful information to them.
iFixit are rank amateurs compared to companies like G-lon, REWA and ZXW. The fact that Motherboard praise them as "incredible" is frankly embarrassing.
Thanks for adding the perspective: I had no idea who these players were in the space prior to you mentioning them. I guess that says something about iFixit's marketing outreach.
iFixit sell DIY repair kits to ordinary consumers, so they need to cultivate a certain public image. The companies I mentioned sell tools to professional repairers, so they don't really care if consumers have heard of them.
My gripe is with the author of this piece, who seems to unquestioningly regurgitate iFixit's PR talking points. iFixit provide a useful service and do cool stuff, but they're much better at marketing than they are at fixing things.
You seem to have some gripe with iFixit itself - the article just points out that iFixit has reverse-engineered some of these techniques and makes them available to the public unlike the many undoubtedly skilled professional repair companies who have a vested interest in making sure the public is as ignorant as possible. This makes it impossible to show other such examples; how this becomes "regurgitating iFixit PR" is unclear to me.
Based on the comment history GP has some axe to grind with iFixit.
I don't get why they dislike iFixit, as the guides they put out are high quality and well suited for their target demographic. Not everything has to be geared to the super-knowledgeable reader, especially things like repair guides for consumer electronics.
As I said, iFixit provide a useful service and do cool stuff. If you know absolutely nothing about electronics repair, they will show you enough to perform basic repairs with a reasonable degree of confidence. They publish repair guides in order to sell more tools. I have absolutely no qualms with their business model. It's a positive, socially beneficial way of making a living.
My objection is with journalists who uncritically describe iFixit as experts. iFixit are not experts on consumer electronics or electronics repair. They are well-meaning amateurs who run a tool shop and have a media budget. If a professional technology journalist is unable to discern this, then that is indicative of a profound malaise within journalism.
Every time Apple launch a piece of hardware, iFixit get a huge amount of SEO juice from technology news websites linking to their teardown. Why is literally nobody in the media doing it themselves? iFixit have taken on an outsized role in technology journalism, because the overwhelming majority of technology journalists simply do not have the knowledge to take apart a piece of technology and say anything meaningful about what they see inside. That is most certainly not the fault of iFixit.
Doesn't the cost of these advanced repairs kind of negate the value of getting your device repaired versus just replacing the whole thing (or parts)?
I'm sure Apple has done lots of cost benefit analysis and found that it's way cheaper to just replace an iPhone motherboard than it is to pay someone skilled at SMD repair to find the bad component(s) and replace them.
The third-party repair industry exists because companies can profitably undercut Apple's out-of-warranty repair charges. That's true in the US and it's doubly true in lower-wage economies.
It may be that skilled repair work isn't scaleable, so Apple have decided to constrain their repair operations to simple module swaps. It may also be that Apple would rather sell you a new device than fix your old one, so have taken an approach that is broadly hostile to repair. I suspect it's a bit of both.
nope - the original uploader was on twitter and got his/her account shut down right away. This guy downloaded the videos while the original videos on twitter were up. he simply re-uploaded them to youtube. now hundreds of people have these videos. the cat is out of the bag.
I took GPs comment to mean exactly that: The average user wouldn't bother even if they did have the vids available. Apple probably doesn't because if they tried, people would think that they should be able to repair the phones themselves, and then get torqued off at Apple when they failed.
Apple that was once a long time ago had a good rep with the DIY community. Now you hear about them filing lawsuits against repair shops, refusing to sell parts to anyone, slowing down older phones so you have to buy new ones, gluing keyboards to batteries and charging $200 to replace a laptop battery.
Think about this what brands of car are there that aren't sold to DIYers. Tesla? We are in a long term trend whereby more and more things are non repairable trash that last less and less for no real good reason. Its irresponsible, hostile, and stupid. Can you imagine if we had cars that after 3-5 years died and had to be scrapped and we dismissed the matter as foo brand isn't for DIYERS that think you ought to be able to fix your car.
Apple really doesn't like repair shops that aren't "Apple Authorized Service Providers". They tried to sue a company in Norway that was sourcing "counterfeit" parts.
It looks like the Apple authorized service program may be dead, or at least on it's last legs. Their website makes it hard to find these companies, I couldn't figure out how to get a list.
> It looks like the Apple authorized service program may be dead, or at least on it's last legs.
The writing was on the wall when Apple stores started opening up. In my city there was a decades-old independent Apple-focused computer store/repair shop. They were one of those places where you could buy a Mac or get it fixed, even when Apple was at the very bottom of its popularity. It didn't last long after Apple opened a store down the street.
The repair shops outlived their usefulness to Apple. The current authorized ones are basically only allowed to ship your iDevice to a factory repair shop.
There was a time Apple geniuses would recommend going to the 3rd party authorized repair shops because they could offer better and faster service, while still being covered under warranty. There was a period where Apple was growing and the 3rd party authorized repair shops also were doing really well.
It seems at some point Apple decided they wanted to bring everything in house, and that’s when these started drying up. Now it’s hard to get anything other than basic repairs done, and if it’s a phone, not come back with a replacement refurbished phone which is almost certainly in worse shape than the phone you took in.
Well, if you actually read into the case, the screens that originally got him in trouble almost certainly were genuine parts that had "fallen off the back of the truck" or whatever excuse someone gave for trafficking in stolen components, and the guy's defense was "there's no way I could be infringing on their trademarks because the Apple logos are all inked over to make sure nobody sees them before I put them on the phones, and once they're installed you don't see them either!"
Which is not exactly the tale of plucky indie DIY repair hero people wanted it to be, and probably quite close to the "illegal importer trying to spin his way out of it" Apple accused him of being.
> Well, if you actually read into the case, the screens that originally got him in trouble almost certainly were genuine parts that had "fallen off the back of the truck" or whatever excuse someone gave for trafficking in stolen components
If they're stolen, that's bad, sure. But that's only one possibility for where they came from.
> the guy's defense was "there's no way I could be infringing on their trademarks because the Apple logos are all inked over to make sure nobody sees them before I put them on the phones, and once they're installed you don't see them either!"
When someone accuses you of infringing a trademark, pointing out that you don't use the trademark is a completely legitimate defense. I honestly don't understand why you imply that's a bad argument.
> Which is not exactly the tale of plucky indie DIY repair hero people wanted it to be, and probably quite close to the "illegal importer trying to spin his way out of it" Apple accused him of being.
What is an "illegal importer"? You shouldn't need Apple's permission to import anything.
What is an "illegal importer"? You shouldn't need Apple's permission to import anything.
If I steal something from you, can I then run around declaring I shouldn't need your permission to use it or to take it where I like?
Or -- since it's legally yours -- should you have some say in that and the opportunity to get it back?
At best the stuff he was importing was in the realm of really good counterfeits, and included trademark-violating logos that he or his accomplices did a bad job of covering up. At worst (and seemingly pretty likely) the stuff he was importing was legally Apple's property and had been stolen from them.
There is no chain of argument here that turns this guy into the narrative you want him to be.
Either he had legal possession or he didn't. That matters.
Either the components were counterfeit, and bore hastily-covered-up trademark-infringing logos, and thus shouldn't have been legally importable. Or they were genuine but stolen, and thus shouldn't have been legally importable.
> It looks like the Apple authorized service program may be dead, or at least on it's last legs. Their website makes it hard to find these companies, I couldn't figure out how to get a list.
https://locate.apple.com/
Not sure what the problem is for you - I literally clicked on that link, answered a few questions and in a matter of seconds had a list of 2 dozen + repair centers that could replace a cracked screen within 30 miles of me, the vast majority of which are 3rd party.
It drops me at this page, none of these links lead me to a list of repair centers. Clicking on, say, Mac, starts a questionnaire about what is ailing my Mac.
No, you didnt. You got a list of places that will try to upsell you on a new device. Apple authorized service program PROHIBITS actual repair, they are only allowed to mail in repair jobs to Apple "repair" center (somewhere in Texas afair), whats even funnier actual Apple place doesnt repair, they replace whole units (say goodbye to data if you haven't backed up recently).
Apple’s hatred of third party repairs isn’t because of the impact on revenue. It’s because of the possible impact on brand, and Apple is maniacally protective of their brand. If the repair shop does a bad job, or uses a non OEM part, then the phone now sends a bad message for Apple. Your friend picks up your phone and thinks Apple displays are dim or that the phone is a little rattly.
At what point is the brand damage of people never seeking repairs worse for the brand, though? I haven't noticed it as much with the latest generation of iPhones, but it used to be that every other iPhone I saw in the wild had a big crack down the screen which didn't exactly endeer me to the brand.
(or maybe it's still a problem and my peers are just more responsible/willing to pay for repairs?)
You're drinking the kool aid on this one, it is about money, the whole electronics industry (and others) runs on the basis that you will replace your goods regularly. Apple has strong brand loyalty and many customers that will buy every upgrade, they are just shifting the rest of the repurchase curve up. They have never had a good reason for all their proprietary cables either, well other than gouging for them.
Oh your 2 year old laptop is broken? That's old tech anyway, you should buy a new one!
The cable thing is completely different and a clear cash grab by Apple. I mean, the Lightning cable is way better than Micro USB, but why it costs $20 is just because Apple knows people will pay that much.
I've heard this argument before but it seems quite frankly so ridiculous I cannot credit the idea that Apple is so thunderously stupid as to believe it.
Virtually nobody pays much attention to how other peoples phone functions and if they say a dim display they would probably assume their battery was dying not that apple sucks.
If we go back to the auto industry I seem to recall them wanting to force people to get oem service/parts to maintain their warranty not to "protect their brand", a phrase which almost always precedes nonsense, but out of simple greed.
Greed is always always the simple answer in life. People that think their position is strong are always more willing to grasp at a few more pennies.
I don't think you're giving the argument enough credit. Nobody says "I got my iPhone repaired cheaply and now the touch isn't responsive"; they tell their friends "God my iPhone sucks these days".
It's the same reason Kleenex sues when people use their brand for generic products, or Disney forces daycares to take down murals of Mickey, or Burberry burns unsold products. It's a slipper slope away from quality, and while no one thing is a huge deal, the culmination is.
I agree at the end of the day it's about making money, but that's just what being a business is. For certain brands, they want their products to be meticulous. It's not the only way to build a product (see Android), however it is the reason Apple products are so beloved by the people who buy them.
The first two examples you provided (Kleenex and Disney) have nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with trademarks. If they do not aggressively defend their trademark, even from tiny, rural daycares with 10 kids, then there is a chance they can lose their trademark and it can become generic (see aspirin, cellophane, escalator, etc).
Sure, I agree, but the larger point is the same: some companies choose to go overboard to protect their brand. The ways they do it is different, but the reason is the same.
A point where all the constituent examples are false is probably wrong. The only example thus far is one iPhone that caught fire. We have more than one car that caught fire and no ban on third party repairs for cars.
I doubt you are right. Many people make product buying decisions based on What their friends and peers own.
Apple does allow 3rd parties into their ecosystem (app developers), but they lock that process down to specifically retain control of the experience that customers have
You may not want that, and your company may not make the same choice, it Apple’s approach works pretty well for them.
Apple does not sell OEM parts to anyone other than their official partners so any part you get replaced at an unofficial shop is either stolen, harvested from a broken donor device or fake.
IANAL, but I assume there's huge risk if Apple allows phones to be fixed by third parties. For instance, a nefarious repair shop could do who knows what(download all the data, install a rootkit, use defective hardware, install tracking devices, etc.) to the phone and the consumer would never know about it until it's too late.
From a business perspective, it's interesting to me.
Step 1: They want to increase revenue by vertical integration (repairs).
Step 2: They make the process rather difficult (e.g. damaging the device permanently with one wrong move), thus discouraging self-repair and third-party repairs. Also, they void guarantee in such a case.
Step 3: Now that they made it rather difficult, they need to buy/manufacture special equipment (like that metal battery rolling device seen in the video). This, in addition to having the need for more "man hours" replacing a battery, is rather costly.
Step 4: They can now offer repair services, which has to cover the cost of the battery itself, the time needed to repair one device plus the special equipment (which amortises rather quickly I guess).
(Step 5: Constantly increase lifespan of batteries, so that selling guarantees becomes more profitable; incurring costs of necessary time for replacing batteries likewise lower)
The repair process forces you to walk into the store, past all the new models, and wait for 10-20 minutes for your genius, while your eyes dance around all the wonderful products you could buy.
The repair isn't just about the revenue, but getting foot traffic to the stores. With a third-party repair model, like Samsung, all of that potential foot traffic goes to somebody else.
Not sure if you've been to an Apple store lately, but they're not exactly hurting for foot traffic - and IME only a small portion of the crowd are waiting on repairs.
Apple makes it hard to service so that only Apple can service.
Also target apple customer is not a DIY kind. Target customer wants "luxury" experience - let apple do everything and they pay for it.
Somewhat similar to any modern luxury car brand BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar - bulk of the revenue is made on post purchase services but in most cases average luxury car buyer will trade in the car before it gets old and needs a service.
Similar case with average apple user - they'll upgrade to a newer phone in 2-3 years any way so no need to service anyway.
For the high end cars the customer pays up front for service, including oil changes so they never see the direct costs. I'm sure apple would love to have that kind of acceptance of apple care but they haven't come close to achieving it.
Yup, when I bought my BMW they asked if I wanted to pre-pay for all the maintenance. Oil changes, spark plugs, wiper blades, even brake pads and rotors. I sat there and did the math, and the price they quoted was less than the cost of just the oil changes alone, it was a no-brainer.
One thing Apple doesn't have in their favor, cars need regular on-going maintenance. Computers don't.
I have a simpler explanation. Apple would prefer people buy new phones than repairing old phones because they make more money that way. One way to accomplish that is to make the phone harder/riskier to fix.
That said, I think Apples success is mostly inertia at this point: demand in the secondary market keeps resale prices high which quickens the new device cycle. As long as it costs less to sell the broken one and buy a new one, that will be the path people take when there is an issue.
Apple’s success is first and foremost a result of the walled garden that so many here love to hate. A vast majority of people would rather know that whatever they download from an App Store isn’t a scam or malware than almost anything else. People want their phone to just work, they don’t want to tinker with the damned thing.
I'll admit that's the only reason I bought an iPhone in the first place, and why I bought into more Apple products over time. I couldn't trust myself to not break my phone trying to tinker with it (bricked a Palm Pre and then two Android phones after that, all my fault), so I got one where no matter what I did, it was phone first and computer second. Then HP shut down Palm and my HP Touchpad stopped getting updates, so I installed Android but the experience was never what I wanted from it, so I got an iPad to replace it. And then my Windows machine broke down (because of a bad repair I had made) and trying to fix it broke it even further (my fault), so I went out and bought a Macbook.
I got sick of being my own tech support. I do that stuff all day at work and when I get home I'm tired of it. If I have to fix my computer, I'm probably going to rush through it and make it worse, because I really don't want to be doing it in the first place. I want to be using it, not dinking with it.
Same reason I ditched my old fix-me-up beater car for something with a warranty: I needed a car that started every time I turned the key. I haven't opened my own hood since, and it's taken a lot of stress off of my mind.
It sounds like your problem isn't getting the wrong products, your problem is tinkering with things. Buying Apple stuff isn't the answer here, the answer is to just not tinker if you don't need to.
It sounds like a really good answer born from experience and self-awareness. Your answer is 'don't buy stuff that mitigates your problem, undergo a corrective personality reconstruction instead'. This seems like a lot more work than just buying an iPad and getting on with your life.
I don't see how you need to reconstruct your personality to avoid tinkering with things. Just don't do it. I'm a tinkerer too; all you have to do is realize that you have limited time and attention, and then consciously decide to focus your tinkering time on only specific projects, and ignore other ones. Make a priority list perhaps. This takes some willpower obviously, but it's no different than any other undertaking where you're deciding to make a change in your life and do something different (e.g., you decide you want to eat better, exercise more, try socializing more, act better towards people, etc.).
> Apple would prefer people buy new phones than repairing old phones because they make more money that way.
I'm dubious of this. They could easily do this on the software side, but don't. A five year old iPhone 5S is still supported as of iOS 12; some Android devices are sold already unsupported. Only two percent of devices run 8.1! https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/
No, it's just that they want to control what goes into their phones.
For instance, I had my Moto G5 screen replaced at a non-offical repair shop here in Poland.
I told them to use the cheapest thing they could find.
The screen sucks. It's dimmer than the original, and the camera hole doesn't even align properly. Most importantly, the glass is not at all reinforced, and it already cracked.
For me it's fine because I don't treat my phones well anyway and it was bound to happen and I saved money, BUT people that see it will think a Moto G5's screen is dim, prone to scratching, and easy to break.
The 3D touch calibration video made me realize just how complicated it is to get the functionality. It's got to be about the worst cost to utilization ration of any feature on the iPhone. Based on my extensive research asking friends and reading various forums.
When the video get taken down, it showed a large device resembling a 3d printer where the phone is precisely mounted while a probe carefully presses on the glass in multiple places to calibrate touch sensitivity. This works in conjunction with a special app running on the attached iMac. The process takes 15 minutes if it works the first time--the instructions indicate that it might fail the first time.
"It's got to be about the worst cost to utilization ration of any feature on the iPhone."
I can't speak to whether you're correct or not, but that feature is a massive time saver for me. It's one of the most compelling features that keeps me on their platform. I have large fingers and selecting text with 3D touch is incredibly easy compared to using the twin cursors offered by iOS/Android for that purpose.
I run into quite a number of folks who have no idea they have 3D touch though. Surprises them even more than me when I show them.
I don't use 3D touch for much else though, which sort of supports your assertion.
Speaking as an app developer, the little-known nature of 3D Touch means we can never rely on it as the sole way to access a feature, and that pretty much always means we have ignored building much with it.
I wonder if better training by Apple could help? But it seems they’ve already accepted the tap-and-hold workaround for supporting some 3D Touch functionality on devices without 3D Touch.
Seems like 3D Touch, and iOS 7’s lightboxing parallax effect for backgrounds, was likely part of a broader vision by Ive and the design team to bring depth to a thin phone screen. It’s an admirable goal, but whether by lack of discoverability or lack of training, seems like it isn’t poised to be a widely-adopted technology.
There's a broader issue with the loss of discoverability. It's not exclusive to iOS, but the loss of the home button on the iPhone X and the replacement with gestures seems to mark a significant backwards step. Perhaps this is tolerable or even necessary given the increasing complexity of mobile user stories and maximal screen-to-body ratios, but it poses a lot of challenges.
Mobile is increasingly looking like desktop in terms of the gulf between "ordinary users" and "power users"; applications designed of one group are likely to be highly sub-optimal for the other, presenting developers with a difficult UX compromise. Most users understand the hamburger menu, which could be read as a sign of progress or a dismal failure.
I think the problem is that it's not available everywhere on all mobile devices (Android, iPads and older iPhones don't have it) so it's not utilized well or implemented as much as it could be, nor is it a universal behavior users can internalize like they do with panning and pinch to zoom. Android somewhat mimics it with long pressing, but iOS also has long pressing as well as 3D touch. Without ubiquity it can't become a primary UI mechanism, only tacked on to something that must work without it.
Personally though I don't think 3D touch is any less discoverable than your right mouse button on a computer. If you have a 3D touch capable device you had to configure it at least once when you got a new device capable of it so you know it exists just like you know a right mouse button click state often exists (Macs don't even ship with obvious right-click capability, the OS has it disabled by default and neither of their mouse input types have an obvious right click mechanism just by looking at them)
Yeah I use 3D touch as a cursor all the time. It almost makes up for not supporting a mouse. Almost.
Whenever I have to edit text on my work iPhone SE I almost want to text it to my personal phone, correct it there, then send it back. Editing without 3D Touch is a nightmare, especially on a smaller screen.
I have 3D Touch and use this handy cursor all the time but I would welcome a transition to a hold down on the spacebar. 3D Touch doesn’t always fire when I press down hard and I wish it was more reliable to enable. Using the hard press always makes me worry I’m going to either drop my phone or crack the glass.
Because it doesn’t always fire my muscle memory has evolved to just press down harder to increase
reliability. And it’s still only sees 90% of my hard presses.
Almost. This lets you move the insertion point, but AFAIK there's no replacement for the 3D Touch feature wherein you can push in again while moving the cursor to select the word (and again to select the whole line).
Is 3D Touch the only, or even the best way of implementing a cursor?
Why wouldn’t a Long press, for example, not work for that? Or just a dedicated button to switch to a cursor?
A dedicated button wouldn’t be slightly more inconvenient but would be ridiculously more discoverable and make it available for people who have phones older than the 3D Touch supported ones.
A long press wouldn’t suffice, since you’d still need the second gesture (more pressure with the 3D Touch implementation) to switch from moving around a cursor to select mode (ie. moving around the second cursor). Not claiming 3D Touch is the only way it could be done, but a long press seems like it could only support a subset of apples cursor mode.
I had an HTC Incredible that had a little touch nipple thing at the bottom-middle of the screen. It functioned like a Thinkpad nub and was pressable for a click. So far that is the best text selection method I have seen on a cell phone.
I've had a 7 since launch and only now from your comment learned about the text selection feature. What a perfect illustration of the discoveribility issue of 3D Touch.
On the other hand I have a new MacBook Pro with Force Touch and can't drag and drop anymore. It's stupid. I attempt 5 times until I manage to grab one icon. Apparently it's a feature, not a bug.
That thing was on LG G2 few years ago. On LG's keyboars press spacebar and then move your finger to right or left. It only works in input fields such as url or textfields.
I had to search for an explanation for what 3D touch is and found this Apple video tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIuopkLaaa0
This feature looks sooo useless. My intuitive behavior would be to press normally for a (little) longer time. Just looking at the video made worry about hurting my fingers, and breaking the screen...
As someone with an iphone that has 3d touch: it doesn't even remotely feel like the screen is going to break, or your fingers are going to hurt. You can also adjust the sensitivity on it. Pressing normally for a little bit longer time does something different (generally will bring up a menu while 3d touch will open up a preview window), and it takes just long enough to do that that it's uncomfortable. IMO it's not a necessary feature, it doesn't enable fundamentally new interactions, but it's really nice to have.
Oof, just replacing the display looks really dicey. They essentially have specially prepared glue jig that lines up where the adhesive needs to be. That would seem hard to replicate for a independent shop.
I got 10 of 11. Only one I'm missing is the speaker one; Youtube's blocked the channel (informally; 500 error messages and random exclamation points). Link to backup: https://u.teknik.io/xgX94.7z
How do we know that the third-party teams hadn't previously seen these videos? If they had a source that was getting them the videos, they probably wouldn't broadcast that information.
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