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iPhone 12 Anti Repair Design - Teardown and Repair Assessment

Hugh JeffreysCited 5× on HN, 2020–2021
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explainer · intermediate · 2020–2021 on HN

Hugh Jeffreys tears down the iPhone 12 and assesses its repairability, focusing on how parts are serialized and tied to the device so swapping components between phones does not work.

HN cites it as evidence of Apple's parts-pairing restrictions in right-to-repair discussions.

Repair, teardowns & right to repairConsumer devices & gadgets#iphone12#teardown#partspairing#repairability

5 comments from Hacker News

@bogwog2021-04 · in “It's your device, you should be able to repair it”

No. Also, "right to repair" doesn't mean manufacturers have to change their product designs in any way. iPhones today aren't hard to repair because they're thin, they're hard to repair because Apple ships DRM that checks the serial numbers of all the parts, so that it will refuse to work if you try to replace something. Example: ▶ this video

Critical View on HN
@neop1x2021-02 · in “The Framework Laptop”

Nah, not anymore. SSD and RAM are soldered on the motherboard in newer Macbooks [1]. And you can't even swap parts in iPhone 12 unless you reprogram their EEPROMs [2]. [1] link [2] ▶ this video

Critical View on HN
@emrehan2020-11 · in “Pine64 Smarphone Spare Parts”

iPhone 12 models could only be serviced by Apple. A youtuber bought 2 iPhones and swapped their main boards to have a plethora of issues with the screen, battery and cameras: ▶ this video I’m never going to buy another Apple product. The first blow was being unable to install linux to “my” devices.

Critical View on HN
@Cloudef2020-11 · in “Review: A Counterfeit, $100 iPhone X”

There's this video where a person replaces parts with genuine apple parts from another iPhone. And guess what? The device cripples itself thinking it's not genuine iPhone. ▶ this video

Critical View on HN
@neop1x2020-11 · in “Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program”

While it is quite nice, maybe they did it to look better in the antitrust investigation. They are still forcing devs to use their in-app purchases within iOS apps, forbidding 3rd-party payment processors. And iPhone 12 is no longer repairable by swapping parts between devices [1], Safari is still the only web engine on iOS. Finally after many years they are slowly starting to support royalty-free VP9 codec across the OSs but on the other hand are starting to use proprietary M1 chips to further lock in their users. [1] ▶ this video

Critical View on HN

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