![A stack of Activation Locked MacBooks destined for the shredder in refurbisher [John Bumstead]’s workshop.](https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/locked_macbooks_3x2_john_bumstead.jpg?w=800)
Over the years, Apple has gone all-in on parts pairing. Virtually every component in an iPhone and iPad has a unique ID that’s kept in a big database over at Apple, which limits replacement parts to only those which have their pairing with the host system officially sanctified by Apple. With iOS 18 there seems to be somewhat of a change in how difficult getting a pairing approved, in the form of Apple’s new Repair Assistant. According to early responses by [iFixit] and in a video by [Hugh Jeffreys] the experience is ‘promising but flawed’.
As noted in the official Apple support page, the Repair Assistant is limited to the iPhone 15+, iPad Pro (M4) and iPad Air (M2), which still leaves many devices unable to make use of this feature. For the lucky few, however, this theoretically means that you can forego having to contact Apple directly to approve new parts. Instead the assistant will boot into its own environment, perform the pairing and calibration and allow you to go on your merry way with (theoretically) all functionality fully accessible.
The bad news here is that parts whose IDs show up as being locked (Activation Lock) are ineligible, which is something you cannot tell when you’re buying replacement parts. During [iFixit]’s testing involving swapping logic boards between two iPhone 15 Pros they found many issues, ranging from sudden reboots during calibration and boot looping. Some of these issues were due to the captive-portal-based WiFi network at [iFixit] HQ, but after eliminating that variable features like Face ID still refused to calibrate among other issues.
Meanwhile [Hugh]’s experiences have been more positive, but the limited nature of this feature, and the issues surrounding used and third-party parts, mean that the practical use of this Repair Assistant will remain limited, with tons of perfectly fine Activation Locked parts scrapped each year and third-party parts requiring pairing hacks to make basic features work, even on Apple’s MacBooks.
IOS 18 also adds battery monitoring for third-party batteries, which is a nice touch, but one cannot help but get the feeling that Apple is being dragged kicking and screaming into the age of easy repairs and replacements with Apple devices.
Featured image: A stack of Activation Locked MacBooks destined for the shredder in refurbisher [John Bumstead]’s workshop.
The flip side of this is that the aggressive locking to an AppleID and the fact you can’t just rip an iPhone apart for parts means that stolen iPhones are of much less value than they used to be. Police forces have been pushing for android phones to be similarly locked down.
And here’s the difficulty: how do you distinguish a legitimate home repair from a fence?
if the pairing tool communicates with apple, then it’s a lot easier to find fences. you start seeing stolen id’s popping up in a common location.
This was already possible. Apple knows where devices are and seeing many stolen devices in one location could be a trigger to look more closely, but as far as I’m aware they don’t do that. They don’t seem interested.
Is anybody really stealing a phone to tear it apart for spares and repairs? Or Repairing a stolen phone – if you stole it surely you’d just steal a new one…
Sure easier repairs might make it very very slightly more attractive to steal. But by that argument you should not be allowing a new sim card/phone number or new user at all etc ever as that would make the whole functional phone e-waste as soon as its stolen. And entirely kill the second hand market…
Paired parts should be banned as an anti consumer practice because locking in customers and forcing them to use over priced repair srvices or buy a new device is the primary goal of it.
Isn’t that how Activation Lock works, and why repair shops won’t work on them unless they’re offboarded from the service? If a phone is tied to another account, you’re not getting in.
As long as the original user can release a phone, there’s no issue selling a phone, and that’s how it currently works when you opt in. The issue is that stolen parts can still be swapped, and devices that were legitimately abandoned (lost and not picked up, corporate users leaving the company without proper MDM, etc) are e-waste as well. Lots of perfectly fine devices get shredded.
Sorry but no, FUD should never be your friend and locking down devices because of it is a very dumb idea.
Devices should be maintainable down to a single transistor. If i break a display that should not make the rest of the device head for the landfill or an expensive official repairshop. I want to buy a new display and do that myself.
And yes, even Androids FRP goes on my nerves as i had to crack a family members phone who forgot their Google password before. And no, just buying a phone is not an option for everyone, not everyone has such deep pockets.
So – do we have any stats on whether iDevices are stolen much less than all others to prove this works?
Well, using the metric “devices attempting to be sold by someone unable to authenticate to the real owners apple account” then yes, there are a lot of stats showing such sales blocked due to the activation lock.
“Stolen” is a subset of those, but not all of those are actually stolen.
(Eg. a phone legitly and legally sold to you by someone that didn’t remove their lock)
“As noted in the official Apple support page, the Repair Assistant is limited to the iPhone 15+, iPad Pro (M4) and iPad Air (M2)…the experience is ‘promising but flawed’.”
Yeah, that’s putting it mildly! “…the experience is ‘A FAILURE’”. That’s more like it.
I would ban parts locking entirely. Hey EU, do something useful!
Chinese manufacturers got around this by getting the ID out of the bad part whatever means necessary and programming it in the new part. And after they hack the part check in the firmware, everything would fit.
a great example of the kind of dialectic that develops around freedom. on the one hand we have my right to repair and on the other hand we have apple’s right to produce whatever they want to. enormous public consequences to determining what the word ‘freedom’ might mean in this context. no straightforward answer suffices.