This is another dishonest post by Kyle and iFixit. The failure to mention a critical a reason for pairing—theft prevention—is enough to dismiss the entire piece as hopelessly biased.
Just a few years ago, every major news source had an article every other week sounding the alarms about the smartphone theft problem. They would universally blame the phone manufacturers for not doing more.
While they probably should have mentioned it in the article, I don't think that would change the end result. The justification for the pairing doesn't change the fact that it makes the iPhone more difficult to repair.
Now, the increased theft protection may outweigh the hit in repairability for you. People have different priorities, and it's understandable if theft protection is important to you. But iFixit's repairability score doesn't measure theft protection, and they shouldn't grant leniency just because there may be a good excuse.
If the solution to theft is "remotely brick parts that work perfectly," it is a shitty solution that doesn't deserve consideration. Doubly so when Apple's workaround for that is "pay us even more money to double the e-waste by having us send you another perfectly working part, but ~verified~!"
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We're trying for something different here, and we've had ask you this many times before—that's not cool.
It’s a shame you don’t have rules against advocating for violent criminal conduct! One would really hope that would be addressed before tone-policing the criticisms of that.
If a post is unambiguously "advocating for violent criminal conduct" that's one thing, but I don't think your interpretation is something most people would call obvious. In fact, one could argue that it's another way in which you broke the site guidelines, which include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not actually in your interest to argue aggressively or abusively, because it undermines the point you're trying to make. I know it's frustrating when people don't get the truth of your points and/or repeat false claims, but the proper way to deal with that is to make better arguments and/or communicate more clearly, not to fulminate against the community or throw your weight around.
For example, it sounds like you have a great point in your GP comment: the parts are known to be stolen because the lockout was sent. But this information gets eclipsed by the putdowns, snark, etc., which made up the majority of your post.
Multiple people on this page are relating their experience of being choked into unconsciousness with a knife at your throat, or behind held at knife point and forced to unlock their phones, and OP here is concerned about whether the parts being unusable afterwards will complicate repairs.
Even in the most charitable interpretation OP doesn't care about that but is concerned about false lockout signals, an extreme edge case. Like man screw the people getting knifed over this, right? I might have to call support!
You’ve allowed a noxious, pernicious environment to fester here on HN around this topic. It's normally pretty good but some of these Apple threads are really something else. NVIDIA threads get spicy too but Apple threads bring out all the crazies.
And yes, I do think that's a legitimate strand of thought among Android customers. They don't care if it's stolen, as long as they get cheaper parts and repairs, I've had people say it outright. If you want to counter this in the marketplace of ideas, you kinda have to address the elephant in the room that this is tacitly (or not-so-tacitly) encouraging violent crime. Which sets up this unnecessarily narrow line for one side of the argument - gosh, we can't be too impolite disagreeing with the side advocating violent crime!
"wow, I just want to knife you and steal your phone, but I respect your opinion too, this is a complex issue with a lot of concerns to balance, looks like you have some real growing-up to do!" is exactly the reason HN traffic is not welcomed at some domains. Because of your encouragement of that discourse, and your unwillingness to restrain it when it happens. There are much more serious issues where people's lives are at immediate threat, and you'll find a lot of those places have stopped welcoming HN traffic because they don't want to deal with this... and you override it anyway.
I appreciate the way you put this, dang. You're right that I was misinterpreted: I am advocating for a way to unlock the (perfectly good and fully functional) parts that doesn't involve throwing them away and buying new ones. I'm upset that Apple has gone the route of remote bricking with no recourse but to throw them away, not complaining that Apple is making theft harder. Painting me as a "violent criminal" for that is certainly the least generous interpretation of my post.
As for why this misinterpretation happened, I think the other poster here assumes that parts that throw this error were stolen. TFA states that this is not the case, but that any part swap at all will trigger it, such as moving parts from your old phone with a broken screen to your new phone.
If you wanted to talk about erroneous lockout signals, you could have mentioned literally anything about that topic in your post.
This is your entire comment, italicised portion is the one I quoted, which should have made it pretty clear what part I was responding to.
> If the solution to theft is "remotely brick parts that work perfectly," it is a shitty solution that doesn't deserve consideration. Doubly so when Apple's workaround for that is "pay us even more money to double the e-waste by having us send you another perfectly working part, but ~verified~!"
Which portion of this is discussing erroneous lockout signals, or can be inferred to be referring to such? Specific quotation please. Seems pretty straightforward that "lockout results in usable parts becoming unusable after a theft" which yeah, that's the point!
Regardless though, "I don't care about the people on this page who were choked into unconsciousness at knife-point because of extremely-occasional erroneous lockout signals" (has this ever happened to you or anyone you know?) is not much better than "I don't care about people on this page who were choked into unconsciousness at knife-point because I get cheaper parts and repairs".
And I know it's uncouth to point that out here, but it doesn't change it. Even the way you intended it was callous.
You're just willfully ignoring the consequences of your actions because of extreme edge-cases, and ignoring the actual physical edge-case here. People get mugged every day, how often have any of your devices or anyone you know received an erroneous lock-out signal? For me that answer is zero. Could it happen? Maybe, I guess, not really a real problem that I've ever seen or heard.
Why do you think this is a problem worth putting life at risk over?
I'm certain that you have a very good reason for feeling strongly about this, and that your concerns are genuine - but the way you're expressing it in the thread is not helping. Please stop.
It’s an important conversation to have. My mums phone got stolen with Find My active. The police refused to do anything about it, they tried to phish her details, failed and I followed it to Shenzen.
I’m not saying these changes would prevent occurrences, but if they couldn’t even strip parts from a phone, it makes it a less enticing target for thieves.
I do think that a version of the iPhone without these restrictions should be available for purchase for customers who know that’s exactly what they want, not this convoluted system.
This has never worked, because in a single product, a myriad of concerns are bundled together. Just like how people are complex, and you can't simply avoid toxic people. Or you can't just uproot and go live in a better place.
Individuals have much less liberty than the "free market" and "vote with your wallet" sentiments imply.
There are plenty of other products you can buy on the market that don’t lock down everything on a per part basis like Apple does. What are you even talking about.
Well, as long as you would like a pocket computer on which you can use the phone network to make calls, browse the internet, and use navigation, there really isn't many other products, just Android phones. So you choose between Apple and Google, essentially. Now, if someone has a single concern, like this per-part locking down thing, the decision is easy. But if someone has a larger set of concerns, the decision becomes which of them to give up.
Same with voting, really. If you look at the US, you have an imperial shit-ton of political issues, and a ridiculously small pool of just two parties to choose from. Even in countries where there are multiple parties, it's rare that people agree with everything they say and do. But with voting for any of them, they support them anyways.
And so, that's why the arguing about the liberties come into the picture. Because if you buy a product, you essentially support the product and the manufacturer. Maybe you want to support a single thing about them, like how well they protect their cloud, but with that, you also support all the other things they do as well. And you especially can't get away from things which are so pervasive that they are part of the zeitgeist, like the ever-present telemetry that comes with the always-on internet connections.
I mean, I don't and I won't. But fundamentally, the reason I have never bought an iPhone is exactly what the GP said: I want to be able to do whatever I want with a device I own. I'm not willing to give up that freedom for some minor security gains.
That seems a touch melodramatic, is a somewhat more thriving indie smartphone repair market truly "liberating"? It's not like someone has a gun to your head to buy an iPhone
This isn't remotely true. IFixit dropped the IPhone repairability score, does that impede you from buy one?
I have the impression only apple fans are reacting negatively to this news. Like I said, apple rather push for security than liberty, be it software or hardware. It's okay, it's a choice, idc about apple products so I'm pretty much neutral on this. I have made the choice for myself, I'd rather have liberty right now, but once I am too old to use that liberty, you can be sure I'll go to Google/Apple/whatever. It's not a dig, it's a real choice.
Just a few years ago, every major news source had an article every other week sounding the alarms about the smartphone theft problem. They would universally blame the phone manufacturers for not doing more.