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We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

ifixit.com

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Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#321

Post by stevenwliao »

BoorishBears wrote: post #70
tumult wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? How is someone who snatched your phone out of your hand and ran away going to know your password and authentication information needed to authorize a parts replacement?

You should search what happens when these phones are stolen with Apple's lock on them. It's almost always the same play book: - moves to some US address nearby - turns off for days - shows up in Shenzhen or Guangzhou Usually from there are a few attempts to phish the owner with fake iCloud alerts (and sometimes outright threats) before they strip it for parts. To be clear it's not like the phone theft itself is part…

When my phone was taken in an armed robbery, it ended up in Ho Chi Minh City.

No threats though... I assume they just parted it out.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#322

Post by stouset »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #199
riversflow wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not that it reduces crime overall, it’s that it reduces a specific, very inconvenient crime to be the victim of. Having your phone stolen, especially on vacation, is significantly worse than many other sorts of theft.

And yet people still have their iPhone 14s stolen while on holiday.

And people still die of infection despite the existence of antibiotics. Crazy, right?

Please tell me you understand that reducing the value of an iPhone on the black market will reduce incidence of theft even if it doesn’t eliminate it entirely.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#323

Post by stouset »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #272
shortcake27 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m highly dubious of anyone claiming this reduces crime. Things being easy to steal and sell aren’t the _cause_ of crime, they’re a symptom. If someone has felt the need to resort to a life of crime for whatever reason, how is lowering their “salary” (so to speak) going to reduce crime? Surely they now need to steal more phones to make up the difference? I guess you could argue they might commit a different crime in…

Maybe people resort to a life of crime because it makes them money and they like money, not because they have no other option. People readily accept that rich people do morally wrong things (like exploit their employees etc) for more money. So why assume that the only reason people in general would do morally wrong things is because they need to to feed their family?

Because most pickpockets and phone thieves probably aren’t making the equivalent of an office salary.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#324

Post by stouset »

ilyt wrote: post #168
notanormalnerd wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why iFixit doesn't even touch on that point. I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets, because noone will take the phone off of them, so it's not worth it. Phones are still being stolen but imagine if they could sell to a global market of repair shops. You couldn't go to any tourist location wit…

If they are being stolen it doesn't work. If the whole part won't be used it will be stripped to components and resold to the same repair shops anyway. Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more. Apple doesn't want phones fixed because Apple wants to sell more phones, plain and simple. There is no other incentive.

> but they will just steal more

Yes, classically, thieves just scale up their operations tenfold when their profit per theft goes down. This is why iPhone theft has skyrocketed in the past decade, to the point where the general public is anxious to ever wield such a device in public for fear of being immediately snatched.

Oh, wait, that’s not what happened at all.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#325

Post by stouset »

MostlyStable wrote: post #105
mschuster91 wrote: post #6

There is also another issue why Apple is restricting "part harvesting": theft. iCloud locks or Samsung's KNOX lock entered the field because the manufacturers were pretty pissed that customers using their devices in public became a target for "enterprising" robbers who'd factory-wipe the devices and flip them to a pawn shop or second-hand store in a matter of half an hour. When people are afraid to use your products…

What is the relative rates of occurrence of phone theft vs. phones breaking in a way that requires repair? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that far far far more people have a phone that needs to be repaired than have a phone that gets stolen. So making repair worse to make theft "better" seems like a bad tradeoff to me. And that's even presuming that this stated goal actually works. I would expect that a very n…

Luckily, for like $4/mo (and $29 per incident), Apple will replace the screen for you. You can break your screen every year and it will cost you less than the $100 that screen would cost on the open market.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#326

Post by midoridensha »

stouset wrote: post #323
ChadNauseam wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people resort to a life of crime because it makes them money and they like money, not because they have no other option. People readily accept that rich people do morally wrong things (like exploit their employees etc) for more money. So why assume that the only reason people in general would do morally wrong things is because they need to to feed their family?

Because most pickpockets and phone thieves probably aren’t making the equivalent of an office salary.

Most of the people in that line of work wouldn't be able to get and hold an office job.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#327

Post by midoridensha »

MostlyStable wrote: post #136
acover wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being robbed at gunpoint is much worse than having to buy a new phone.

People were robbed at gunpoint before cell phones and will continue to be robbed at gunpoint even if every single manufacturer adopts this policy. This is not some magic bullet that stops crime. There is another commenter in this very thread describing being mugged at gunpoint and his mugger forcing him to go through the Apple unpairing process in order to make the phone completely flippable as a whole device. Not to…

>People were robbed at gunpoint before cell phones and will continue to be robbed at gunpoint even if every single manufacturer adopts this policy.

Only in crappy countries where lots of people own guns.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#328

Post by jestarray »

adesanmi wrote: post #120
LightHugger wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#329

Post by ASalazarMX »

falsenapkin wrote: post #22
toxik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While anti-consumerist practices such as this authentication mechanism sometimes accidentally protect the consumer, it is not the reason why companies do it. If it were, they would also allow you to say “yes this replacement is desired.” Similarly, if it was about security and preventing backdoored parts, they could allow you to authorize the replacement. But no, it is of course about money grabbing, and then the con…

Such an ignore button would allow theft to continue and would allow users to make poor security decisions. I agree that something needs to happen to enable easier or maybe more privacy focused 3rd party repairs but I also appreciate my device being less of a target.

Thieves who really want your iPhone will make you unlock it (or just point it to your face) and remove it from your iCloud account. Much better than using it for parts.

Re: We are retroactively dropping the iPhone’s repairability score

#330

Post by stouset »

midoridensha wrote: post #326
stouset wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most pickpockets and phone thieves probably aren’t making the equivalent of an office salary.

Most of the people in that line of work wouldn't be able to get and hold an office job.

That’s kind of the point.
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