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Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

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Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#151

Post by briandear »

rtkwe wrote: post #137
abalone wrote: post #16

> Now, I’m not sure that Apple has thus far triggered that kill switch. But they can do so at any time. This is just scaremongering. Apple has not, in fact, triggered a "kill switch" or "locked" anyone out of using a 3rd party battery. All it does is display a message that it's not a genuine Apple part. Deep in the battery settings. That's it. Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to k…

> Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts. That's something they could display without disabling the entire battery monitoring screen though. They could do that for every single part of the phone but instead they remove functionality if you don't do things the apple approved way. If I open two identical iPhones and swap their batteries there shouldn't be any d…

How can they accurately monitor a non-Apple battery? Are they to test their systems against every possible junk battery?

For those complaining, you’ve never dealt with airplane repairs. If you want a draconian system, try using non-Garmin SD cards in Garmin avionics. A blank Garmin SD card costs $300 and your avionics won’t work without it.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#152

Post by logfromblammo »

esmi wrote: post #91
kuzehanka wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone knows that the battery is a genuine Apple component, because the battery cryptographically identifies as one. What it's detecting is that a genuine Apple battery was installed in the phone, but not by Apple. It displays the warning to scare the user and make them mistrust the 3rd party repairer. The only way to make that warning go away is to use a secret-sauce Apple programming tool that they withhold from…

> The phone knows that the battery is a genuine Apple component, because the battery cryptographically identifies as one. But that’s not the error. The error is the health is unknown. To be a devil’s advocate: How do you know the health of this first party battery is good? For example, maybe it wasn’t stored properly.

I'd probably take objective measurements of physical properties over a "profile new battery" charging cycle, and not solely rely on supply-chain QA personnel, protected by DRM nonsense.

My charger for rechargeable AA (LR6) batteries can do that, recondition batteries to eke out a few more cycles, and also tell me when a battery is finally gone beyond its powers to revive.

And my charger is not a $1000 device that utterly relies on the health of its battery to function, either.

What Apple is doing is slapping an opaque cover over the report screen until someone comes along that has a company-issued "remove report cover" pass. What if someone put alkaline batteries in there, instead of metal hydride? What if they put in AAA batteries instead of AA?

The charger can detect wrong chemistry types, like alkaline and NiCd, by objectively measuring the physical properties. And it can still charge AAAs. They just have a lower capacity. The battery subsystem in the phone could analyze a new battery and report its condition, but that would require Apple to admit to itself that a battery is a 3rd-party replaceable part that will require replacement some time over the projected lifespan of the device.

How do you know? You measure. High-tech batteries have some of that capability built-in, and high-tech devices with charging circuits connected to high-powered general computing processors can certainly run automated tests after their case-intrusion sensors and/or power-interrupt sensors detect events.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#153

Post by hobofan »

briandear wrote: post #133
hobofan wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had any of those problems before Mojave. No Facetime bugging me, updates were no problem, and there was an easy terminal command to turn off the disk space notification.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/254485/silencing-y... Literally 12 seconds worth of Google. FaceTime issue: FaceTime menu > Turn FaceTime Off Software update without Apple ID: https://www.macworld.com/article/3269337/how-to-install-maco... It feels that people just love to complain about and hate on Apple. I get it, it’s trendy. But a good portion of the complaints are either disingenuous or an acute case o…

> https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/254485/silencing-y....

If you read the comments there, you will see that this doesn't work for Mojave. I've run those commands on High Sierra (or what the previous version was), but Mojave made them unusable. All related and linked answers also don't work for Mojave.

> FaceTime issue: FaceTime menu > Turn FaceTime Off

Funnily that option is greyed out if you are not logged in, and I guess doesn't do what you think it does.

> Software update without Apple ID

My main problem there is that I don't want to update (because how the fuck do I know that Apple won't brick other features I'm used to), and can't silence the notification for forever.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#154

Post by rtkwe »

briandear wrote: post #151
rtkwe wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts. That's something they could display without disabling the entire battery monitoring screen though. They could do that for every single part of the phone but instead they remove functionality if you don't do things the apple approved way. If I open two identical iPhones and swap their batteries there shouldn't be any d…

How can they accurately monitor a non-Apple battery? Are they to test their systems against every possible junk battery? For those complaining, you’ve never dealt with airplane repairs. If you want a draconian system, try using non-Garmin SD cards in Garmin avionics. A blank Garmin SD card costs $300 and your avionics won’t work without it.

The batteries have chips in them that do most of the reporting and for capacity Apple can monitor how much is being added during charge and use that to evaluate the capacity on an ongoing basis so there's no need to even trust the provided capacity 100%.

That's also a terrible system. The existence of a worse company doesn't excuse any company that does slightly better.

(At least with Garmin I could see a regulatory liability reason for it, Garmin's equipment is certified with a particular configuration so if we're being blindly legalistic it's not the same equipment with a different card. What's the card used for? To be clear I don't think they should be doing it the Garmin is just the GPS right? Every pilot should be 100% able to fly and navigate without it.)

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#155

Post by esmi »

kuzehanka wrote: post #147
esmi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The phone knows that the battery is a genuine Apple component, because the battery cryptographically identifies as one. But that’s not the error. The error is the health is unknown. To be a devil’s advocate: How do you know the health of this first party battery is good? For example, maybe it wasn’t stored properly.

> maybe it wasn’t stored properly. Then it has a smaller capacity than a brand new battery should, but still larger than a heavily used battery. It's something the phone can report on, and android phones do. Apple can't guarantee your replacement battery was 'stored properly' either. All they can do is run their little programming tool to remove the warning regardless. This scenario is completely outside the realm of…

So if Apple rephrased this message to state, “unable to verify the health of this battery,” but still had the exact same system response, you would be happy?

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#157

Post by rtkwe »

jpttsn wrote: post #142
rtkwe wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The damning part is that even if the repair place uses an actual Apple battery with all the circuitry exactly the same the phone treats it as a complete unknown because it hasn't been approved by Apple and authenticated. If I open up two identical iPhones and swap the batteries I shouldn't have diminished functionality, the phone should still fully report everything it knows about the battery health.

What if you let the battery get wet/warm when replacing? Should the software trust that you replaced it correctly?

What if Apple's installer screws the same thing up? And if that was really a huge issue just locking out any battery monitoring is... worse because now there's just the meaningless 'You're battery isn't Apple approved and installed' warning.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#158

Post by seltzered_ »

judge2020 wrote: post #126
seltzered_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to second the take on water resistance/ waterproofing. I overheard someone at a pool yesterday who bought a used iPhone that died after getting in the water with it. He mentioned buying it used. From my experience the water resistance is a very thin line of sticky black stuff that is easy to mess up after opening an iPhone. Im assuming the better repair shops use sticker sheets of new seal whenever a phone i…

> Im assuming the better repair shops use sticker sheets of new seal whenever a phone is opened. This is my point at the end, a fair amount of repair shops do care about the phone, the customer, and doing things right, but there are probably a good amount that don't care and will cut as many corners as possible to increase profit.

Yeah. The ideal could be for repair shops to have a provably diligent repair process (e.g. imagine repair shops doing repair under a camera akin to a Rossmann stream). (Insert visions of blockchainy contract stuff here). Think the question is whether it’d be practical - perhaps it could be regulated into existence over certification/nda programs but even then the value of the object itself may need to be higher. The startup Mattereum comes to mind, seemingly theyre starting out in high value areas (vintage violins, collectibles, real estate)

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#159

Post by neuralRiot »

0ld wrote: post #77
kuzehanka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in…

> Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible. You wouldn't believe it, but that's almost exactly how it works with bmws since around 15 years. The unofficially replaced battery won't…

There are 3rd party tools to register the battey not only pirated software, most automotive software now uses the same interface (j-2534 passthrough) so you pay to download the needed files for programming which is totally acceptable. Apple instead have a battery ransomware.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#160

Post by Shorel »

kuzehanka wrote: post #59
kemayo wrote: post #11

> By activating a dormant software lock on their newest iPhones, Apple is effectively announcing a drastic new policy: only Apple batteries can go in iPhones, and only they can install them. I really dislike the phrasing attached to this story. It's not a lock: a third party installed battery still works , the phone isn't refusing to start up until you go to an Apple Store and have an authentic Apple(tm) battery inst…

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in…

I am a cheap customer using the fifth battery in my very old Nexus 5.

What Apple says is exactly correct. Battery replacements never hold charge as well as the original battery (in my case no longer manufactured). And spare batteries are of lesser quality.

They are also very cheap, about $9, so I don't care if I have to charge the phone twice every day, until it dies.

However, knowing the sue-for-anything culture in the USA, I back Apple on this one. The message about the battery is accurate, according to my own experience.

Now, the shenanigans with their special screws and tools, the everything glued inside, and removal of the audio plug, I will always be against.

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