Putting aside all the business model stuff, man, Apple makes some seriously pretty hardware. The packing, the cables and connectors, the wrapped motherboard - the whole thing is gorgeous.
Apple has always made even the insides of their hardware clean and neatly laid out, dating back to the Original mac hardware. In the video, one of the inside brackets had a laser engraved apple logo!
As a former Android user, it was one thing every iPhone fanboy had on me I couldn't argue on. Not why I switched, but I now appreciate it knowing that they still give attention to that little detail.
There used to be cases for iPhones idk if they still exist, that show off the internals back 10 years or so. iPhones were always easier to open up and work on than Android phones in the early years. So even though they push things so they do repairs, they make it so that even if they don't fix your stuff, it's not a clobbered mess of things inside.
There are Teardown and X-Ray decals available from dbrand which were created in partnership with Zack from the JerryRigEverything YouTube channel and accurately represent the internals of the phone. They can attach directly to the back of the phone and there is also a case available.
I think it was Steve Jobs who insisted that that even the inside of their products look as clean as the outside. It unfortunately means it's a pain to disassemble, but they certainly do look pretty.
I don't think it's about showing off. It's about reliability, mechanical sturdiness, compactness, the ability to cleanly assemble the device an test it on every significant step before sealing. You can't help but end up with a neat thing to meet all these requirements.
As someone who had to work on the inside of almost every iPhone model ever made, I can tell you first hand that it is mostly about looks.
Because it seems neat but there were a whole lot of decisions that made actually working on it really annoying. After the 4, they just weren't made in a way that facilitated fixing.
To be fair, at that point the replacement rate was so fast that I can see why it didn't make sense to spend time making it repairable.
The issue is they kept that philosophy for way too long into models that would last quite a while and need repairs in the long term.
Now they have started fixing their act (well under a lot of both public pressure and legal pressure from EU) and the latest model doesn't just look pretty, they start to make sense from an (dis)assembly/fixing point of view.
A least now they have figured out that they can put the port on a separate board so you don't have to literally disassemble the whole phone just to replace the port (that tend to fail under heavy use, especially the models based on the 6 that needed a lot of juicing).
Looks are deceiving, don't be fooled, just because it looks neat doesn't mean it is.
I see your point, but I never meant repairability. Not even opening the back cover. Only about the efficiency of the assembly, and reliability of wearing while sealed.
In the same way, artillery shells and landmines are highly regular and neat in their internal structure which affords them the ability to bear immense loads and release large amounts of energy. But it's never about the ease of disarming them, it's exactly about the opposite, about making safe disassembly hard or impossible.
Well, I understood what you meant, but you are wrong in either your views or your language.
Here are the firsts 2 definition of the word neat:
- free from dirt and disorder: habitually clean and orderly
- marked by skill or ingenuity
And modern iPhone's internals do not really feel like that at all. They are interesting to look at, but the whole design is clearly made to cut costs and meet some arbitrary requirements.
There is not much neat about it.
There are dozens of screws, with many different imprints (for some reason) with all kinds of different lengths (when it surely wouldn't be complicated to figure out a cleaner approach).
They overuse fragile ribbon cable, often putting them in place where they can get easily damaged during disassembly/repair.
They still haven't figured out a neat way to make batteries not move without relying on stupid glue stripes that always break.
There are plenty of small pieces that need to be screwed down when it feels that they could be part of larger assemblies or have a better/easier way to install.
Now don't get me wrong, the iPhone is a very technologically advanced device, with extreme miniaturisation of some things that are just incredible.
But it's not something that you could call neat. It's not a perfectly symmetrical engine with shinny tubes well laid out that is just as beautiful to look at as it is powerful.
It is just a pragmatic design to accomplish a form factor at a specific price point, the rest are just side effects or nice to have.
And in a way it makes sense they have this approach, because they change the thing every year, never committing to a particular form factor or set of functionalities (which is the whole point to entice replacement) but that doesn't come with neatness.
As for reliability, iPhones are not any more reliable than equally priced Android smartphones. It seems that way because Apple has higher exigence and thus better-quality control for parts and also will often swap phones for factory problems easily (under warranty or not).
But they are not any more reliable when you put price/costs into the equation, most people make the mistake of comparing a cheapo 200/300 dollars Android with a minimum 500 dollars iPhone (more likely minimum 800), it would be sad if they couldn't figure out to make them more dependable at 2-3 times the price.
Hilariously, the way they do it is with forgoing neatness and adding a lot of annoyingly small parts at ingress points and using very strong glues. Not neat at all.
Steve Jobs was famously obsessive about design, inside and out, call it showing off or whatever you want. He believed the internals of Apple products, like the original Macintosh, should be just as beautiful as the exterior, even if users never saw them. This attention to detail reflected his commitment to craftsmanship and quality.
My grandmother (she'd've been ~118, now) taught me to sew. There's specific techniques for turning down interior hems. That is, imagine a jacket: it has a shell, and a lining; I'm talking about a specific kind of hem for material between the shell and the lining. The finish work of that hem had no bearing on the quality of the item — it just demonstrated to the next tailor working on the jacket that you'd spent the time to finish the parts only they would see.
And, goddamn, it doubled the effort for finishing a jacket.
I don’t know if he came up with it, or if it was one of those fatherly : shop class myths, but there was a cabinet built, and the backside needed to be finished as well as the front, even though it would be nailed to a wall. The idea being that the design and craftsmanship should permeate the object.
And it really does permeate it. I'm on Linux but I run it on an Intel Mac. It will be very hard to find a non-Mac replacement. I look at the laptops at the electronics store and simply nothing comes even close. Beautiful products, it's very unfortunate though that they become ever more closed.
When I go to replace wear items such as the battery the insides of my Apple products look like goopy garbage because of all the adhesive I have to melt and scrape through.
What about the dozens (at this point hundreds) of phone models that are both rainproof and have a replaceable battery without melting and scraping? They exist in real, observed reality.
What about the last 15 years of MacBook models that never claimed to be waterproof but still require heat guns and risk of catastrophic immolation to extend their life beyond 3-5 years?
But for some reason the internals of an iPhone 16 are still “gorgeous”…and merit a stage appearance and endorsement from Mother Earth herself!
in my experience from a few years ago: I commute by bicycle to shool (and in the meantime work) in a very rainy country. My entire childhood, I had to replace phones every few months jsut because they got soaked in the rain and I didn't close the protective case perfectly or whatever.
Then I started to buy waterproof phones, and my life was noticeably better. those still die from water damage, just slower. Every time you drop the phone and the case pops off, the water protection gets a bit worse, and after a year or so, the rubber gets hard, especially in winter, and its no longer waterproof. I wouldn't dare to put it in actual water.
Now I have had my smartphone for many years, and I had the previous one for many years. So yes please, glue it together, glue it shut, at least if you're serious about water damage and dust ingress
> What about the dozens (at this point hundreds) of phone models that are both rainproof and have a replaceable battery
If that's what you are looking for just get one. It may come even with spyware preinstalled. Then try it underwater, should be fine if it's in specs, right?
I just switched from Android for security primarily. The rest is a bonus. The problem is smartphone becomes a single point of failure. If it gets stolen I can't even work without authentication apps.
Sealing electrical stuff from water is literally 19th century tech. Plenty of underwater flashlights exist even today. If they just lose the obsession with thinness in phones, almost every other problem becomes trivial to solve. Instead they make the ultra thin, breakable phone, and then users put it in a protective case which eliminates the thinness anyway.
That's what Steve Jobs used to say and that's why Apple phones were 3.5 inches until he died. Who uses a 3.5 inch phone now? In fact small phones basically don't exist anymore. There were credit card or cigarette lighter sized phones that weighed under an ounce but they were 2G GSM, so now they are e-waste. There is nothing to replace them. Meanwhile the Unihertz Tank 2 weighs about a pound (22,000 mAH battery) and it's imho attractive, except too expensive.
I think it’s important especially because phones have gotten larger on the x and y axes that they remain light and small in the z axis in order to maintain pocketability. There are very thick phones with giant batteries out there for people who want that, but I think Apple has been striking the perfect balance.
They are not that fragile if you don't drop hard. Never used case for A50, it still looks almost new after years of active use. But for iphone I got a thin case, to protect popping out cameras and to make it look cool. Main concern is thieves if I travel somewhere, not the physical damage.
Unless you drop them very hard, cases are not needed anymore. Been using a Iphone 12 pro max for 4 years without a case, I don't even look twice and I drop it from the table.
A commenter complains that Apple uses a lot of adhesive inside their phones so they are not really a thing of beauty. Someone replies that it's because of water proofing. Another person points out that, no, actually plenty of companies make waterproof phones without using glue so Apple could. You tell them to go buy other another phone.
How is it in any way related to beautiful design, waterproofing and glue use in manufacturing?
Its cheaper to make something pretty, than good. Humans use this shortcut and have a hard time resisting it.
My experience opening an iphone box, giving all my personal information, and seeing the home screen of my work iphone was fun and exciting.
Then within a few minutes, the swiping/changing between apps was noticably slow, the podcast app had a bug in it, and it kept asking me to 'sign in' by typing my password. The illusion had broke, and its not like I was going to return the phone now.
Out of all the things to complain about with Apple software/hardware, I think quality isn't one of them. The devices and accompanying software are very high quality.
They're not repairable, they're quite restrictive, and they're perhaps too simple. But definitely high quality.
Idk, did the butterfly keyboards scream quality to you?
Did it say "we care about quality so much that we've very carefully designed and built these, and tested them extensively to ensure that our customers have a quality experience"? No, it did not.
Not only that but there has been a refusal to acknowledge almost every single critical flaw in Apple's products and when they're finally pressured to do so, they brush it off.
So it’s more expensive to make something ugly. Gotcha ;)
The slowness might be explained by the background tasks of restoring previously installed software and data. I have an iPhone 13 Pro with tons of apps and it’s still pretty snappy. But those specific bugs do pop up from time to time. Especially since they release new phones concurrently with new operating systems.
>So it’s more expensive to make something ugly. Gotcha ;)
What is the point of this? Does anyone enjoy this? Everyone knows what is being said based on the context?
>The slowness might be explained by the background tasks of restoring previously installed software and data.
No, it never went away. I had been coming from a Pixel, so I wasnt really forgiving about bugs, limited features, or slow animations. It felt like I bought an old phone. That + the otterbox really dispelled the illusion.
Otterbox is a meme. Might as well carve out a hole in a nerf football to stick your phone inside. The thin leather cases + glass screen protector do nearly just as much to protect the phone and also don't feel like garbage to use.
> its not like I was going to return the phone now.
Sounds like you're your own worst enemy here. You're well within the return window and could easily do so and replace it with, uh... well... let us know which mobile OS has more polish than iOS, I guess.
- working on cars (the torque "wrench" click is such a cue)
- dissembling electronics
- watching folks work on... mechanical watches
- unnecessary / creative uses for a CNC
all firing. I feel pandered to directly... and consider its a mostly silent video of someone replacing a nand chip, I'm not how to feel about that.
On a more constructive topic: Can the performance/endurance characteristics be modified by using better nand chips(a la ram)? Or does it have to an Apple blessed part?
Did you think that comment was suggesting replacing NAND with DRAM? I'm pretty sure it's just asking if there are varying speed grades of NAND the way there are varying speed grades of DRAM.
Reality sadly goes much further than your imagination.
Dumping without desoldering, reflashing in place, generally speaking if you think it's theorically possible, someone probably have tried. If they have your device, you have already lost.
Supply chain attacks to computers have been documented in various countries. I don't think attacking the iPhone's NAND is practical, though, as it would also need to somehow bypass the signature verification system of the CPU, and even then everything on the chip would be encrypted before it hits the flash.
It's possible that there are bootloader exploits, but fortunately you can't beat these devices as easily as you can on PC.
We know, from multiple leaks, that clandestine services from multiple countries, including the US and China, have supply chain attacks, where they intercept computing equipment and install hardware backdoors into it.
Intercept an iPhone, replace the 128GB storage with a 128GB storage and some extra rootkit. Or anything else really.
Seriously, made me think he was on beta-blockers or something to be so smooth. (insinuating PEDs were used for iPhone modding- we're through the looking glass here people. :P)
Is there a hardware restraint for why he chose just 1TB?
I'm seeing 2TB/4TB/8TB Nand Flash being sold online (the latter for a hefty ~$650). Is there anything stopping me from paying a professional like this to install an 8TB unit?
edit: I see those NAND flash models are supported by Macbooks. Perhaps I am mistaken in thinking an iPhone could support it.
Maybe it's a BIOS/firmware thing: replacing the RAM memory chips on a Steam Deck to 32GB total requires BIOS tweaks to recognize the chips. I assume in this case the motherboard may be trained to recognize up to 1TB, like the highest capacity model sold. 2TB+ may be too high density to "just work" out of the box.
I wonder what happens if you increase the storage beyond what is offered by Apple in one of the models. Will it just work as normal with 2TB/4TB/8TB? Or will the OS realize that something funky is going on and try to restrict it?
Storage controller for the NAND is on the SoC so it only works for specific configurations of NAND. Assuming it followed the pattern of the M series Mac’s.
I never understood why this was always seen as such a constraint. It’s three (or four) pins! It doesn’t even have to have the “hole” form factor. You could have them all in a straight line and then place a headphone jack AGAINST them. I always thought a magnetic TRRS set of pins along the side of a phone could work. Add a sleeve to the connector’s side too. Heck you could standardize a flattened TRRS or whatever that would still slip readily into a typical jack.
That was on the iPhone 7. Its internals really look like the decision to omit the headphone jack was made pretty late in the development cycle, so they replaced it with a useless piece of plastic.
I started watching this and as someone else commented, yeah, things looked doable at the start and then got progressively more impressive and insane. It's clear they know what they're doing. From the extremely intricate tools for each and every specific step, to the screwdriver that tightens only the exact amount when putting things back together, to - what! - CNC milling off an entire component?! I was so impressed. Surely their day job must be in some way related to assembling this phone?
The competition doesn't provide a product package that is superior for everyone's use case, so Apple users balance the trade-offs and decide they prefer Apple's products even with its caveats?
It's not like Pixel + Android, Samsung + Android, etc. produce objectively better products in every way.
For me, I can buy a phone that works and will work for 6-8 years with software updates. I'm on my second iPhone, an 11 pro, that I've had for 5 years at this point. I have to use an Android phone for work and we replace them every two years as the security updates stop.
It's hard to see but the original NAND is epoxied to the motherboard, which wouldn't come away easily with heat. I'm not sure what the purpose of the epoxy is but he goes to the trouble of replacing the epoxy later in the video so there must be a good reason for it.
I’ve seen some fascinating slo mo videos of devices bouncing from a decent fall in an X-ray machine. The battery in particular squishes way more than you think should be possible or right. Epoxy makes a ton of sense when you consider the shock that it takes.
The chip has an epoxy underfill. It softens slightly in the heat and desoldering is probably possible, but the amount of force required means you're likely to damage something in the process.
"CNC is the safest and most efficient way. Using a hot air gun to remove it normally will cause irreversible damage to other components on the motherboard."
Yet, he uses hot air gun to solder the new chip. There are ways to safely remove that old nand chip, but why would they show the state of the art methods?
Are there any manufacturers/standards that both pair parts to your phone (to make theft not worthwhile) but also allow authenticated unpairing of parts to your phone (to allow part reuse)? I am conflicted in that I like the idea of right to repair but I also like that locking things down helps fight phone theft.
I imagine that something like this ought to be feasible:
- the phone comes with a secret key baked into it
- upon installation of parts, some secret generated from that key is baked into some secret enclave in the part to “pair” the part with your device so it can’t be harvested
- the OS a provides a function to “unpair” a part with your phone that requires use of the secret key, so you can reuse that part elsewhere
- parts are sold “unpaired” and therefore can be used with any phone (maybe via some open protocol to allow many manufacturers to provide parts, not just the OEM)
With your idea, if my phone gets damaged to a point I can't access that function anymore, all of its parts are non-reusable and complete e-waste. IMO a better and less complicated solution would be to blacklist the serial numbers when a phone is reported stolen, and phones can check serial numbers against a server (if offline just assume the parts are fine for now). Parts should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around.
There's probably ways to break this system such as blacklisting the servers from your DNS and never connecting to any network other than your home, but it makes the phone much less practical to use and it only takes one slip-up for the phone to brick itself
I am personally willing to allow some e-waste to make theft not worthwhile, which is mostly just a difference in our values. But maybe there’s a variation that would allow for both.
Samsung Galaxy S5 from 2014. Headphone jack, SD card slot, and swappable battery. IP67 water resistant. Almost everything since then has been a regression.
You can get a Nikonos V underwater film camera around $300 on ebay these days too. Designed by Jacques Cousteau in the 1960s, can shoot under 150+ feet of water, and is supposedly a good all-around rugged outdoor camera as well. I'd sort of want one but I haven't used any of my film camera gear in years.
>After every charge and boot sequence, the [Galaxy S5] reminds the user to preserve the IP67 rating by securing the back cover and making sure the USB flap is closed.
Nobody wants to faff around with this stuff just in case today's going to be the day that they drop their phone in a puddle.
No doubt, but we're 10 years on, if we'd carried on down the path of swappable storage we'd probably also have solved these minor ux things - no USB flaps on modern waterproof phones f.ex
MicroSD cards go into the same slot the SIM cards go into. Unless Apple stopped taking SIM cards, there's going to be a bit that takes a sliver of plastic and metal. Clearly, Apple has already solved this problem, they just choose not to add the design complexity (and frankly, damage to their popcorn pricing model) of a microSD slot.
Apple has stopped taking SIM cards in US devices. Only the iPhones sold in Europe still have sim slots, and I assume those do worse in immersion testing.
bold assumption to make without sources or testing. Rubber gaskets are a thing and last time I had a sim slot on my iphone, they had one there.
I know immersion testing is about depth and time, but 99% of the time phones are in danger of water damage, we are talking about a 6' pool or a 6 inch bathtub/sink/toilet for 15 seconds, not being submerged in 100' of seawater for 10 days while SCUBA diving. A rubber gasket on a SIM tray does perfectly fine in these normal situations.
I think it takes a pretty tortured interpretation of reality to not acknowledge that Apple hates SD cards for one reason only: So they can sell additional storage for $100 per 128GB (and secondarily, because when people underestimate their needs, they're likely to either pay for expensive iCloud storage to compensate, or upgrade their otherwise perfectly working phone in a short time in order to get a bigger SSD. Apple wins in all cases.)
They're protecting their legendary, industry-leading margins. Which they're free to do. And we customers are free to deride them for their extreme stinginess.
A compromise would be having a slot inside the case. But we all know why they don't have any option to increase the storage to begin with. "That'll be an additional $500 for the upgrade please."
They're in the same tray as the SIM card, you don't see people crying for esims because of waterproofing. And a simple gasket around the port is enough for the IP68 or whatever kind of rating the iphones and co have nowadays
Terabyte nvmes selling for 60-80 dollars these days, and thats much higher than the prices last year. You’d be best off getting the top stuff though, I doubt Apple is using Chinese QLC, or bottom binned TLC.
I suppose 2230 NVMe drives are probably the best proxy because those use a single very dense NAND chip similar to the one in the iPhone. Those are around $100 for 1TB TLC, but that includes the NVMe controller and retail markup.
The industry uses bits rather than bytes. If you buy 1tb NAND from a factory or NAND dealer, you're going to get 128GiB (or perhaps even 125TiB) of storage. The conversion to bytes generally happens the moment products start being offered to end users.
Yes, it is flux (solid rosin). He vaporizes some with the iron and the smoke resolidifies on the contacts, so there is a very thin layer of flux to help with the soldering.
Interesting, I’ve never seen this before. How does it compare to regular gooey or liquid flux? Also how does it work? Just bringing a chunk of rosin next to a soldering iron would just vaporize the flux as seen on the video?
My grandfather who learned electronics work in the USSR worked with solid rosin.
When you touch the iron with the rosin, it starts smoking like incense at a church (same stuff actually), but a small amount remains on the tip. You transfer this to the contact you’re soldering, dip into the rosin again, and then solder as usual.
They're using a torque screwdriver, which ensures tightening to a specified torque to prevent excessive tightening. The "clicking" is made by the clutch that disengages once the preset torque has been reached.
It really is a shame no one has ever successfully added some form of small scale extendable storage to a phone that Apple could have copied so they are entirely forced to upsell you a phone 500$ more expensive so you can get extended storage at a five fold markup. Surely, if it was the case, customers would never stand being taken for such fools and would do something. /s
On a more serious tone, I hate Apple for the way they do their products segmentation. It's for me the best proof that the market is not competitive enough. Multiple screen support forcing you on the pro line, decently sized storage requiring you fork 500$, the stuborn refusal to allow tablet users a proper interface to not canibalize the laptop sales, it's outrageous what Apple can get away with. Not that their main competitors are shaking the boat much mind you. Oligopolies are awful.
At least, you can now record video directly to a usb-c connected hard drive but only in ProRes and no luck for photos (because f*** you that's why).
If you find this interesting you might also like repairing graphics cards and with that I mean stuff like fixing traces on the inner layers of the board. I just picked the first search result [1], not sure if that one is especially interesting or not.
I'm astonished that it works! To my understanding, the 128GB has specifications for how to "talk" to it on its datasheet and same with the 1TB. Do they have the same manufacturer for them to have the same pinout?
And, how come they're the same size lol. Intuitively, I'd expect the 1TB to be way bigger.
Generally most memory uses standardized physical/electrical/firmware interfaces from JEDEC, an industry consortium. I do not know for certain if the iPhone memory is standard.
Mobile RAM/Flash packages are usually made in larger capacities by stacking several dies within a package. This can involve die thinning - grinding the dies thinner so they fit within the same space after stacking.
1TB storage comes from another donor iPhone apparently so it makes sense it just fits and works. I guess Apple didn't think of matching them to specific motherboards so you can still reuse them
Is this economically viable or just a show-off? Because considering the skilled labour and equipment, I’m not sure it’d be much cheaper than the $500 upgrade.
It's not economically viable because the NANDs come from donor systems. Apple prevents the NAND oem from selling to anyone but them. It's part of their anti right to repair strategy.
I don't have an answer but you can upgrade your existing phone you already bought using that method/service. Otherwise cost of official "upgrade" is $500 and a new iphone
To be completely honest I'm surprised; I would've thought that Apple would have locked it down such that the part can't just be replaced and immediately work. Guess for them it's just not worth it given that doing this swap out isn't all that popular in the first place (because of effort).
Chinese market iPhones are different SKU and have been for a long time. Originally it was for different kinds of SIM but that's not relevant anymore. Maybe a regulatory thing.
Empty spaces are resonant spaces, and this can be heard when the phone's speaker(s) are playing sounds and/or the microphones are microphoning. Mechanically damping resonances is always superior to handling them with DSP -- a DSP doesn't need to account for resonances that simply aren't problematic to begin with, freeing it for other duties.
Such resonances can also be heard when handling the phone -- even when it is off. Tapping on the phone and hearing/feeling a dull, well-damped thud inspires more of a perception of solidity than a lingering resonance does, even though such foam itself contributes nothing to to the structure of the device at all.
Even back in the iPod days, one of the stated goals of the designers at Apple was to make their handhelds feel like a singular piece, like something that naturally grows that way (think fruits, crystals, etc) instead of disparate pieces tenuously held together. An impression of solidity falls in line with that idea.
I'm surprised Apple didn't hardcode the NAND capacity based on the model number, so even though he installs 1TB it'll still only allow 128GB to be used.
That's a bullshit video. The guy conducting the tests doesn't know enough about how SSDs work or about how Macs boot to be drawing conclusions, especially not such strongly negative conclusions. He would have had to at the very least attempt a tethered restore from DFU (as is done for these phone storage swaps or any other situation where the NAND is blank or thoroughly corrupted) before concluding that Apple has everything totally locked down.
Adding the second drive module is something that we should not expect to work the way he tested it. Plugging in a second hard drive to a desktop does not magically give you a RAID-0 without extra steps; expecting this from SSDs doesn't make any more sense. And without reverse engineering the machine config from the quoted prices, we don't even know if the two modules had the same capacity, let alone the same type and manufacturer of NAND (which is probably important if the system is going to treat the two modules as one SSD instead of exposing them to the OS as one drive).
> Adding the second drive module is something that we should not expect to work
Hard disagree. This approach works for just about any normal storage medium. Apple decided to Think Different about where the SSD controller lives and works and how storage pinouts work, but their weird approach wasn't publicly documented anywhere until people like this guy started trying.
Uninitialised storage would've normally showed up just like that, as uninitialised storage, ready to be partitioned. Instead, the device didn't even turn on, let alone show the added flash storage in a partitioning tool.
You're still thinking of the storage modules as standalone SSDs to be managed by software, rather than devices hidden behind hardware RAID.
I did almost exactly the same kind of drive-swapping tests with the WD Black AN1500 [0] in an Intel PC, with the same results in terms of whether the system can boot from the device, but none of that supports the conclusion that Western Digital is locking down what drives can be used behind that RAID controller. You can swap drives on the AN1500, but almost any such operation will require you to erase and reinstall.
Confusion is understandable here because such technicalities were not officially documented and the community had not figured it out at such an early point.
phone storage hasn't mattered to me in years, what do you guys need the huge storage these days? the bulk of my data in the past was photos and videos, but now those are uploaded to the cloud and i instantly delete from my local phone.
If you have the know how and the discipline to maintain proper backup strategy, then local storage(@ home) always wins over cloud in terms of pricing, flexibility or freedom.
What about for a whole family of iPhone users? I've got the 2TB cloud plan which my elderly parents are on, my kids are on and me and my wife are on which is letting us get away with the smallest class of storage for each device we have.
Fair question! To figure this out, you could calculate the price per GB that you're paying and that you would pay for local and compare the two values. Cloud storage can and often does have a better deal in instances like yours!
With that said, your instance is just your instance, and for swathes of people it will be cheaper to have local storage. Them having the option of local storage wouldn't hurt you, so I would hope for their sake you would still support giving them that choice.
With all the celebrity leaks, hundreds of them (remember the fappening?), I don’t believe the encryption is the problem. It’s usually social engineering or cracking a password that leads to these leaks.
I like having things stored locally. I'm not always in a spot with great reception, so waiting for a video to load from google photos or whatever isn't an option.
Many models of many GB each on a phone with only 8GB of DRAM doesn't make sense. Even on Android phones that have more DRAM than that, there's not enough performance for large models to be useful, let alone multiple models consuming tens of GB of storage.
> Many models of many GB each on a phone with only 8GB of DRAM doesn't make sense.
> there's not enough performance for large models to be useful
For iPhone, the Private LLM app offers 44 models in its easy-install menu right now (on 15 promax), with avg model size about 2.7 GB.
Total GB is ~120 GB to install and compare them all.
People could argue about what being useful means, but asking these different models the same question can give quite different (and indeed thought-provokingly different) results.
They all have either different foundations or different fine tuning or something. The same prompt gives rather different answers depending on what model you pick. It's fun that way.
So to compare their outputs, one would need 120GB free at once, then install them all, or else do some very inefficient and weird dance of uninstall-then-reinstall n times while picking and choosing which ones to try out for a given prompt.
And that's just for one offline "gen AI" app. There might be others.
This can be done offline, while on a walk, or whatever, without hitting any servers at all, in the palm of one's hand. Performance is good enough on iPhone for a bunch of tasks/prompts.
So, IDK. Does part of that not make sense? These models not being run run at once, and don't need to be in RAM at once. They're being stored on disk at once to be used when wanted. They initialize one at a time when in use. The large disk size is for storing the models. The phone can then use the models when wanted.
(Granted, it's not the "same" as hitting huge versions of the models sitting on some beefy infra, but we're talking about mobile devices here and actual current uses for having a bunch of local storage available on them.)
So what I'm hearing is that you don't have a use case for having 44 LLMs on your phone simultaneously, aside from testing different LLMs for the sake of testing different LLMs. There's no way a user would want to keep all 44 LLMs around indefinitely; nobody could possibly remember which one they prefer for which type of query across that many models. I can believe there are uses for having a handful of models around and for trying out new ones when they become available, but I can't see many users bothering to thoroughly evaluate dozens of models at once.
We're getting away from the point. What does it matter what the specific use case is? Who are you to be the arbiter of a valid or invalid use case? This one guy didn't justify himself to fulfill your arbitrary personal requirements; I guess that means nobody should even have the option of removable storage and that we should all be okay with paying an extra few hundred dollars for five more gigabytes of space on our phones (or whatever the insane going rate is now).
> What does it matter what the specific use case is?
Recall where the thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41631782 A question about what use cases people have for large amounts of storage on phones, aside from photos and videos that are easily offloaded to the cloud. When someone replies that they need tons of storage for LLMs, it's quite reasonable to want to understand where that need comes from, how much storage is actually needed for that use case, and whether it's anything that could become popular enough to influence product design decisions or if it's something that will only ever be done by HN nerds. If the best use cases HN can come up with for more storage on phones are things that are unlikely to go mainstream, then we should be assuming that phone manufacturers aren't going to be feeling much pressure to change their storage strategies.
Complaints about product design choices rarely produce interesting discussion when they can be reduced down to the complainer not making the distinction between their personal usage patterns and those of the target market in general. LLMs are still a very new class of workloads for phones, and what an early-adopter HN user is doing with LLMs on a phone could be a preview of an emerging trend that may go mainstream—very on-topic for HN discussion. But in this case it looks more like a use case that will forever remain an outlier.
(It's totally okay to be an outlier and do things with your gadgets that hardly anyone else would choose to do or even think of doing.)
Intuitively you shouldn't even need to ask this question though. There are a billion and a half iPhone users out there. Numbers at this scale can be tricky to comprehend, but the takeaway should be that even if just 10% of users want the option (an extremely conservative estimate), that's still 150 million people with a need. That's more people than there are HN viewers (not just users) there are per day, several times over, so this is absolutely not a need only floated by "HN nerds." Hell, even 1% of the iPhone userbase vastly outnumbers HN by every metric. There is obviously demand, and I mean popular, non-nerd demand. Ask your friends or parents if they would like more space on their iPhone or if they have ever had to delete an app to make space for another or if they have ever been reluctant to install an app because it was too big. A very common one I see especially with older folks is that they take too many pictures and agonize over deleting some to get more space, and yes, they could use iCloud, but they're very old and hardly understand software, much less as a subscription service. Much easier for their grandkid to pop in a 2 TB micro SD and call it a day (not to mention several times cheaper, but let's get to that next!). This is not up for debate, demand absolutely exists at a massive scale.
You are right however that "manufacturers [specifically Apple] aren't going to be feeling much pressure" to change their design because right now they are absolutely gouging the general public and making hundreds of millions of dollars off of it. An iPhone 16 Pro 128 GB is $1000, and a TB is $1500. They are selling less than a terabyte of space for five hundred dollars, over five times the cost of a gold standard 1 TB micro SD which costs under $100. If you opt for iCloud you pay almost a thousand dollars a year, well over 10x as much as a micro SD. Of course there is no pressure to divert from their current model: They're getting away with highway robbery. Scale that to the 150 million or so people with a valid need for storage (again, this is an extremely conservative estimate) and you have numbers in the billions. They will ABSOLUTELY ignore a valid need and never fix the problem of not offering a reasonable storage method if their insane storage method results in so much money.
> but the takeaway should be that even if just 10% of users want the option (an extremely conservative estimate),
Do you mean 10% of iPhone users want to keep a few dozen LLMs on their phone (obvious bullshit), or that in aggregate at least 10% of iPhone users would buy more storage if it was cheaper (to say nothing of the customers who always buy the most expensive config as conspicuous consumption)?
I meant 10% of iPhone users have a valid need for additional storage space. That can mean LLMs or just having a lot of apps or photos. If you had read past the first sentence you would have known that...
i use android and google photos because it's really cool to auto match faces of my friends and family.
but think about it, how crazy that someone can steal your phone and you would be totally fucked, priceless memories lost forever. now with cloud that's a non-issue no?
It doesn't have to be one or the other. Apple/Google can permanently lock you out of your iCloud account at any instant. You can only be sure of access to your data if it is physically on you.
And if you encounter pickpockets or get mugged, you won't have access to that data either. And don't forget to worry about natural disasters taking out your home.
I don't know if anyone can offer something like that seriously. And I don't mean it badly. Technically, a conversion including warranty would certainly be possible. But would it work commercially?
Impressive work on undoing the Apple engineering and unnecessarily soldered component. The CNC grinding guarantees this is out of reach for many people.
The blatant greedy decisions Apple makes is what has turned me away from their devices in general. Been winding down my usage for a few years now and aging out my current devices.
I am on that path as well, considering how filthy rich they are, the greed is not just unreasonable it's a complete fuck you to the customer.
If it was just on the phone I wouldn't care as much (can get away with buying less often or second hand) but the reproduction of the models on the Macs is just inacceptable since everything is soldered.
I wouldn't mind paying a bit of premium on RAM/storage but it is just a big "fuck you", because we can, at the moment.
Considering how fast they are obsoleting older hardware (just because they can) it doesn't even make sense to pretend that you will recoup the cost over time (won't last twice as long as less expensive PC).
And macOS is aging poorly, feeling the effects of neglect and doubling down on fully closed strategy.
Apple doesn't have to care because they have new customers that don't care about any of that; it's mostly people that buy entry level hardware though, which is kind of hilarious when you think about their luxury strategy (mass market "luxury" is so dumb).
Now, to be honest I have still some hopes left for the upcoming M4 devices (sales have slowed to a stop, so they have the signal) but still I'm doubt the pricing will make sense.
It's just sad because Apple has more money than it knows what to do with productively, it's just a terribly managed company nowadays contrary to what the idiots who believe stock price is everything (imaginary value) like to think.
User capture+lock in. I mean every sane minded person runs away from the iphone ecosystem when the first how can I get this file out from my phone and why it's such a mess experience kicks in.
All of those phones still have soldered storage as their primary storage. Removable primary storage isn't really a thing for smartphones, so calling it an "unnecessarily soldered component" is an extraordinary claim presented without any evidence. There's no standard removable storage form factor that's small enough to use inside smartphones that offers adequate performance for what's typical of today's smartphone operating systems and applications. microSD cards are fine for storing photos and videos (more for reading than sustained writing), but are horrible for random access and the performance gap between microSD and the soldered primary storage in phones is only getting wider.
> There's no standard removable storage form factor that's small enough to use inside smartphones that offers adequate performance for what's typical of today's smartphone operating systems and applications.
The question is why? I doubt that there are technical reasons.
Looks like the UFS card interface only has one lane, but phones have been using two lanes for more performance for a long time. Samsung is planning a four-lane UFS solution for next year, but it's not clear whether that's intended for phones or laptops (their Snapdragon X Elite laptop uses UFS rather than NVMe). And the removable UFS cards standards have tended to lag behind by a few years on link speed, so it's really a 4x discrepancy in bandwidth between soldered UFS and removable UFS cards.
In theory, something like UFS cards could have performance parity with soldered UFS (at least for the link speed; not sure if a package that small is adequate from a power/thermal perspective when stuffed with 1TB of NAND). But UFS cards have been dead on arrival in the market several times now, so it's understandable that nobody wants to try an even more ambitious version in the hopes that it can finally catch on.
I think UFS might catch on if Samsung started cooperating with Samsung and Samsung to build a Samsung phone that would take Samsung UFS cards. Alas, I fear this can never happen, as Samsung wouldn't want Samsung's products to compete with their own storage tiers.
The problem with microSD vs UFS is that microSD is actually more than fast enough for most use cases if you buy good cards. Random I/O on SD cards is rarely a requirement even of phones with SD cards in them. Most of the time it's just bulk writing or reading video files and downloads.
I was also blown away at CNC grinding step. Perhaps he did it because heat gun would have impacted other parts of the PCB. With grinding the impact was limited to Nand chip only. He eventually had to use heat to cleanup the residue.
You also need to be pretty precise with attaching the phone in an exact position, and grinding things with a very low margin of error, say, 0.05 mm along the vertical axis, in order to remove the chip but leave the PCB intact. Not for the faint of the heart.
I suppose they have had several training rounds using badly broken phones first.
Yrs, as long as the milling machine is adequate. Hobby-level CNC devices may have harder time doing that, and pro / industrial devices cost many times the iPhone.
Yes, the flash chips are approximately the same in their mechanical properties. Milling speed, debris removal, depth of milling to keep the PCB intact, treatment of the PCB.afterwards to clear it and attach another chip. It all is best done several times on dead bodies before attempting a modification of the expensive target phone.
> Perhaps he did it because heat gun would have impacted other parts of the PCB
Most of all the components on the other side of the PCB.
Even if the NAND was not additionally covered in resin, due to the large amount of contacts (and probably large amount of grounded pins, which dissipate heat faster), alot of heat would be needed. More than the smaller components underneath need to just fall off then...
The components underneath shouldn't fall off. The surface tension of the solder should be enough to keep them in place. (That's how it's generally possible to reflow solder components to two sides of a board.)
Of course, reflowing the components in an ad-hoc way is quite likely to cause other problems, so it's probably still a good idea to avoid it.
With only hot air you would need a lot of heat and pulling, potentially displacing other parts nearby, because it seems like the nand flash is not just soldered, but additionally glued with some kind of adhesive.
Fwiw, you can get a desktop CNC for a few hundred dollars (I mean they're very similar to 3d printers in design). You can get pretty good ones for under $5k.
But yeah, getting that chip off with just heat looks pretty hard without affecting anything else. I'd still want a heat sink to pull away heat from other parts but I'm not at this skill level and overly cautious. But this does look doable.
And since it's HN, I do encourage everyone to give more repair a go. Things like micro soldering are easier than you think. And remember than your phones can be turned into servers (raspberry pi? How about my old nexus?). Though I'd love to hear if people know how to do this stuff on iPhones because I plan on switching over. I guess no more bash scripting for automatic backup of all my photos and stuff to my server :'( someone please tell me there's a way )':
> Though I'd love to hear if people know how to do this stuff on iPhones
Very little in the realm of "server" or "raspberry pi alternative" could be done with modern iPhones despite even a 2-year old iphone being OP in terms of hardware for most home server tasks. They really work hard to prevent any use besides what's officially blessed by Tim Apple himself. Whether that's "for your own good" or not is a matter of opinion, I happen to think it's lame but don't want to debate it.
I'm not too worried about old iPhones since by then it's pretty likely to be jail broken and no issues there. I mean even if I brick it (and somehow can't recover; so, very unlikely) it was going to be e-waste anyways, right? As far as recycling goes, turning your old phone into a server is a big win.
But I'm more interested in being able to use my current bash scripts that run on my Pixel. Backup is really the only important one since I can connect to my computers from anywhere to do anything else
Some of us do do this stuff with iPhones, and it’s do-able, sort of - TrollStore (available up to iOS 17.0 currently) + NewTerm/bootstrap gives you a native CLI, add Filza in there and you can do almost whatever you need (with some manual work). I must admit, it’s much easier/potentially more functional on iOS 16 and earlier, but what can you do…
I've been playing with iSH and aShell on my iPad. I'm not particularly happy with them and there seems to be a big lack of documentation (e.g. the `mount -t ios idintmatter dest` was quite odd and I think surprising to anyone that's terminally terminal)
Idk if I'll feel comfortable jailbreaking a new 16, but yeah apple is fucking weird.
==== Apple engineers, I know you're here ====
What the fuck guys? I want to throw a match case into my ssh config based on the SSID of the network I'm on (I can't rely on IP being static).
- Airport
Deprecated.
- networksetup
Not associated with AirPort network
- wdutil
Not only requires sudo, but you redact the SSID. To a root user‽‽‽
- ioreg -ln Airport driver | perl -lne 'print $1 if $_ =~ /IO80211SSID.*"(.*)"/;'
Redacted
- system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | awk '/Current Network/ {getline;$1=$1;print $0 | "tr -d ':'";exit}'
Takes 10 seconds to run but at least it fucking works and doesn't require sudo!
What
The
ᵃⁿᵈ ⁱ ᵈᵒⁿ'ᵗ ᵐᵉᵃⁿ ᵗʰⁱˢ ˡⁱᵍʰᵗˡʸ
FUCK
‽‽‽
Seriously! What is going on here? Why are you __hostile__ to shell users‽ I don't know how to tell you that knowing the SSID of a machine that you already have access to is not a security risk. Seriously, what is going on here? I have a dozen ways to do this on Linux and you redact it with a sudo command but not with a user level command? Come on..... Have some balls and stand up to your bosses
Try `ipconfig getsummary en0`. It's instant on my machine and dumps plenty of info about the current state of the connection, including the SSID and BSSID.
I have been amazed at how little information there is about this. Maybe I just don't know the right areas to look. But I tried google, reddit, stack, several LLMs[0] and never once did I come across ipconfig. Where should I be looking?
[0] Of course LLMs were just repeating the same stuff as reddit and SO and would continually forget that airplay got deprecated despite being in the prompt and me telling them multiple times after it suggested it over and over....
I use Windows, Mac, and Linux systems regularly, and frequently get ipconfig and ifconfig mixed up. So I was vaguely aware that both commands existed on macOS and your comment prompted me to try both to see if either exposed the SSID.
Thanks, I didn't know any this. I'll look into it more.
But I'm still just confused by the decisions being made over at Apple. I understand hand holding those who don't know much but they do realize that the reason their device is so common among engineers is because it's not too dissimilar from Linux, right? Why attack power users? What's being gained? That's what I don't get.
I long ago concluded that the overlap with Apple products and power tech user desires was a happy coincidence, and/or a hangover of their past, rather than an indication of their future.
The Mac is the exception in their current product lineup: every other platform is heavily locked down, and the user’s behaviour heavily restricted.
I strongly believe the Mac is heading in the same direction. See the progression from run what you want, to optional signing of binaries, to right click to run unsigned things, to disable a setting to be able to run unsigned binaries; or “worse”, the way spctl and csrutil no longer function after deploying Sequoia.
I mean I hate Windows more and that's the choice unfortunately. I'd love a Linux arm book though.
I do think part of the problem is not enough engineers asking their bosses why. Or not enough engineers thinking decisions through. I hope to god it's not a lack of engineers that are power users because that's even worse in many ways, but I wouldn't be surprised.
> And remember than your phones can be turned into servers
I wouldn't turn a cell phone into a server without also disabling the wireless chipsets somehow. Knowing that some unknown number of people working for your phone manufacturer, your wireless carrier, and Google or Apple have privileged access, including the the ability to remote into your phone at any time and add/delete/modify files and install software, without any notice or even indication to you that something has been done isn't the kind of security/privacy I'd want on a server.
It happens all the time on the OS/carrier/manufacturer side. I've personally seen settings reverted, software installed without notice, etc. It's a lot harder to say what any random cell tower in range is able to do but the chipsets are closed source and have their own OS.
Manufacturers and carriers have had it in their terms of service that they can do it.
Here's what tmobile had in their ToS:
We may remotely change software, systems, applications, features or programming on your Device without notice. These changes will modify your Device and may affect or erase data you have stored on your Device, the way you have programmed your Device, or the way you use your Device. You will not be able to use your Device during the installation of the changes, even for emergencies.
On a 5+ year old device that no longer has a data plan? T-Mobile's TOS doesn't apply during that time.
Plus, you know this is about software updates, right? It's generic but that's what it's about. Yes, upgrading means removing files at times as things get refactored or become obsolete, but they're not going to touch your main data, not that software isn't shitty and accidents happen.
While technically it would be a CNC machine, desktop CNC are really just routers, and for most of them even soft materials like aluminium push them, requiring crazy spindle speeds for the tiny endmills they can handle due to the limited stiffness. And those high speeds create horrible fine metal dust
Yes you can but operating one CNC without major snafus takes some practice and selecting the proper bit and speeds for such a delicate operation isn't exactly easy. It is actually very easy to puncture the iPhone through and through.
Sure, but I don't think it is as hard as people make it out to be. It definitely is a tool you should not take lightly and use precaution with. But people act like vim or baking bread is really hard. Sure, mastery of them takes quite a long time, but ability to do at a competent level is more dependent on if one can read instructions than time or skill.
Meh, I replaced the battery in a 1st gen (2016) iphone SE, per the ifixit instructions. The home pushbutton didn't work afterwards. Repeated disassembly and reassembly didn't help. No useful advice on ifixit forum. Unclear what if anything to try next. Luckily the phone was long obsolete by then, so replaced. Repairability of these things sucks and I miss swappable batteries.
The EU requirement is pretty weak and it basically says you can take the phone apart and replace the battery without iphone-like hassle levels. So when the battery reaches EOL, you can order a new battery and do the repair yourself at home. What I miss is being able to swap batteries whenever you feel like it, with no tools, like you would with a flashlight. That means you don't have to mess with power banks or worry about your phone's charge level. Just carry a spare, charged battery with you. I'm old enough to remember when basically all mobile phones were like that.
we live in the future, just start recording video of everything. You probably have an old cellphone you could use, and you'll wish you had more angles if you do end up being to go back into the footage for something
I think that would make it a multi-person job. Keeping the relevant part in focus while you’re manipulating the device distracts from figuring out what to do next.
Doesn't really adress the basic problem, most old phones (and many new phones) don't have the sort of macro autofocus you'd need to keep a video recording at a high enough fidelity to keep track of millimetre-sized objects. Looking at various youtubers, even with semi-professional gear it can be a multi-second struggle to focus on much larger pieces of mechanical devices.
Do that for 20-30 steps and you need an assistant or two to not lose track of what you're doing, and spend an hour in post editing out all the times you side tracked fighting the camera.
I wouldn't have thought to do it, but after seeing it, i think I could do this on a Bridgeport. I'm only so-so at machining, but I can make a Bridgeport grind with great precision in a rectangle!
I was actually thinking the same thing; a maintained milling machine can easily grind at those tolerances. Get your Z level be the most important so you don't cut too deep into the solder pads.
The being said, I'm wondering if he used something like a cheap SainSmart CNC... sounded like a dentist drill
Even so, the solder pads are surely at least like 0.05 to 0.1mm thick, across the size of the 2cm chip that shouldn't be hard at all to get level enough
> Disconnect dozens of cables and parts – wow, it's going to be hard to remember how everything goes back together.
It's not going to be hard. You won't even need to note where everything goes. The sizes of the cables/parts are different and as a result you'll be able to match them up.
If you visit cities in China that are heavily invested in the electronics industry you could buy a cheaper iPhone 16 pro with 128GB and upgrade it to 1TB.
But if you do that regularly, you probably have the money to buy the 1TB version outright.
