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.
When people stop robbing phones for them to end up in Shenzen and stripped for parts, this will stop. This is a deterrent to make stealing iPhones less convenient and I’m all for it.
People already have to try to phish people’s iCloud details after stealing their devices to resell, costing them time and money and making it more annoying to try and steal.
I do think people who want to repair their phone should have access to a version without this stuff and deal with the consequences themselves.
For everyone else, including myself, please continue to make it annoying for thieves to target iPhones.
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.
And there’s no way for Apples policy to fuel theft when the stolen phone and parts from that phone can’t be used for anything. You might have had a point a few years ago when they neither sold parts nor did the pairing stuff.
I think they’re moving in the right direction. But like many here have pointed out they should allow you to unpair parts in a phone you own.
There are comments here from people who have been robbed at gunpoint and forced to unlock their phone and disconnect it from iCloud. I think Apple could solve it by making it a 24 hour process that can be reversed. But that just illustrates that it’s actually a hard problem to solve properly.
I don’t care at all about 3rd party parts. I’ve been burned too many times. It’s not environmentally friendly if you buy a brand new shitty part that you end up discarding along with the phone a few months later because the part was bad. Just force Apple to sell good quality genuine parts at a low price. The sum of the parts should equal the price of the phone. Yes that will be unprofitable for Apple, but governments can force it through regulation in the name of sustainability
If they stop selling parts then they should be forced to disable parts pairing for that model… then relying on 3rd party market as a fallback is an fallback
The problem with SSR is that they give you the shit AASPs/Genius Bar gets, which is finished assemblies designed to be swapped out by low-skill workers for minimum wage. This dramatically increases the price of the repair because you're now swapping out a large number of components instead of just one.
Louis Rossmann used to beat Apple on the price of repair specifically by desoldering individual chips and swapping them, which is far cheaper per repair. But it's more expensive to train workers to do this kind of repair, and Apple doesn't like paying for skilled labor in America, so they just make the consumer eat the cost of whole assemblies.
At the same time Apple has also insisted on locking down their supply chains so that you cannot buy factory original components at all. They don't want you to be able to buy the chips that go into their phones, because they're worried you might pull a Strange Parts and cobble together a whole iPhone out of them.
It's oddly convenient how all of these things - the need to stop iPhone chop-shopping, the need to stop product cloning, and the need to have cheap labor costs - all just so happen to result in a really shitty repair experience that makes buying a new one always the best option.
> they give you the shit AASPs/Genius Bar gets, which is finished assemblies designed to be swapped out by low-skill workers for minimum wage
> all just so happen to result in a really shitty repair experience
You're saying getting genuine parts and instructions directly from Apple that are simple for a low-skill person to install is a shitty repair experience?
All this uproar is about is needing to contact Apple for them to link the part to my phone. How is that a shitty experience?
> You're saying getting genuine parts and instructions directly from Apple that are simple for a low-skill person to install is a shitty repair experience?
He's saying when the screen doesn't work because a 1/5 penny transistor broke he'd rather pay $15 in labor for the tech to replace it than >$15 for a new screen assembly.
And related, people are saying they'd rather be able to pay the $15 in labor when Apple End-of-Lifes the device and no longer produces that assembly.
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 just because. There just weren’t letting repairability getting in the way of the design and aesthetic they want, and I think it’s fine for them to have this opinion. They couldn’t achieve both so they biased towards design, and look to slowly iterate towards repairability compromising as little on design as possible.
I think inventing a new screw would be a design thing? In a perfect world a screw that is easily replaced and allows them the design they want would be used.
However if that doesn’t exist, as an engineer, I am aware of the concept of tradeoffs and ever since that company has existed they’ve always biased towards design.
They would rather 1mm of thinness or an angle a specific shape and if that means that this normally standard screw won’t fit, then “oh well”. Like I said above, it’s an opinion. My FairPhone has the opposite opinion where everything in the design was made around repairability.
Both of them have different, diverse, opinions on what design is. Neither are right or wrong, per se. That’s why the market is so awesome, go to the stall that fits your need, don’t try to make all the stalls make the same thing.
The “security” feature is the serialisation of said screws, no? Even if they were standard and freely available, the serialisation would still cause this issue. Unless it’s somehow not possible to serialise a standard screw but I don’t know how that would differ from the process of doing it to custom screws.
Elon Musk seems to think this way, and every other car manufacturer has let this cancer metastasize in otherwise perfectly fine EV designs because dealers won't sell a car without something to keep people coming back every six months for maintenance.
> 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.
>> When people stop robbing phones for them to end up in Shenzen and stripped for parts, this will stop.
Once such practice is started it will never stop. If it benefits Apple why would they wver stop it.
Thieves have existed since forever. There are many things which get stolen and don't integrate such protection and people live with that. No tech things like gold bars, gold rings with diamonds. Some people simply look after their stuff. And it is possible to buy insurance, tracking devices, lock boxes and other services to help.
I’ve heard that take many times, but is there any actual data to back this claim? I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is or how to tell iPhone models apart to know which ones to steal. They steal your purse, bag or just anything and sight and only then deal with the loot, discarding what’s useless. I would be very surprised if serializing the battery or screen is putting any significant dent in the number of stolen iPhones worldwide.
Apple has already created a pretty good deterrent to prevent iPhone theft - the Find My iPhone system. It’s better because it’s actually useful to the user and works even if you turn the phone off. The way I see it there’s absolutely no need to serialize the parts as an additional measure to prevent theft (given also what I said in the first paragraph)
> I mean think about it - your average thief is not the kind of person that will know what part setialization is
It doesn't matter. The market will dictate behaviour. As soon as the value of iPhone parts drops at the end of the chain (Shenzhen et. al) this will propagate all the way up to the street criminals.
Perhaps they will not discriminate by iPhone submodel (will not matter after a while of the serialisation policy), but they will (and do) discriminate by brand.
Much smartphone theft includes robbers grabbing the phone out of unsuspecting victims' hands, forcing them to surrender it at gunpoint, or pickpocketing it.
I don’t know if there’s data to back this up. I’m simply assuming based on what I know. What I know comes from people I went to school with who have stolen phones before telling me at the pub. There is a price for the type of device you bring in. The ones on the bikes or mugging people actually drop it off to the people who send stuff off to China. Those people give a standard price for the type of phone, he quoted £100 for an iPhone 11 and £120 for a Samsung Galaxy.
He corroborates your point regarding not discriminating the phone he stole, to be fair.
Making the parts useless won't immediately stop theft, sure. It's the same with making catalytic converters hard/impossible to fence. People still steal them, because they're working off an older state of the world. But once you've stolen enough stuff that you couldn't market, you figure out not to steal that anymore. (Although if you're stealing bags, harvesting cash and throwing the bags in the river, phones in the bags are still gone)
Regarding your second point, I agree with the Find My praise, however Find My itself illustrates why every little thing done to make it “more of a ballache” to steal an iPhone, more costly for the thieves, is reducing the demand and these “papercuts” can add up in a sizeable way.
But your point is valid, and I can understand why you hold that opinion.
When this eventually makes it to “basically every iphone out there”, and thieves stop being able to go to the local repair shop to trade in the iphone they stole for a wad of cash, they will stop targeting people with iphones.
I take it you’ve never been to an impoverished area? Holding an iphone paints a massive target on your back.
Best phone I ever owned. A small phone with a great camera, all the modern niceties (Face ID, fast processor), and a beautiful design. I'll keep this baby until its final legs.
I owned the 13 pro. Gave it to my daughter and bought a 13 mini for myself. I don't see how anybody carries around the bigger model in their pockets, but maybe that's just me.
Many people use their phone as their primary or even sole computer. I think many things would be hard if the screen were too small.
But I mainly use my phone to quickly glance at things, use a map, and a few things like that. And occasionally talking. So I'm with you: less is more. These days I often go out without the phone and just use my watch. Works great.
I had one of the "megaphones" (plus sized) for a while and it was horrible.
That's a very accurate representation of the battery life, however the reality is that it has the best battery life of any phone with that size + performance combo on the market for my usage - its just that more "regular" sized phones blow it out of the water.
Edit: I negate this somewhat with a Magsafe magnetic wireless battery.
I suspect there's a Parkinson's Law like effect at play. Phones increase battery capacity to meet demands of software which expand to fill available battery life. If a phone is going to have a smaller battery, which is a necessity for a SFF device, it can't be expected to perform the same tasks at the same speed as a full-size phone. But I haven't heard of any OS adapting in such a way. Power management is optimized for the average which is larger than the mini. And not only the OS but the user has to adapt to expect a more frugal experience with a small phone. I don't see that attitude with a lot of people. Nor do I believe advertisers would be happy with a platform that has "use fewer apps" has a selling point.
For the ability to comfortably use my phone one handed, I found the battery trade-off worth it.
But I don’t really travel far enough with just what’s on my person for it to be noticeable. At the very least I have a small bag, and some form of small power bank has always been in there. The 12 Mini charges incredibly fast in my perspective.
I was stubborn enough to use an iPhone SE until almost the release of the 12 Mini, and that thing has atrocious charging speed and battery life. But back then I was just amazed at how much better it was than the 5 I’d been holding out with previously.
Sure it was a downgrade from the X I used for 6 months battery wise, but I just never got used to the size. Maybe the long battery life was partially because I hated and avoided using it the whole time.
TLDR: Every 4-5 years Apple releases another small phone, and I generally refuse to upgrade until then.
My understanding is that it’s the preferred way for a lot of frontend engineers to build their experiences. It gives a lot of freedom and reduces entire classes of bugs due to the type system.
Edit: to elaborate; “a lot of freedom” means an entire schema instead of pre-negotiated contracts, potentially reducing back and forth between frontend and backend.
Yep. Imagine an api scheme that matches the underlying normalized database structures. In order to render a view, you may need dozens of calls to different services to gather all of the data you need. Some places have been moving towards backend for front end (BFF) as a way of providing a better abstraction layer for UI development and some have been exploring GraphQL where the data can be combined and aggregated within call as dictated by the front end. I will say that the time I’ve spent working on front ends with a good graphql implementation were much more efficient and reduced overhead of dealing with more typical API interfaces.
This isn’t something I’d rush into though. There is real overhead in managing graphql and in my opinion is best suited for extremely large API spaces that most companies simply don’t have to deal with. Microsoft and their graphql implementation is one where I see it as a better option than hundreds if not thousands of different services with different endpoints.
I believe older iPhones still get security updates for a very long time. Much longer than 5 years, making them one of the longest-term supported devices on the market currently.
It has one of the worst screens of any handheld gaming device I own. I prefer my Switch OLED, but will be very excited for a future version of the Steam Deck with a screen that isn’t utter garbage. I understand some people don’t mind, but I just can’t immerse myself into the games I play with that bad of a screen.
I know it's only a band-aid but have you tried vibrantDeck [0]?
It won't make your screen look like OLED but it definitely helps bring out the colours.
I do hope someone comes up with an OLED replacement screen for it, hopefully with thinner bezels (like the Switch did between the original and the OLED) but I find the OEM one pretty adequate.
Because a huge amount of value in AirBnB is its reviews.
That’s how you’re supposed to know where is worth staying and where isn’t.
If those can’t be trusted, then it’s an inferior B&B platform with doctored reviews that you can’t trust.
My advice to those reading this is just to get a hotel unless there is no alternative.
AirBnB was fine for a bit when it was cheaper than alternatives, but, in my experience, it’s now as expensive (if not more) as the hotels they’re trying to replace.
There’s usually a massively inferior experience when compared to Hotels the majority of the time. At least, that’s been my experience.
For what its worth, for a number of decades, American town squares have in many places been shopping malls, which are privately owned. There are several states where protestors can be thrown out of malls[0], free speech be damned. I'm frankly glad they're struggling.
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.