I believe you are having our DIY air quality kits that are as you describe very simple. Our commercial product AirGradient ONE has a much more complex PCB with tons of additional components e.g. DC DC converter to run it from 12-36v, modbus chip, external hardware watchdogs etc.
We have made a lot of comparisons to other air quality monitors and there is a significance difference in the repaiarbility, e.g. I broke an enclosure of a competitor because it was glued together and just couldn't be opened easily.
Yes, iPhones are by a magnitude more complex products but I think a lot also boils down to attitude. I believe for a long time (and probably still), Apple made it conciously very difficult to repair/upgrade their product e.g. with proprietory screws, glued batteries, etc.
Look at the Fairphone that is a phone and also allows easy replacement of components. If they can do it, why not Apple? Maybe because so far they did not want to?
If it was a hugely important element, the Fairphone would be the market leader vs Samsung/Apple.
As you no doubt know, it varies depending on the audience. If you have a nerdy DIY audience, or a technical enterprise tech audience they're going to come with different requirements.
Proprietary/security screws don’t inhibit anyone from opening a phone other than those who would have no hope of doing anything beyond causing further damage with 100% certainty. Anyone with a sufficiently curious ten-year-old ought to be particularly thankful here.
Obscure security screws are common throughout the industry and are rarely ever the reason why a device is difficult to repair by anyone for whom success is within the set of possible outcomes.
This is the iphone 14. It's been a long time since the original iphone. I'm glad to see that they are changing things, but them making it better now does not cancel out all of the problems with their previous line (or the current issues with the macs).
> Obscure security screws are common throughout the industry and are rarely ever the reason why a device is difficult to repair by anyone for whom success is within the set of possible outcomes.
I think this misses the point. Even for a insignificant choice such as the screw head, Apple chose to use the option less friendly for repairs. This is a symptom of the fact that repairability has not been high on their priority list.
IIRC the front panel uses DRM to stop unauthorized screen replacement.
Foxconn workers reportedly stole US$43 million worth of iPhone parts to make new phones https://www.scmp.com/abacus/news-bites/article/3042987/foxco...
It's amazing to me that developers, resellers etc seem to forget this.
It is debatable whether the devices that are restricted have any security impact to begin with (the fingerprint or face recognition sensors should just be untrusted input devices with the actual comparison happening inside the secure element of the CPU - compromising this device wouldn't give you anything you don't already have), but either way, even if there was a security impact, you can always let the user choose by giving them the (per-device) keys to override said security.
0.002% of our customers need security against sophisticated hackers who have the capability to hijack a repair service and replace it with a spying custom made iphone screen replacement.
Let’s make screen repairs 5-7x more expensive for 100% of our customers !
That will get the hackers !
Yea, right.... If you’re that paranoid about your security, go to an authorized apple repair centre which doesn’t bother repairing the parts and just charges you to replace the entire circuitry.
No one’s stopping you. Leave the rest of us, alone from this.
Encryption issue is about banning it altogether.
This is about user choice in terms of repairability.
This excuse is more to the equivalent of , we are banning all communication in plaintext or any encryption standard, except aes-256.
Everyone has different requirements, choice and deserve the freedom.
Companies dont get to excuse away freedom and choice, in the name of “security”.
Companies don't owe you freedom and choice. If you don't like their product, if you don't like their concern for your freedom and choice, don't buy it.
We were critiquing a product, now you’re saying, companies dont owe us the right to criticise their product, and that we must move elsewhere instead of complaining.
one second you’re saying “it’s for our benefit”, the next, you want us to stop using the product, because we aren’t “owed anything”.
Arguments with a dishonest interlocutor are frightfully boring. Reply as you see fit, but I’m closing this thread and not looking at it again.
If people with that kind of resources are out to get you, they can simply lift your fingerprints from elsewhere. A transparent tape on the home button would probably be enough.
Maybe that isn’t so important to you, but it’s a very practical concern for many people.
I really have a strong feeling that some folks have Stockholm syndrome or something.
If someone tried to sell whole iPhones assembled entirely from parts leaked from Apple's supply chain, it ought to seem obvious to anyone that this is wrong. Why is the principle any different when it's not an entire iPhone?
Why would it be any different for Apple?
Hmmm, I always wanted a Ferrari.
If you want a Ferrari, go buy one. They have quite long waiting lists from what I've heard.
edit: In order not to be completely off topic: Apple might have just the same problems with parts stolen from their suppliers but since every single iPhone needs to be activated, I'm very sure they would be able to catch "iPhones made entirely from stolen parts". So this is clearly not it. The fact that they don't sell anything will probably make this whole thing quite worse because if you could buy a genuine display for 250$ from Apple, why would you really buy from anyone else? That market would of course exist but it would be much much smaller.
I would not expect them to sell motherboards or for exampe face id sensors without some kind of pairing. But batteries and LCDs? Come on!
They are doing it just to stick it to anyone who wants to repair their device. Quite sad when you think about the origins of that company :-(
My guess is Apple started doing all this pairing stuff due to some security threat they saw before we did.
Apple does somewhat care about users privacy (I like that very much) but this is really not it. And it goes for the battery as well. And vibration motor. And rear facing camera. All these are just plain and simple middle finger to third party repair shops. You could argue about FaceID sensor and motherboard and I would agree with security concerns, but that's pretty much it.
Even broken logic board is worth quite a lot so this argument is really more of a wishfull thinking than a reality.
AirGradient hardware is little more than a plastic box and a relatively basic PCB which makes around a dozen connections between few off-the-shelf prototyping components which need direct exposure to room air — they can't be sealed or weatherproofed. Repairability is literally the default state for this class of product; making it less repairable would have required more effort.
Apple devices weren't made difficult to repair because Apple actively despised repairers. They were difficult to repair because Apple lacked sufficient concern over repairability and had other priorities such as as thickness, weight, simplification and efficiency of manufacturing.