Hacker News Reader

Comment by patorjk | Hacker News Reader

> What’s incredible here is not that Apple’s internal videos leaked, but that the third-party repair teams have done such an incredible job replicating its procedures without having seen these videos or having access to Apple’s tools.

How do we know that the third-party teams hadn't previously seen these videos? If they had a source that was getting them the videos, they probably wouldn't broadcast that information.

View on HN

>How do we know that the third-party teams hadn't previously seen these videos?

The best third-party repairers are vastly more advanced than Apple's own warranty repair service. They're constantly pushing the limits of what is considered possible in SMD rework. None of these videos would have provided any useful information to them.

iFixit are rank amateurs compared to companies like G-lon, REWA and ZXW. The fact that Motherboard praise them as "incredible" is frankly embarrassing.

Thanks for adding the perspective: I had no idea who these players were in the space prior to you mentioning them. I guess that says something about iFixit's marketing outreach.

iFixit sell DIY repair kits to ordinary consumers, so they need to cultivate a certain public image. The companies I mentioned sell tools to professional repairers, so they don't really care if consumers have heard of them.

My gripe is with the author of this piece, who seems to unquestioningly regurgitate iFixit's PR talking points. iFixit provide a useful service and do cool stuff, but they're much better at marketing than they are at fixing things.

You seem to have some gripe with iFixit itself - the article just points out that iFixit has reverse-engineered some of these techniques and makes them available to the public unlike the many undoubtedly skilled professional repair companies who have a vested interest in making sure the public is as ignorant as possible. This makes it impossible to show other such examples; how this becomes "regurgitating iFixit PR" is unclear to me.

Based on the comment history GP has some axe to grind with iFixit.

I don't get why they dislike iFixit, as the guides they put out are high quality and well suited for their target demographic. Not everything has to be geared to the super-knowledgeable reader, especially things like repair guides for consumer electronics.

>Based on the comment history GP has some axe to grind with iFixit.

Their actual comment history doesn't seem to reflect this https://hn.algolia.com/?query=jdietrich%20ifixit&sort=byPopu...

As I said, iFixit provide a useful service and do cool stuff. If you know absolutely nothing about electronics repair, they will show you enough to perform basic repairs with a reasonable degree of confidence. They publish repair guides in order to sell more tools. I have absolutely no qualms with their business model. It's a positive, socially beneficial way of making a living.

My objection is with journalists who uncritically describe iFixit as experts. iFixit are not experts on consumer electronics or electronics repair. They are well-meaning amateurs who run a tool shop and have a media budget. If a professional technology journalist is unable to discern this, then that is indicative of a profound malaise within journalism.

Every time Apple launch a piece of hardware, iFixit get a huge amount of SEO juice from technology news websites linking to their teardown. Why is literally nobody in the media doing it themselves? iFixit have taken on an outsized role in technology journalism, because the overwhelming majority of technology journalists simply do not have the knowledge to take apart a piece of technology and say anything meaningful about what they see inside. That is most certainly not the fault of iFixit.

Doesn't the cost of these advanced repairs kind of negate the value of getting your device repaired versus just replacing the whole thing (or parts)?

I'm sure Apple has done lots of cost benefit analysis and found that it's way cheaper to just replace an iPhone motherboard than it is to pay someone skilled at SMD repair to find the bad component(s) and replace them.

Well, if Apple has exorbitant markups on motherboard replacement (and other repairs) outside of warranty, repair makes perfect sense.

The third-party repair industry exists because companies can profitably undercut Apple's out-of-warranty repair charges. That's true in the US and it's doubly true in lower-wage economies.

It may be that skilled repair work isn't scaleable, so Apple have decided to constrain their repair operations to simple module swaps. It may also be that Apple would rather sell you a new device than fix your old one, so have taken an approach that is broadly hostile to repair. I suspect it's a bit of both.

I don't see any need for the repair companies to have inside information beyond what is already available. They get detailed schematics of the electronics and as far as how to disassemble, that is generally figured out quickly by companies like ifixit that race to be the first company to post a teardown video on youtube when a new device comes out.

They use elaborate equipment and even x-ray to figure out what is going on inside these things.

2/3rds of the challange in taking apart an iPhone is the various adhesives holding the screen, battery, and home button together.

Taking apart an iPhone is absolutely trivial, relatively speaking. Good repairers can do component-level repairs, even on the weird sandwich PCB on the iPhone X. They can splice together two flat-flex PCBs to repair a TouchID home button. They can restore iCloud-locked devices by removing and reprogramming the flash memory. They can separate the individual layers of a sandwich LCD screen to replace just the cover glass or the digitizer. There are aftermarket suppliers of iPhone X screens, complete with the notch and 3D touch. Third-party iPhone repair represents the absolute cutting edge of electronics repair. The level of precision and ingenuity on display is simply staggering.

> They can restore iCloud-locked devices by removing and reprogramming the flash memory.

That sounds a little sketchy.

I don't think they can do so for newer devices, but here's a video from REWA demonstrating the process: https://youtu.be/AYETzuYlEjE

That takes a pretty shady turn when they start checking serials to see if they're already activated. That's why people with a brand new iPad complain they can't activate it.

Thanks for sharing. This whole video is really mindblowing. The level of sophistication is very intense. There's a lot of really cool hardware and software reverse engineering going on here, and it's worth a watch.

In term of factory reset

Also unlikely; the lock is not in the device but in Apples servers denying activation. To fool it you need to put a legitimate identifier into to locked device. You can’t just make up numbers because Apple has them in a database. And you can’t duplicate them because then one of the devices gets locked.

It’s more likely they use identifiers, chips or boards from unlocked but broken devices.

Those elastic strips look like a variant on 3M's "Command" adhesive system for wall hooks.[1] Those can be safely mounted and unmounted.

[1] https://www.command.com

Wait, somebody has and uses the domain command.com?

TIL..

With the right setup, PCBs are basically source provided. There's only so much you can obfuscate when all of the chips still have to be connected the right way.

Or they could hire people with experience working in that part of Apple, etc. That passage does seem a bit naive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com