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Comment by jjeaff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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..

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