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Comment by buildzr | Hacker News Reader

Great, so why wouldn't they accept another battery IC with a valid Apple signature? Even swapping a brand new battery is enough to raise complaints.

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The ic is not part of battery chemistry- in case this comment isn’t a joke a common workaround would be to grab ic from dead batteries and put them on fakes.

You're right, keeping keys in SRAM and other trivial anti-tamper measures are way too expensive. Cutoffs are performed by the same IC. Should be trivial.

This was a business decision for sure. Apple doesn't want anyone but Apple to work on their devices. Now maybe you can say that alone is good for resale, but it's extremely shitty for customers, especially when their attitude is to tell people they need a new board and all their data is gone when a repair, often even a simple one is entirely possible.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/expert-disputes-apple-on...

The issue w bogus undisclosed batteries was causing problems for apples brand rep. Many of the bulging / exploding batteries were not in the end apple.

The lie you are spreading, that you can’t use non apple batteries is false. The phone will work fine, but apple will let you know it can’t model the batteries health.

Having the phone recognize if the battery key has changed is a simple and effective way to manage this.

For MANY people, being able to rely on the apple battery health check is far more important than allowing scammers to do a cheap battery swap, sell phone with a “near new” battery, and then have customer in apple store complaining a few weeks later only to be told they were ripped off

> Many of the bulging / exploding batteries were not in the end apple.

This is incorrect. Apple issued a recall due to known issues with their own batteries! These are not 3rd party replacements.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-...

As I pointed out there's fairly simple ways for them to resolve this without these practices. No where did I suggest that the batteries don't work at all. The extents people go to on this site to defend Apple's shitty anti-consumer behavior is utter insanity.

Go ahead and describe the fairly simple solution you've come up with understanding there is a surprising amount of money out there to defeat it.

If by "brand new" battery you mean an unused battery there are actually issues there, sellers do sell "unused" batteries as "brand new" but the mfg date turns out to be really old. Technically true I guess - the battery has not been used? Would I want a 3-4 year old battery? No - who knows what SOC it has been maintained at.

What is interesting is apple's focus on "shitty anti-consumer" behavior which is "utter insanity" has resulted in a lot of consumers buying their product.

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