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Comment by JoshTko | Hacker News Reader

I love that Apple is doing this. Making thieves not want to steal my phone is 50x more valuable to me than having a slightly easier time repairing my phone.

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This is a case of conflicting needs of users.

If security is your primary need, it is great.

If sustainability is your primary need then it sucks.

Apple supports and repairs phones for a long time. It's not about sustainability, it's about the price Apple charges for repairs. What is so sustainable about having and using the right to mount a cheap, bad battery that will have to be replaced again in a year or so?

Things have a long tail. The world is unstable. Politics can suddenly change and now you're throwing tons of things in the trash not because the items cannot be fixed, but that Apple directly cannot sell you parts.

It's not you can magically repair any Apple phone if only they made parts replaceable. The tiny amount of phones that can't be repaired due to 'world unstability' is probably irrelevant to the general climate/environment problem.

This.

But instead of making parts unexchangeable by default, couldn't they blacklist parts that come from phones specifically reported as stolen? And then any phone with a blacklisted part installed could be disabled/reduced in functionality/reported to authorities, etc. Meanwhile people who just wanted to recycle their old screens or whatever wouldn't be penalized.

Deterring criminals requires consistent, accurate, fast reporting by customers which will never happen since customers have no incentive at all to report (not even considering the level of effort of educating the iPhone customer base abotu how to report). You can recycle your phone today by dropping it off at Apple.

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