The things we could have had if it wasn’t necessary to use regulation to force Apple into doing the right thing.
We had all that. It was taken away.
Humans go ooo, accessibility never comes back again..
Personal preferences matter little in a duopoly industry. Sure, you could argue that other aspects are more important than serviceability, but it’d be insane to argue that people want less serviceability. So in short, we were better off in this aspect before. 100%.
I mean yes, it literally is, the law requires that smartphones incorporate a killswitch capable of resisting a device format/reload of the OS. This was seen as a consumer benefit in 2014, and did succeed in bringing muggings and phone theft down by as much as 80%.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/440002/10-things-to-know-abo...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/11/london-sm...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/431818/drop-in-smartphone-th...
This is what the sibling means about tradeoffs: people at the time wanted the tradeoff of fewer muggings. The killswitch was seen as a benefit, and largely Apple is in fact just responding to the legislative requirements pushed upon them.
And if you have to have a killswitch that can resist a OS reformat… there has to be some component pairing mechanism that works underneath the OS layer, naturally. That is the sensible way to implement it, otherwise you'd just swap in a new motherboard and hey, phone's working again. Or strip the phone for parts.
The idea of parts being anti-theft/strip-resistant is pretty much inherently in contradiction to right-to-repair. And again, I think people probably understand that... but never forget that theft-resistance was a legislative initiative pushed over the objections of Apple and other phone vendors at the time, having some unforeseen consequences. People actually did want this, people lobbied for this, as much as modern readers may not believe it.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/is-the-smartphone-kill-swit...
To be fair, most electronics these days are so tightly integrated (literally IC, Integrated Circuits!) that there's not much you can do even with a full on schematic.
Long gone are the days of bigly electronics parts connected by a spaghetti nest of wires and third grade soldering.
I've watched these videos — and the people you're referencing doing this are rarely using any kind of schematics at all to repair modern digital-logic boards. And not for lack of accessibility!
Modern logic-board designs consist of a few proprietary ICs, plus generic labelled support components (e.g. VRM caps, surface-mount resistors and diodes, etc.)
You can repair these boards, but these repairs fall into three categories:
1. bad solder joints or broken traces — which mostly just requires looking at the board carefully to notice these.
2. bad generic support components — which in theory you can determine the need for by testing with various multimeter modes across the individual component's legs; but more often you just notice that what the component is in line with isn't working, and "swap out to see if that fixes it." And which where such a swap-out can be done by just looking the part to figure out what it identifies itself as; then de-soldering it and soldering on a replacement.
3. bad proprietary ICs — which you determine by tapping the signal lines leading from/to the IC on an oscilloscope; and which you "fix" by buying other for-parts copies of the board, de-soldering those ICs off of the sacrificial parts boards, and soldering them onto the "almost good" board.
In none of these cases would referencing a schematic help! They're all effectively "context free" repairs — see, probe, think, do.
(A schematic can in theory help you to find test points to differentially diagnose 1 vs 2 vs 3 in the case where a board is failing mysteriously... but once you have some experience in board repair, you can get 80% of the same information by just staring at the board for a minute.)
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Of course, if you're repairing a power supply, or an audio receiver, or some still-half-analogue electronic appliance from the 1970s — then yeah, schematics help. But these types of systems do still come with those schematics! (You just need to buy the thing directly. You aren't getting a schematic for an "embedded" PSU with a computer; but you do get the schematic if you buy that same PSU at retail at a Shenzhen parts-mall. And you get forwarded that same schematic [and more] if you make an industrial order of 10000 of them, too.)