> and totally get why people want the right to use 3rd party repair services. I've used them myself in the past to save (a lot of) money. The BBC article talks

> and totally get why people want the right to use 3rd party repair services. I've used them myself in the past to save (a lot of) money. The BBC article talks about someone who was in Macedonia. Apple doesn't have repair centres there. What they did - try to repair their device in a non-Apple-served country - was about all they could reasonably do. As Apple wants more of our life to be phone-oriented (payment details, wallet, physical data, etc) expecting 100% of people to be within X minutes of official repair centers 100% of the time is not workable, nor reasonable. I get it - the home button is secure and might have been compromised. This was just horrible design - they failed to account for a failure mode, and default to a brick instead. A warning bar or message on boot indicating "the touch id may have been compromised - all touch id features are disabled - please contact Apple" - while annoying - would have been reasonable.