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> By activating a dormant software lock on their newest iPhones, Apple is effectively announcing a drastic new policy: only Apple batteries can go in iPhones, a

by kemayo 7y ago

> By activating a dormant software lock on their newest iPhones, Apple is effectively announcing a drastic new policy: only Apple batteries can go in iPhones, and only they can install them. I really dislike the phrasing attached to this story. It's not a lock: a third party installed battery still works, the phone isn't refusing to start up until you go to an Apple Store and have an authentic Apple(tm) battery installed. Rather, it's a warning in the "battery health" section basically saying "we don't know if your battery is any good, you might need to get it replaced". That said, I'd prefer a clearer phrasing of their error message. It looks like it's just triggering the generic "your battery may need service" warning, which is more of a scare tactic than I'd like. "You don't have a certified Apple battery" would be completely sufficient. Given the existence of refurbishment scams, where substandard parts are put into old phones to make them look good briefly, I can understand where Apple is coming from on this point. Someone who buys a second-hand iPhone and finds the battery dies after a month isn't going to be very happy with iPhones.

thedevilslawyer 7y ago
Except where the error is still displayed even when you transfer in an apple original battery from another phone.
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  Legitimate parts that fail quality control testing in China have a way of "falling off the truck" onto the loading dock of the fulfillment center used by unscrupulous third party vendors instead of being destroyed.
  - masonic 7y ago
    ... which reflects Apple not policing their supply chain.
  - kuzehanka 7y ago
    Cool story. But when I get a replacement battery pulled from a brand new iphone with the 3rd party repairer providing warranty on their work, I still have no way to make that message go away other than to pay Apple's extortion fees.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      Fun local fact: unless you order your battery at iFixit and DIY, it’s cheaper to go to the Apple Store to change an iPhone battery than any of the repair shops nearby.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - liability 7y ago
        Fun reality check: for many people, going to an Apple store means driving several hours, or even purchasing a plane ticket. Any reasonable accounting of that would massively inflate the cost of 1st party repair.
        briandear 7y ago
        .. not if you go to an authorized Apple repair center. Unless you live in some wilderness area, there is almost certainly an authorized repair center near you — and those repairs are backed by Apple. Going to some sketchy shop that cannibalizes new phones to sell a replacement battery? That is bizarre. I am starting to understand why Apple has apparent hostility towards unauthorized third party repair. Someone is likely going to go buy one of those “new” phones and think Apple is crap. Meanwhile, the repair shop made money selling you the battery from a new iPhone, then money selling a fake-new iPhone with a garbage battery to someone else.
        liability 7y ago
        You're seriously living in an urban bubble if you think either an Apple store or a certified repair center will be readily available and convienent for everybody. Let me remind you, the alternative is Apple sends me a new battery in the mail and I insert it into my phone myself. Zero downtime or travel. The last time I got a battery replacement for an Apple product was a few months ago, when I was living in Seattle a mere 30 minutes away from the University Village Apple store. From the time of my first phonecall to schedule the appointment to me walking out of the store with a new battery, three and a half weeks elapsed. I had to go to the store three times, the first time they merely "confirmed" what I had already told them on the phone and said they'd need to order the battery and it would take a week. What a fucking disaster, why didn't they order it when I called? Why did they give me an appointment when they knew they couldn't help me that day? Imagine if I was living an hour or two out of town, that would have been three afternoons of my short live wasted. Unacceptable. It's shit. Unmitigated shit. With my old thinkpad I had new batteries mailed to me and it took mere seconds for me to swap them. I am never buying another computer from these shitheads. People who continue to support Apple have either gotten lucky, or they're nuts.
- wingspar 7y ago
  As per the iFixit report, the Apple chip that identifies it as an 'Apple Battery' can be moved to another battery from any/dubious source. Given this, how can software KNOW that it's truly an Apple original battery. Therefore, Apple is only 'vouching' for the battery health of batteries replaced via a confirmed 'chain-of-custody'. Could the message allow the health to be shown anyway? Sure... but it's not like a message pops up every time you wake your phone.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > As per the iFixit report, the Apple chip that identifies it as an 'Apple Battery' can be moved to another battery from any/dubious source. Given this, how can software KNOW that it's truly an Apple original battery. Doesn't that work against your argument? If you put in the effort to move the chip, the phone will never know you replaced the battery at all. It's no riskier to trust the chip post-replacement than it is to trust the chip any other day of the year.
flukus 7y ago
> Given the existence of refurbishment scams, where substandard parts are put into old phones to make them look good briefly, I can understand where Apple is coming from on this point. Last I checked apple did not make parts available to third party repairers, at least without signing on to some draconian anti-consumer agreements. If they were really interested in protecting consumers from counterfeits then they'd be doing more to make genuine apple parts available and doing less to limit third party repairs.
dfg74fcgp 7y ago
Considering the level of psychological analysis that goes into products like this and others, I would not be surprised to learn they have selected the phrase most likely to cause distress to the owner making them want to take the product to an authorised repair centre. It seems some US manufacturers are trying to make their products a service of sorts, when you look at what other companys are doing. John Deere springs to mind with farmers.
- temporaryvector 7y ago
  >Considering the level of psychological analysis that goes into products like this and others Don't need to do any analysis or anything. The mere fact that the message doesn't go away is enough to push a lot of people towards getting an authorized repair. If this truly was for consumer protection against bad batteries, they could have implemented a "Check my battery" button which returns the same message instead of having an always-on message.
  - dymk 7y ago
    This kind of nit picking seems so petty, I don’t understand why people are getting boiled up about it. You can still get non official batteries, the phone still works.
  - hobofan 7y ago
    Notifications that can't be dismissed or are recurring without a way to turn them off are one of the most annoying things about current operating systems, and Apple is one of the worst offenders. On my Macbook, I currently get: - A request to log in to Facetime every time I restart it (I've never used Facetime, and don't intend to, and have lost access to my AppleId) - A daily recurring notification to update my OS, which again I can't do without my AppleId - A notification that comes every ~10mins reminding me that I'm low on disk space (like I don't know it)
    - auggierose 7y ago
      Seriously, running an Apple OS without an Apple ID doesn't make any sense.
kuzehanka 7y ago
No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in 3rd party repair shops. It says battery health issue. Are sure you put in a real Apple battery? Did you even change my battery at all? Outright locking the battery out would cause backlash and possible legal action. This 'technically works but will nag you forever unless you pay Apple to run a program to clear the message that they refuse to share with 3rd parties' solution is genius. Evil genius. Imagine the car equivalent of this situation. Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible. There are laws that require carmakers to release repair manuals to 3rd party repairers and honour warranty after 3rd party repairs. Tech companies are shitting on their users because equivalent laws don't exist for electronic goods.
- millstone 7y ago
  Apple burying a message in the battery subsection of settings is "extreme lengths" and "by far the most effective"? God help us if they discover how to log to console.app.
  - addicted 7y ago
    How is it burying when it’s probably the first thing someone would look at after a battery replacement. Also, I bet none of the Apple defenders were phrasing the location of the battery health meter as “burying” it when Apple released it as a response to their own battery fiasco (which they liead about for months, if not years, until they were proven to have lied).
- yoz-y 7y ago
  I am on the fence. On one side I would love if it were possible to repair your phone whenever wherever. On the other hand, let me tell you a personal anecdote. After my wife’s iPhone got stolen we wanted to buy another one for cheaper. We chose to buy it from a big retailer in here. The phone was marked as renewed and under warranty. It cost a bit less as a refurb from Apple would. When we got it it was immediately apparent that the screen was changed for a non first party one. The phone was thicker than original (a case would not fit) and the colors were shit. No warnings were displayed on the phone. I have returned it immediately for refund. Now, if somebody who does not know how an iPhone should look and behave it is quite possible that they would pay a lot of money for a subpar product and then tell about it to people around. I think Apple should absolutely put in warning lights for any non genuine components or genuine components installed by non authorized repair shops. But, the message here is off as it does not actually help to describe the problem.
jaclaz 7y ago
>"You don't have a certified Apple battery" would be completely sufficient. The whole point is more towards the fact that it actually means: "We don't know (or don't care) if you have a certified Apple battery or a (crappy) third part one, all we know is that it has been changed by non-Apple-Authorized personnel, so we are giving you this warning message as a lesson"
Despegar 7y ago
>Rather, it's a warning in the "battery health" section basically saying "we don't know if your battery is any good, you might need to get it replaced". That's not what the message is. It's really weird that everyone keeps getting this wrong given there's a screenshot of it in the iFixit post. https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2019/08/07170827/iphone-battery-service-835x900.jpg https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2019/08/07170827/iphon...
- dymk 7y ago
  I don’t know who’s taking crazy pills, but the GP paraphrasing seems perfectly reasonable given your screenshot
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    The damning part is that even if the repair place uses an actual Apple battery with all the circuitry exactly the same the phone treats it as a complete unknown because it hasn't been approved by Apple and authenticated. If I open up two identical iPhones and swap the batteries I shouldn't have diminished functionality, the phone should still fully report everything it knows about the battery health.
    - jpttsn 7y ago
      What if you let the battery get wet/warm when replacing? Should the software trust that you replaced it correctly?
      - rtkwe 7y ago
        What if Apple's installer screws the same thing up? And if that was really a huge issue just locking out any battery monitoring is... worse because now there's just the meaningless 'You're battery isn't Apple approved and installed' warning.
  - Despegar 7y ago
    The people taking crazy pills are the one's suggesting it just says "Service" rather than not knowing if the battery is genuine.
CaptainZapp 7y ago
They specify that in the next paragraph explicitly that the phones are not bricked. That very next paragraph, which you omit in your "quote".
- Jgrubb 7y ago
  this is some next level irony. Read the sentence he wrote after the first one.

by kemayo 7y ago

thedevilslawyer 7y ago

Except where the error is still displayed even when you transfer in an apple original battery from another phone.

GeekyBear 7y ago
Legitimate parts that fail quality control testing in China have a way of "falling off the truck" onto the loading dock of the fulfillment center used by unscrupulous third party vendors instead of being destroyed.
- masonic 7y ago
  ... which reflects Apple not policing their supply chain.
- kuzehanka 7y ago
  Cool story. But when I get a replacement battery pulled from a brand new iphone with the 3rd party repairer providing warranty on their work, I still have no way to make that message go away other than to pay Apple's extortion fees.
  - lloeki 7y ago
    Fun local fact: unless you order your battery at iFixit and DIY, it’s cheaper to go to the Apple Store to change an iPhone battery than any of the repair shops nearby.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - liability 7y ago
      Fun reality check: for many people, going to an Apple store means driving several hours, or even purchasing a plane ticket. Any reasonable accounting of that would massively inflate the cost of 1st party repair.
      - briandear 7y ago
        .. not if you go to an authorized Apple repair center. Unless you live in some wilderness area, there is almost certainly an authorized repair center near you — and those repairs are backed by Apple. Going to some sketchy shop that cannibalizes new phones to sell a replacement battery? That is bizarre. I am starting to understand why Apple has apparent hostility towards unauthorized third party repair. Someone is likely going to go buy one of those “new” phones and think Apple is crap. Meanwhile, the repair shop made money selling you the battery from a new iPhone, then money selling a fake-new iPhone with a garbage battery to someone else.
        liability 7y ago
        You're seriously living in an urban bubble if you think either an Apple store or a certified repair center will be readily available and convienent for everybody. Let me remind you, the alternative is Apple sends me a new battery in the mail and I insert it into my phone myself. Zero downtime or travel. The last time I got a battery replacement for an Apple product was a few months ago, when I was living in Seattle a mere 30 minutes away from the University Village Apple store. From the time of my first phonecall to schedule the appointment to me walking out of the store with a new battery, three and a half weeks elapsed. I had to go to the store three times, the first time they merely "confirmed" what I had already told them on the phone and said they'd need to order the battery and it would take a week. What a fucking disaster, why didn't they order it when I called? Why did they give me an appointment when they knew they couldn't help me that day? Imagine if I was living an hour or two out of town, that would have been three afternoons of my short live wasted. Unacceptable. It's shit. Unmitigated shit. With my old thinkpad I had new batteries mailed to me and it took mere seconds for me to swap them. I am never buying another computer from these shitheads. People who continue to support Apple have either gotten lucky, or they're nuts.
wingspar 7y ago
As per the iFixit report, the Apple chip that identifies it as an 'Apple Battery' can be moved to another battery from any/dubious source. Given this, how can software KNOW that it's truly an Apple original battery. Therefore, Apple is only 'vouching' for the battery health of batteries replaced via a confirmed 'chain-of-custody'. Could the message allow the health to be shown anyway? Sure... but it's not like a message pops up every time you wake your phone.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  > As per the iFixit report, the Apple chip that identifies it as an 'Apple Battery' can be moved to another battery from any/dubious source. Given this, how can software KNOW that it's truly an Apple original battery. Doesn't that work against your argument? If you put in the effort to move the chip, the phone will never know you replaced the battery at all. It's no riskier to trust the chip post-replacement than it is to trust the chip any other day of the year.

flukus 7y ago

> Given the existence of refurbishment scams, where substandard parts are put into old phones to make them look good briefly, I can understand where Apple is coming from on this point. Last I checked apple did not make parts available to third party repairers, at least without signing on to some draconian anti-consumer agreements. If they were really interested in protecting consumers from counterfeits then they'd be doing more to make genuine apple parts available and doing less to limit third party repairs.

dfg74fcgp 7y ago

Considering the level of psychological analysis that goes into products like this and others, I would not be surprised to learn they have selected the phrase most likely to cause distress to the owner making them want to take the product to an authorised repair centre. It seems some US manufacturers are trying to make their products a service of sorts, when you look at what other companys are doing. John Deere springs to mind with farmers.

temporaryvector 7y ago
>Considering the level of psychological analysis that goes into products like this and others Don't need to do any analysis or anything. The mere fact that the message doesn't go away is enough to push a lot of people towards getting an authorized repair. If this truly was for consumer protection against bad batteries, they could have implemented a "Check my battery" button which returns the same message instead of having an always-on message.
- dymk 7y ago
  This kind of nit picking seems so petty, I don’t understand why people are getting boiled up about it. You can still get non official batteries, the phone still works.
- hobofan 7y ago
  Notifications that can't be dismissed or are recurring without a way to turn them off are one of the most annoying things about current operating systems, and Apple is one of the worst offenders. On my Macbook, I currently get: - A request to log in to Facetime every time I restart it (I've never used Facetime, and don't intend to, and have lost access to my AppleId) - A daily recurring notification to update my OS, which again I can't do without my AppleId - A notification that comes every ~10mins reminding me that I'm low on disk space (like I don't know it)
  - auggierose 7y ago
    Seriously, running an Apple OS without an Apple ID doesn't make any sense.

kuzehanka 7y ago

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in 3rd party repair shops. It says battery health issue. Are sure you put in a real Apple battery? Did you even change my battery at all? Outright locking the battery out would cause backlash and possible legal action. This 'technically works but will nag you forever unless you pay Apple to run a program to clear the message that they refuse to share with 3rd parties' solution is genius. Evil genius. Imagine the car equivalent of this situation. Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible. There are laws that require carmakers to release repair manuals to 3rd party repairers and honour warranty after 3rd party repairs. Tech companies are shitting on their users because equivalent laws don't exist for electronic goods.

millstone 7y ago
Apple burying a message in the battery subsection of settings is "extreme lengths" and "by far the most effective"? God help us if they discover how to log to console.app.
- addicted 7y ago
  How is it burying when it’s probably the first thing someone would look at after a battery replacement. Also, I bet none of the Apple defenders were phrasing the location of the battery health meter as “burying” it when Apple released it as a response to their own battery fiasco (which they liead about for months, if not years, until they were proven to have lied).
yoz-y 7y ago
I am on the fence. On one side I would love if it were possible to repair your phone whenever wherever. On the other hand, let me tell you a personal anecdote. After my wife’s iPhone got stolen we wanted to buy another one for cheaper. We chose to buy it from a big retailer in here. The phone was marked as renewed and under warranty. It cost a bit less as a refurb from Apple would. When we got it it was immediately apparent that the screen was changed for a non first party one. The phone was thicker than original (a case would not fit) and the colors were shit. No warnings were displayed on the phone. I have returned it immediately for refund. Now, if somebody who does not know how an iPhone should look and behave it is quite possible that they would pay a lot of money for a subpar product and then tell about it to people around. I think Apple should absolutely put in warning lights for any non genuine components or genuine components installed by non authorized repair shops. But, the message here is off as it does not actually help to describe the problem.

jaclaz 7y ago

>"You don't have a certified Apple battery" would be completely sufficient. The whole point is more towards the fact that it actually means: "We don't know (or don't care) if you have a certified Apple battery or a (crappy) third part one, all we know is that it has been changed by non-Apple-Authorized personnel, so we are giving you this warning message as a lesson"

Despegar 7y ago

>Rather, it's a warning in the "battery health" section basically saying "we don't know if your battery is any good, you might need to get it replaced". That's not what the message is. It's really weird that everyone keeps getting this wrong given there's a screenshot of it in the iFixit post. https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2019/08/07170827/iphone-battery-service-835x900.jpg https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2019/08/07170827/iphon...

dymk 7y ago
I don’t know who’s taking crazy pills, but the GP paraphrasing seems perfectly reasonable given your screenshot
- rtkwe 7y ago
  The damning part is that even if the repair place uses an actual Apple battery with all the circuitry exactly the same the phone treats it as a complete unknown because it hasn't been approved by Apple and authenticated. If I open up two identical iPhones and swap the batteries I shouldn't have diminished functionality, the phone should still fully report everything it knows about the battery health.
  - jpttsn 7y ago
    What if you let the battery get wet/warm when replacing? Should the software trust that you replaced it correctly?
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      What if Apple's installer screws the same thing up? And if that was really a huge issue just locking out any battery monitoring is... worse because now there's just the meaningless 'You're battery isn't Apple approved and installed' warning.
- Despegar 7y ago
  The people taking crazy pills are the one's suggesting it just says "Service" rather than not knowing if the battery is genuine.

CaptainZapp 7y ago

They specify that in the next paragraph explicitly that the phones are not bricked. That very next paragraph, which you omit in your "quote".

Jgrubb 7y ago
this is some next level irony. Read the sentence he wrote after the first one.