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FCC Accidentally Leaked iPhone Schematics
- jajuuka 1y agoAny other admin and Apple would sue them. But in this case I think Apple will just apologize to them for not removing the watermark. Very nice to see these out in the open though. Saves some work. Even if it is the 16e.
- gruez 1y ago>Any other admin and Apple would sue them Examples of this happening in the past?
- hypeatei 1y ago[flagged]
- scarface_74 1y agoNot this necessarily. But corporations have sued other administrations for a number of things. But they are afraid to cross Trump
- stronglikedan 1y ago> But they are afraid to cross Trump If that were the case, there would be some examples of it like the person you are responding to asked for.
- tempestn 1y ago[flagged]
- stronglikedan 1y agobig maybe, but neither has this admin
- LocalH 1y agoThis administration (and the legislature) has ramped the bullshit level to the stratosphere. Multiple government officials go on social media daily to spew bullshit rhetoric. No other previous administration has been as full of bullshit as this one.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- scarface_74 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,.... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/business/us-steel-nippon-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/business/us-steel-nippon-... https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/29/biden-faces-slew-lawsuits-business-groups-criticize-overreach.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/29/biden-faces-slew-lawsuits-bu...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ASalazarMX 1y agoSpecially when megacorporations have fortunes in fiscal paradises, which is only possible because their local law has ample loopholes. Threaten to close the biggest loopholes and they will obey. I believe monopolies and megacorporations are a necessity for authoritarian governments.
- sanskritical 1y ago> Any other admin and Apple would sue them I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court, and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not have a right to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them. The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any administration, and there's no way that the Supreme Court would cede the idea that the government has an absolute obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a tort.
- jffry 1y ago> I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. Statute of Limitations is about how long you have to file the case, by no means is it a deadline by which you must fully prove damages and have no opportunity to continue your case after it passes.
- sanskritical 1y ago[dead]
- ronsor 1y ago> Apple would sue them. Apple fears the tariffs.
- fortran77 1y agoIt's just very hard to sue a government agency. The FCC, as a federal agency, is subject primarily to lawsuits that challenge its rulemaking, implementation, or enforcement actions. This falls outside that scope.
- immibis 1y agoIIRC there's a law that says the government is immune to lawsuits, so you can only sue it when there's another law that says you can in specific circumstances. This is why you can't sue the police when they bulldoze your house based on bad information, and you have to hope your own insurance covers it.
- fortran77 1y agoWhat you're thinking of is "qualified immunity" and that protects individuals--govermenment offcials--from being sued when carrying out duties related to their jobs. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
- majorchord 1y agoI think it's more likely they were referring to sovereign immunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
- freedomben 1y agoGiven how friendly Tim Cook is to Trump, and how being friendly to Trump gets you special carveouts/exemptions, I tend to think they are not afraid of retaliatory tariffs. But, in this day and age you really never know, so definitely a possibility.
- gred 1y agoThere must be some sort of legal agreement governing the data sharing. NDAs tend to have something like: > The parties acknowledge that monetary damages may not be a sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure or use of Confidential Information [...list ways Apple is allowed to nail disclosing partner...]
- cogman10 1y agoThat ain't how things work. The law is that you have to submit your schematics to the FCC if you want to sell a device with wireless communications so the FCC can validate that you aren't improperly using the wireless spectrum. The US might be corporate captured but it's not THAT corporate captured. The US government still has a bigger stick than apple does.
- avidiax 1y agoLouis Rossmann posted a video to commend the FCC chair on defending the right to repair by publishing these schematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TlgrIAI8x4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TlgrIAI8x4
- gjsman-1000 1y ago[flagged]
- Tade0 1y agoI saw the clip. It's deep fried sarcasm through and through.
- bigyabai 1y agoNice little post-hoc "/s" you added there. Can't have anyone think you skipped the video and actually thought that (cough cough).
- cwillu 1y ago“Ridiculous statement… not.” was annoying when gen-x pushed it in the 90's, and it's not less annoying now that gen-z spells it “/s”.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jmclnx 1y ago[flagged]
- mschuster91 1y agoHot take: Publicly available schematics, part lists and utilities for service and maintenance should be part of FCC certification requirements, at least for mass-market goods like phones and TVs. For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even offer. But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.
- nicce 1y agoI would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a certain market share. It might be too much for smaller companies and reduces innovation and competition.
- nerdsniper 1y agoI’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is). However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private. The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients. Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer. Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
- cornstalks 1y agoThe Engadget article is just a shortened regurgitation of the original source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/29/fcc-mistakenly-leaks-confidential-iphone-16e-schematics https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/29/fcc-mistakenly-le...
- 333c 1y agoActually this Reddit post predates that "original source" by several hours: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ntc1gt/the_fcc_has_leaked_the_schematics_for_the_iphone/ https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ntc1gt/the_fcc_has_...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- paxys 1y agoHuawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, Poco, OnePlus, Honor, Realme all taking notes. Good guy FCC looking out for global competition.
- Liftyee 1y agoThey all know how to design a phone already, and don't have access to the proprietary Apple chipsets. Everything else is just industry standard electronic engineering. What would they gain? The specifics of how some power supply is connected?
- Kirby64 1y agoNot sure why you would think the specifics of how one of the largest company’s in the world designs their phones wouldn’t be useful. There are entire companies that exist solely to generate their own schematics from teardowns because they’re so valuable to certain consumers.
- mikestew 1y agoNot sure why you would think the specifics… Because the FCC didn’t publish specifics. I think one would get better, more specific information from a teardown. It’s even in TFA: ”Competitors could simply buy a handset and open it up to get to this information…”
- Kirby64 1y agoDid you read what FCC published at all? They published the BOM, with specific part numbers and alternatives, the full schematics, and block diagrams of where the chips are laid out. Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this info.
- mikestew 1y agoDid you read what FCC published at all? Most of it, yeah. Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this info. I'll disagree and say that any teardown org would be able to figure this out on their own in an afternoon, and end up with more information than the PDF in the process. You vastly over-estimate the value of schematics showing wire traces from one black box to another.
- Animats 1y agoIt's interesting seeing the sheer number of tiny inductors and capacitors required to keep internal RF noise down. It's amazing that they can cram all those tiny discrites in there.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- leakycap 1y ago> This was likely not an intentional act against Apple, which tracks given that the company has been especially supportive of the Trump administration. Tim has made some terrible choices – I'm sad this is so accurate.
- MountDoom 1y agoThis is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair. The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware, not the traces on the PCB. About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way. Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
- simpaticoder 1y agoI'm not a repair tech, but I do enjoy watching them work and I suspect they'd strongly disagree with you. It is always useful to know part numbers and how they are connected with each other even of the components are themselves "black boxes".
- MountDoom 1y agoEh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty. You just replace the PCB or tell the customer to buy a new phone.
- flowerthoughts 1y agoYour original comment talked about "most commodity PCBs," but it sounds like you really meant to limit your scope to phone PCBs. Laptops, motherboards, microwave ovens and whatever else has "commodity PCBs" are much more repairable than the highly size-optimized phone market.
- rs186 1y agoNot cost-effective for a repair shop in the US, but in other countries with lower cost of living, including China and many Asian countries, technicians go to great lengths to replace individual components on PCB boards.
- henriquenunez 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20250928013949/https://fccid.io/BCG-E8726A/Schematics/A3212-A3408-A3409-A3410-System-Electrical-Schematics-V1-0-8024509.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20250928013949/https://fccid.io/... If anyone is curious
- 1oooqooq 1y agoapple showed bad faith to the fcc at every stage (remember iphone 3g always transmitting at full blast 1W when that was reserve for emergency only low signal?). why do they get the courtesy of filling in private?
- wnevets 1y agoThe meritocracy strikes again
- fuddle 1y ago"CEO Tim Cook even brought the president a gold trophy for being such a good and important boy." - haha, well played.
- snvzz 1y agoThe real question is why is Apple (and other companies) able to sell a product without publishing schematics (and gerbers) for it.
- phyzix5761 1y agoTrade secrets. They've existed since the beginning of time. If they publish the schematics their competitors can make similar products which reduces their incentive to innovate and they go spend money somewhere more profitable. Or worse, they patent the design and sit on new tech for 20 years which stifles innovation for other companies. I guess an argument can also be made for security. Publishing schematics makes it easier bad actors.
- snvzz 1y ago>If they publish the schematics their competitors can make similar products Copyright applies, even with schematics published. Somehow, the repair people end up with schematics through back channels. It is ridiculous they have to use these channels. I'd argue the public interest is above any benefits Apple gets with this layer of obfuscation. >Or worse, they patent the design and sit on new tech for 20 years which stifles innovation for other companies. Don't companies do that anyway? Or do you mean steal ideas and then patent them? Prior art invalidates this. >I guess an argument can also be made for security. Publishing schematics makes it easier bad actors. Security through obscurity isn't a thing. Actual security requires a good design, not obfuscating a flawed one.
- mrheosuper 1y agowhy would you need gerber files ?
- snvzz 1y agoClick on board, see wires and BoM cross-referenced. Extremely helpful for both repair and modding.
- mrtksn 1y agoCan this help with making iPhone do things that it's not supposed to do?
- buescher 1y agoOne, what you can learn from this is what good production documentation looks like, more than how to hook up Apple's SoCs, which you don't really need to know. If you get used to that sort of detailed parts specifications on your schematics, you'll miss them most places. I also particularly like how they call out the i2c addresses of the chips with i2c interfaces. Two, take a look at the system specification and block diagram also.
- 93po 1y agois anyone else tired of political commentary infecting every single corner of the web? i want to read tech news, not jabs at political figures. i don't support or like trump but why in the world would i care at all about an engadget writer's opinion of him?