6 ms·

This 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

This 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 ago
I'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 ago
  Eh. 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 ago
    Your 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 ago
    Not 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.
  - frankchn 1y ago
    They are doing some wild stuff in Asia like adding physical SIM card slots to eSIM only iPhones (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w). I imagine having schematics like this would be at least marginally helpful in developing those techniques.
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    > 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. My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up getting stuck on a black screen during boot. I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews. Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong, and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped. I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT. For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was well worth it. There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would definitely make sense to repair such cases.
    - cogman10 1y ago
      I'd argue that VAT is just a bad way to do taxes in general. The only thing it really accomplishes is slowing down the economy. Much better to target wealth/income instead IMO.
      - jacquesm 1y ago
        Much better to target resource extraction. That will have an immediate and very positive effect on the environment because it will make recycling so much cheaper than using virgin resources.
  - mrheosuper 1y ago
    You are the reason why we have so much e-waste
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > It is always useful to know part numbers In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy. At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.
  - derefr 1y ago
    > aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy ...on the open market. However, if your repair shop exists just down the street from one of Apple's component supplier's factories, then knowing the part number of one of the ICs or other actives, might be enough to let you walk in there one day and submit a hand-written PO for a few boxes of said part (...as a cash transaction, of course.)
luma 1y ago
It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID, etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might need repair.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  I suppose you could transplant the chips from a damaged board.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Yes, that's what people like Louis Rossmann famously do. Apple, in turn, tries to serialise each chip and make it only boot if all the serial numbers match.
  - throwaway31131 1y ago
    You don't need a schematic to do that.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - HPsquared 1y ago
      Aftermarket board and passive components; transplant the Apple chips from a damaged board. Then you don't need to cannibalise the board, you use a new one. I assume most physical damage and corrosion etc affects the board and passive components.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  It's not really useful for most repairs. These PCBs are very dense. The traces and even vias are buried below the surface. At best it might give them some hints about where to probe if they've never worked on that phone model before, but in a practical sense they're not going to be doing many repairs based on the schematics. The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs. Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.
omgJustTest 1y ago
It is valid to say they do not have the majority of trade-secrets in the schematics. However having high quality documentation that is easily accessible is always the first step, and if there are information there that are important it is _much_ more likely it will be known. It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.
varispeed 1y ago
> it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff. It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc. Schematics are extremely valuable! Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
- cogman10 1y ago
  I'm sorry but no. Unless you are producing a 1930s radio these sorts of schematics are next to worthless. There's nothing super clever about PCB routing or resistor placement and it is completely dependent on the chips used (which are increasingly including the actual resistors and capacitors internal to the chip). Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs an AMD motherboard schematic. You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB design. But that's just not how hardware works. The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going into the design of their M series chips and their software/firmware.
  - varispeed 1y ago
    This dismisses the entire field of modern high-speed digital design. At GHz frequencies, the PCB isn't a passive substrate; it's an active RF component. Managing signal integrity, controlling impedance, and mitigating EMI in a dense layout is a monumental engineering challenge, not a solved problem from the "1930s radio" era. The AMD comparison is backward. AMD provides public datasheets and reference designs. This schematic is valuable precisely because Apple's silicon is a black box. It's the only public blueprint for a successful, validated implementation. The chip and board are a co-designed system. A brilliant SoC is useless without the board-level engineering to power it cleanly and cool it within a tiny physical envelope. That system integration is the R&D.
    - throwaway31131 1y ago
      But all that information is in the engineering files that are neither the schematic or the layout. You might guess some information from the layout, but on some crazy HDI PCB like the iPhone uses, you'll be missing most of the information needed to take advantage of it. Any signal that uses passive termination, and would therefore show up in the schematic, is basically a tacit admission that this line needs something, but basically anything remotely close to 50Ω will do. Which is something you could've gathered by inspection of the final product.
armada651 1y ago
> This 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". I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.
- petsfed 1y ago
  I mean, even the firmware binaries would be a game changer. But really, it'd be the appropriate tool chain to re-sign a replacement chip so that the overall device doesn't reject it. Provided there isn't some kind of mutual key exchange that gets fused out upon factory programming.
mrheosuper 1y ago
>The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them. A trace on PCB is much more important. Boardview is a must to do board repair.
mrheosuper 1y ago
>The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them.

simpaticoder 1y ago

I'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 ago
Eh. 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 ago
  Your 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 ago
  Not 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.
- frankchn 1y ago
  They are doing some wild stuff in Asia like adding physical SIM card slots to eSIM only iPhones (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w). I imagine having schematics like this would be at least marginally helpful in developing those techniques.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  > 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. My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up getting stuck on a black screen during boot. I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews. Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong, and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped. I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT. For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was well worth it. There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would definitely make sense to repair such cases.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    I'd argue that VAT is just a bad way to do taxes in general. The only thing it really accomplishes is slowing down the economy. Much better to target wealth/income instead IMO.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      Much better to target resource extraction. That will have an immediate and very positive effect on the environment because it will make recycling so much cheaper than using virgin resources.
- mrheosuper 1y ago
  You are the reason why we have so much e-waste
Aurornis 1y ago
> It is always useful to know part numbers In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy. At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.
- derefr 1y ago
  > aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy ...on the open market. However, if your repair shop exists just down the street from one of Apple's component supplier's factories, then knowing the part number of one of the ICs or other actives, might be enough to let you walk in there one day and submit a hand-written PO for a few boxes of said part (...as a cash transaction, of course.)

luma 1y ago

It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID, etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might need repair.

HPsquared 1y ago
I suppose you could transplant the chips from a damaged board.
- immibis 1y ago
  Yes, that's what people like Louis Rossmann famously do. Apple, in turn, tries to serialise each chip and make it only boot if all the serial numbers match.
- throwaway31131 1y ago
  You don't need a schematic to do that.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    Aftermarket board and passive components; transplant the Apple chips from a damaged board. Then you don't need to cannibalise the board, you use a new one. I assume most physical damage and corrosion etc affects the board and passive components.
Aurornis 1y ago
It's not really useful for most repairs. These PCBs are very dense. The traces and even vias are buried below the surface. At best it might give them some hints about where to probe if they've never worked on that phone model before, but in a practical sense they're not going to be doing many repairs based on the schematics. The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs. Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.

omgJustTest 1y ago

It is valid to say they do not have the majority of trade-secrets in the schematics. However having high quality documentation that is easily accessible is always the first step, and if there are information there that are important it is _much_ more likely it will be known. It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.

varispeed 1y ago

> it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff. It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc. Schematics are extremely valuable! Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.

cogman10 1y ago
I'm sorry but no. Unless you are producing a 1930s radio these sorts of schematics are next to worthless. There's nothing super clever about PCB routing or resistor placement and it is completely dependent on the chips used (which are increasingly including the actual resistors and capacitors internal to the chip). Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs an AMD motherboard schematic. You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB design. But that's just not how hardware works. The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going into the design of their M series chips and their software/firmware.
- varispeed 1y ago
  This dismisses the entire field of modern high-speed digital design. At GHz frequencies, the PCB isn't a passive substrate; it's an active RF component. Managing signal integrity, controlling impedance, and mitigating EMI in a dense layout is a monumental engineering challenge, not a solved problem from the "1930s radio" era. The AMD comparison is backward. AMD provides public datasheets and reference designs. This schematic is valuable precisely because Apple's silicon is a black box. It's the only public blueprint for a successful, validated implementation. The chip and board are a co-designed system. A brilliant SoC is useless without the board-level engineering to power it cleanly and cool it within a tiny physical envelope. That system integration is the R&D.
  - throwaway31131 1y ago
    But all that information is in the engineering files that are neither the schematic or the layout. You might guess some information from the layout, but on some crazy HDI PCB like the iPhone uses, you'll be missing most of the information needed to take advantage of it. Any signal that uses passive termination, and would therefore show up in the schematic, is basically a tacit admission that this line needs something, but basically anything remotely close to 50Ω will do. Which is something you could've gathered by inspection of the final product.

armada651 1y ago

> This 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". I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.

petsfed 1y ago
I mean, even the firmware binaries would be a game changer. But really, it'd be the appropriate tool chain to re-sign a replacement chip so that the overall device doesn't reject it. Provided there isn't some kind of mutual key exchange that gets fused out upon factory programming.

mrheosuper 1y ago

>The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them. A trace on PCB is much more important. Boardview is a must to do board repair.

mrheosuper 1y ago