We need to have a serious chat about iPhone repairability. We judged the phones of yesteryear by how easy they were to take apart—screws, glues, how hard it was…
1- theft risk/reward is crushed. It’s simply no longer feasible for stolen iPhones to be parted out if the valuable bits don’t simply work. Sure, dumb and non networked components like frames and glass can probably be salvaged, but when even batteries are involved in the handshake process, you lose out on the ability to sell anything of value.
2- positive supply-chain validation. Not important for the majority of people, but for those who require a little more security, they can be a little more sure that their device isn’t compromised from illegitimate parts. I imagine this to be a fringe benefit for executives and the like. I know at one point government officials had access to some “special” variants of iPhones which were more locked down, but specifics are difficult to come by.
For everybody else, this plain sucks. We move farther and farther into not even owning the physical things in our possession.
2- positive supply-chain validation. Not important for the majority of people, but for those who require a little more security, they can be a little more sure that their device isn’t compromised from illegitimate parts. I imagine this to be a fringe benefit for executives and the like
Anecdotally, many years ago I had a Mac laptop that was fairly new but I ran it as what amounted to a portable desktop. It was plugged in 99% of the time. A few months after I got it I had an issue with one of the fans. Instead of taking it to the Apple Store that was 90 miles away (I was living and working in a small town then), I took it to the local computer repair… and they fixed it it.
Afterwards, while I didn’t use batteries much, it seemed off.
Another two years and I had moved to a larger city and took my laptop into the local Apple Store for them to replace a fan that was not operating strongly enough. The repair tech commented that I had a sub par third party and while it should be replaced as its battery health was very low, it wouldn’t be covered under warranty because it clearly wasn’t an OEM Apple part.
I strongly suspect that the repair shop had swapped my new battery out for an old one and hoped I wouldn’t notice because I didn’t use it in that capacity. I can’t prove anything and the shop had gone out of business.
This is anecdotal and batteries for laptops don’t get pairing the same way phones do… but this sort of thing happens.
I don’t know how old your Mac was, but I think system info does record battery details. If not a serial, it definitely reads the cycle count, so it may have been possible to cross reference that if you knew the cycle count previously, but of course, I don’t blame you for not making backups of all that information and cross referencing it, you should never need to do that in the first place.
That’s odd. That’s really dumb for those third-party technicians to take that, as (aside from the damage to their reputation and simply not being a good person), it would probably be a degraded battery anyway. Being constantly plugged in is very bad for a battery.
There’s exactly two positives to this system:
1- theft risk/reward is crushed. It’s simply no longer feasible for stolen iPhones to be parted out if the valuable bits don’t simply work. Sure, dumb and non networked components like frames and glass can probably be salvaged, but when even batteries are involved in the handshake process, you lose out on the ability to sell anything of value.
2- positive supply-chain validation. Not important for the majority of people, but for those who require a little more security, they can be a little more sure that their device isn’t compromised from illegitimate parts. I imagine this to be a fringe benefit for executives and the like. I know at one point government officials had access to some “special” variants of iPhones which were more locked down, but specifics are difficult to come by.
For everybody else, this plain sucks. We move farther and farther into not even owning the physical things in our possession.
Anecdotally, many years ago I had a Mac laptop that was fairly new but I ran it as what amounted to a portable desktop. It was plugged in 99% of the time. A few months after I got it I had an issue with one of the fans. Instead of taking it to the Apple Store that was 90 miles away (I was living and working in a small town then), I took it to the local computer repair… and they fixed it it.
Afterwards, while I didn’t use batteries much, it seemed off.
Another two years and I had moved to a larger city and took my laptop into the local Apple Store for them to replace a fan that was not operating strongly enough. The repair tech commented that I had a sub par third party and while it should be replaced as its battery health was very low, it wouldn’t be covered under warranty because it clearly wasn’t an OEM Apple part.
I strongly suspect that the repair shop had swapped my new battery out for an old one and hoped I wouldn’t notice because I didn’t use it in that capacity. I can’t prove anything and the shop had gone out of business.
This is anecdotal and batteries for laptops don’t get pairing the same way phones do… but this sort of thing happens.
I don’t know how old your Mac was, but I think system info does record battery details. If not a serial, it definitely reads the cycle count, so it may have been possible to cross reference that if you knew the cycle count previously, but of course, I don’t blame you for not making backups of all that information and cross referencing it, you should never need to do that in the first place.
That’s odd. That’s really dumb for those third-party technicians to take that, as (aside from the damage to their reputation and simply not being a good person), it would probably be a degraded battery anyway. Being constantly plugged in is very bad for a battery.
Sounds like that shop may have gone out of business for a reason.