I love the iPhone.

The fact “it just works” with pretty much everything else Apple is something that I’ve enjoyed for years. My favourite one was the iPhone 5 – it had a small but awesome form factor, the camera was decent and battery was brilliant. It was also fairly repairable by almost anyone.

Since then, their phones have got more water resistant and much more difficult to take apart, but were still repairable for things like the battery and screen in some models. Now is a whole other ball game as Apple introduced software locks to the battery, screen and cameras since iOS 13.1.

Touch ID and Face ID is has always had a software lock on it as it’s the biometric entry to the phone so I see no reason why that would ever change, but replacing the battery and screen – the two most commonly replaced components – should be easy to do by anyone with the right parts. But no. Apple have been fiercely defiant and refused to remove these software locks making it impossible for anyone other than Apple to repair.

Fine, you can repair it yourselves

Apple did release a self-repair program but this is basically worthless. You pay just a tiny bit more than taking it to Apple themselves to do, and you still have to call up Apple and confirm that you’ve put the correct part in and for them to remove the software locks remotely, as shown by Hugh Jeffreys and Quinn Nelson (Snazzy Labs). It’s still hampering repairability because nobody in their right mind is going to attempt to do this themselves because of how much equipment is required to do these repairs and then having to call Apple to remove the software locks.

Apple claim this is due to security and to prevent non-genuine parts being put in the iPhone, but even genuine parts will trigger this lock – see the Hugh Jeffreys video where he swaps batteries and boards between 2 identical iPhones, so their claim is rubbish and in my eyes is a way to just force out any third party repair out of the market.

But please don’t talk about it

Apple also launched a third party repair program, but it’s so aggressively secretive that Louis Rossmann made a video showing the T&Cs of this meaning that anyone in the program is under a non-disclosure agreement not to talk about the repair program, and in order to enter the program you’re effectively going in totally blind. Put this into perspective for a moment. This isn’t some military hardware that could threaten the national security of a country, this is a phone screen, a phone battery and a phone camera. Three very simple parts to replace, being artificially locked for no good reason.

We have Daisy?

Daisy is Apple’s open source parts dismantling robot, and it’s really rather good at dismantling and stripping down an iPhone into the raw parts in order to recycle it as demoed by Lawrence Llewellyn from the Fully Charged show.

This is fantastic, it means that for new iPhones fewer and fewer raw materials need to be mined, and several older iPhones can be recycled to make one brand new one, or an iPad or MacBook.

So when Apple did their whole sustainability skit in this year’s iPhone event, they helpfully missed out the one glaring issue to sustainability: THEIR HARDWARE IS NOT REPAIRABLE BY ANYONE APART FROM APPLE. Devices not being repairable by anyone apart from Apple simply leads to tons of e-waste, as the cost of repair often outweighs the price of a new device so people don’t bother.

My dream would be fore Apple to keep the software locks but not display the message if you’ve put in a genuine part. Apple know about every single serial number of every screen, battery and camera, so it wouldn’t be beyond them to show the non-genuine warning first time, ask you to confirm and it checks against their serial numbers remotely, and then it works.

I get fed up with Apple’s holier than thou approach to repairing everything. I want to be able to repair my device, or have a small repair shop do this.