To be clear, you can replace the battery with whatever battery you want, it will just show a message saying it can't be verified as an Apple battery. The only user impact is being unable to see battery health. I don't even think I can see my battery health on my Android so I don't see it as a big deal, but definitely not great if they are hiding this functionality for no reason.
Well, if they made the batteries easily replaceable without the device having to go to service they would not have this many issues. Of course their replacement batteries would need to be reasonably priced...
Anecdotes are worthless, but in the past half decade the only people I know who have successfully replaced a smartphone or pad battery have been Apple device owners. Apple has an easy, clear, successful program for replacing batteries, and most find the pricing entirely reasonable.
A friend did buy a Nexus 6P battery replacement kit from Amazon, but the process was so byzantine, and no shop was willing to do it, that they just ended up getting a new device.
I did like back in the day when I could pop the back off my Samsung Galaxy and replace the battery, but those days are gone and Apple is the only company that has any sort of concerted program to keep their older devices operating.
>Anecdotes are worthless, but in the past half decade the only people I know who have successfully replaced a smartphone or pad battery have been Apple device owners.
More anecdotes, but it's too bad you don't know me. I've replaced 3 or 4 phone batteries in the last decade. Needless to say, they've all been Android, as I've been able to do them all myself. Most of the batteries have been $30 or so and have given me years more life on my phones than I otherwise would have gotten.
I don't think that's worth it vs a slightly more rigid and more waterproof phone. Changing the battery is done 0 or 1 times in the lifespan of a phone, so making it a 10 minute affair is hardly too inconvenient.
FWIW, Apple is making a huge push into services. Services revenue is dependent on a large installed base, rather than quarterly unit sales. This gives them a huge incentive to make sure customers have a great experience for as long as possible after purchase (on top of just wanting to make their customers happy). If they're doing this, there's probably a pretty good reason for it.
Not sure why you got downvoted, but this is true. When you replace the battery in a new-ish BMW you need to recode/register the battery since BMW changes the way it charges the battery based on age and type.
I'm not sure myself. I am attempting to contrast one premium consumer product with another based on expectations. I think iFixIt and others knowingly sensationalize this stuff without looking for parallels elsewhere.
In the BMW community, we justify technical reasoning behind the battery coding of our automobiles' features, but apparently phones, with their comparable levels of complexity, are supposed to use AAA batteries because the company that makes replacement parts has a loud voice. Maybe I am mistaken, but this could be considered a double-standard. I am not apologizing for Apple, I have my own frustrations with the company lately, but I strive for consistency when I opine.
There are already COTS ICs for monitoring rechargeable batteries. These used to be built into laptop batteries when they were removable and swappable. Nothing prevents a phone manufacture from integrating the same into a removable battery to keep track of aging.
Even Chrysler is doing things like this. I had a hitch installed, super simple, all of the wires etc plug in to the appropriate places, but if you want to actually use the break lights, you need to visit the dealership to flip a boolean flag somewhere, otherwise the lights just don't work.
The only difference in a current Ford Mustang between making the in-dash vacuum gauge work for boost too is a boolean flag. So if you drop a supercharger on your N/A GT model, you can have your MAP sensor register in the dash as if the supercharger is OEM.
In my experience that is pretty common. My F150, for example, has daytime running lights ... in Canada. Another boolean flag, if I had a programmer I could enable them on mine.
Same with Porsche, but it doesn't actually hurt anything if you don't have the dealer install and code a replacement battery. The car doesn't nag you about it. The coding is primarily used to determine when the auto start/stop feature can be activated and for how long, but many/most owners turn that off anyway.
If Apple doesn't want to show the estimated health state for aftermarket batteries, that's fine, but they should have simply refrained from displaying that field. Displaying scary but meaningless warning messages just comes across as rent-seeking behavior. It will (or at least it should) encourage their customers to contact their representatives to support Right To Repair legislation.
Agreed, the spirit of Apple under Mr. Cook is vastly different then when his predecessor was directing--no, recreating--the company. Part of it, I realize, the innovation curve tends to flatten over time. If you can't make your numbers with innovative and powerful new ideas, at least capture the margin with vendor lock-in. For a good percentage of Apple customers, that may just be fine.
It will apparently also say/hide that if you swap two batteries of two identical iPhones that you just bought from the store.
Louis Rossman's take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlvlgmjMi98
The simple truth is that the market for third party non-Apple replacement parts is super sketchy. In the US and other countries where it's convenient to purchase from a reliable site like ifixit, you have legitimate options. For the rest of the world, you have AliExpress. It's not a matter of finding a local reseller, you really just don't have many good options.
I opted for my own 3rd party replacement via AliExpress and a few other resellers who shipped to the country I'm in, and while the price was right (about $10 or so), the battery shipped was just trash. It did not charge properly, even when I wired it up myself, and once fully charged that way, the batteries turned out to be counterfeit and had labels posted over the actual capacities.
It's a mine field, and unless you have the technical background to know whether it's the phone or the battery itself causing the issue, it really starts to look like it's Apple making things bad. In my case, I have the rudimentary knowledge to know that I just was sold batteries that were not fit for purpose. Go to the most common online retailer for most US persons (Amazon) and you are inundated with shoddy 3rd party batteries, the exact same ones I got from AliExpress.
How exactly are they supposed to protect the consumer here when __not__ noting that this is an unofficial battery results in the phone/user getting the impression something is wrong with the phone, not the battery.
I love iFixit, but in this case, I feel maybe they're misjudging the situation. I'd totally trust a battery from them 100%, but it's not feasible to ship to my country of residence from iFixit. Many people in the world are in this situation.
I think the big issue here is that Apple seems unwilling to distinguish between reputable aftermarket companies and those that aren't. I can see how they're trying to protect consumers from shoddy batteries, but this goes beyond that. If someone hasn't seen it yet, there are youtube videos of people having their iphones damaged and not having their photos backed up. The Apple Geniuses and on the offical forums tell them, "No sorry, no way to get them back, because of security chip, all your data is gone." Meanwhile, 3rd party repair centers are able to make the phone fully functional again. Apple is straight up lying to their customers and will delete posts from anyone on their forum that even attempts to offer advice on someone who just lost a lot of valuable pictures/video/files.
This is just more of the same. Apple needs to be more open so reputable companies like ifixit can keep doing what they're unwilling to, due to low profits or for whatever reason.
I'd say Apple is partially to blame for the replacement parts market being shady, for three reasons:
1. You can't get genuine Apple replacement parts in such a way that the end-consumer can actually verify they are not counterfeits.
2. Apple charges an exorbitant brand premium for genuine Apple products.
3. Apple doesn't believe that unapproved persons are capable of repairing its devices correctly.
If one could order a replacement battery from Apple, at a price that approaches the actual cost of a genuine replacement battery, plus the actual cost of QA, plus the actual cost of splitting off single units from the batch and shipping them, most would never need to bother with sketchy third-party batteries. You could just buy an Apple battery, and either DIY replace it, or take it to an electronics repair-person that you trust.
So it is Apple making things bad. By refusing to recognize consumer right to repair at all, it is automatically excluding the possibility that there is a difference between a shoddy home-repair, and one that would otherwise meet Apple's repair standards, if only it had been performed by an Apple-blessed individual.
A shop that values its reputation would almost certainly offer customers the choice of OEM-original replacement parts, or brands known by them to be good, such as iFixit parts, if it could. As it is now, the only OEM-originals they can get, come from devices purchased new for the explicit purpose of dissassembly for parts, and broken, unrepairable devices that still have some good parts in them. That pushes the prices up.
Batteries fail on a predictable schedule. You can either design your whole battery-powered product to fail roughly when the intrinsic battery fails, or you can design the battery to be replaceable.
Apple is trying to have the cake, by designing a product with a longer except-for-the-battery service life, and eat it too, by making the battery intrinsic to the construction, and not easily replaceable. These are incompatible goals for product lifecycle. Either you make cheap garbage that may break before the battery fails, or you have to account for repairing or replacing a failed battery in a product you have not owned in any way ever since you sold it to the consumer.
The consumer-friendly way to go about this would be to offer OEM-blessed battery replacements by sanctioned professionals AND sell repair parts directly to anyone who wants to buy them AND publish specifications for 3rd-party replacement batteries AND publish instructions on how to replace the battery AND write your software to detect and report incorrect installation or out-of-spec replacement parts, while also actually accepting any repair done correctly with in-spec parts without complaint.
The "issue" is that the current software is essentially saying, "we know everyone in the world who can properly replace an Apple battery, and whoever it was that replaced this battery wasn't one of them". Rather than offload the cost of their brand protection scheme onto the consumers, they could write their word trademark and mfg date to the chip in the battery, read it from the phone to report as part of battery health, and prosecute battery-counterfeiters in civil court, on their own dime, rather than using some bullshit para-DRM scheme.
Your ‘consumer friendly’ solution seems like just the opposite.
Your propose a costly scheme that would require significant ongoing investments in engineering and bureaucracy to maintain in order to support a network of less reliable repair shops policed by a never ending cycle of offensive lawsuits.
Not only would that not protect the brand, but it would harm consumers through increased pricing, and harm the repair shops by targeting them with lawsuits.
How can this possibly be better than the current situation where people are free to repair the device and use whatever batteries they like, and there are no lawsuits - only a message on a screen buried in the settings app!
What's stopping Apple from selling the parts that they manufacture to third parties, though? If anything this is an argument for right to repair laws, not for manufacturers to further restrict how consumers can use their devices. The Massachusetts right to repair laws for vehicles already provided a good framework for such an electronics repair law.
Google's phones track you in several ways that aren't through a browser. Want to see every place you've ever visited since you got your Android phone? Google has it and you can see it in your dashboard.
Google keeps location tracking a secret from you until you view your data, then once you go look at it, they start sending you monthly summaries of your travels.
Any don't get me started on the facial recognition in Photos. Take a photo of someone else's kids, and it will show you a helpful popup asking if you want to send the photo to the kid's parent.
What's anti-consumer about explicitly not reporting inaccurate information to the user? Don't get me wrong, Apple does need a fist down their throat, but over this?
What sets me off is if you replace your battery with a genuine apple battery. I can certainly understand if it's a 3rd party battery missing some feature the phone needs to assess battery information. This just flies in the face of the whole right to repair movement and for no other reason than pure greed.
I view this as Apple not vouching (in the form of verifying/stating the health of a battery) unless THEY have a complete 'chain-of-custody' for the battery.
Honest question: How can Apple KNOW it's a genuine apple battery, if it's not replaced from THEIR inventory? Moving a battery from one phone to another doesn't really mean anything, as the article states you can move the TI chip from one battery to another battery. Seem to me then that the underlying battery can be something other than the GENUINE battery.
Amazon is replete with fraudulent SD cards pretending to be one make/capacity when in reality they're not the same quality/size as a real card.
Getting a genuine battery is probably the bigger problem there. For an average joe, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of any "genuine" battery they find being a counterfeit.
