Why Can't You Repair an iPhone?
Found on Bloomberg View on Tuesday, 16 February 2016
Since 2014, the world's most profitable smartphone company has -- without warning -- permanently disabled some iPhones that had their home buttons replaced by repair shops in the course of fixing a shattered screen. Phones that underwent the same repair at Apple service centers, meanwhile, have continued working just fine.
Apple says it was merely trying to keep the iPhones "secure," and that "Error 53" -- the code that pops up after the company bricks a unit -- is meant to ensure that nobody messes with the phone's fingerprint sensor.
One word: control. If you buy a device, you can do whatever you want with it, and no company should be allowed to brick your hardware for that. Besides, if the fingerprint sensor itself is a trusted piece of hardware in the authentication process, and not just a simple sensor, then the entire process is flawed by design.