Repair website iFixit on Tuesday announced that it has retroactively lowered its iPhone 14 repairability score from “recommend” (7 out of 10) to a “do-not-recommend” (4 out of 10). The retroactively lowered score is due to Apple’s post-repair parts pairing requirement.
Most major repairs on modern iPhones require Apple approval. You have to buy parts through their system, then have the repair validated via a chat system. Otherwise, you’ll run into limited or missing functionality, with a side of annoying warnings.
Lots of independent repair shops have business models that are threatened by Apple’s parts pairing practice. Shops harvest parts from broken devices. They use third-party parts. They shouldn’t have to send Apple their customers’ personal information, or agree to five years of audits just to do the repairs they know how to do.
iFixit initially praised the iPhone 14’s internal redesign with a more repair-friendly mid-frame, which is now being used for the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, but it decided to revise its score in light of feedback from the repair community.
“Although we enthusiastically awarded it a solid score at launch last year, thanks to its innovative repair-friendly architecture—of which we remain big fans—the reality for folks trying to fix these things has been very different,” said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens, in a blog post. “Most major repairs on modern iPhones require Apple approval. You have to buy parts through their system, then have the repair validated via a chat system. Otherwise, you’ll run into limited or missing functionality, with a side of annoying warnings.”
Apple’s post-repair System Configuration software tool, “authenticates genuine Apple parts, updates firmware, and calibrates parts to ensure maximum performance and quality,” according to Apple.