Repair website iFixit today announced that it has retroactively lowered its iPhone 14 repairability score from 7/10 to 4/10 due to Apple’s post-repair parts pairing requirement, just over a year after the device launched.
“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.”
I have watched videos of people who repair their own iPhones using this program, and some of them have to go through a process afterwards to get the new parts paired, which sometimes takes over an hour.
This should honestly lower it to a 1/10.
Parts being available doesn’t really matter if you have to go through a process to pair the parts after, which uses some kind of server + human support line, that Apple can shut down at any time.
It’s essentially an “always online” DRM for REPAIRING YOUR PHONE.