State of Repair is Motherboard’s exploration of DIY culture, device repair, ownership, and the forces fighting to lock down access to the things you own.
A tweak to the iPhone’s repairability that has been long prophesied and feared has finally come to pass, giving staggering new urgency for legislation that makes repair more accessible: The iPhone 13’s screen cannot be replaced without special software controlled by Apple. This is a devastating blow to independent repair shops, who make the vast majority of their money doing screen replacements, and, specifically, make the vast majority of their money doing iPhone screen replacements.
According to iFixit, replacing the screen on an iPhone 13 disables Face ID functionality. That’s because the screen itself is paired to a small microcontroller attached to the display. Replacing a cracked screen with a new screen will disable this pairing, thus breaking a core piece of functionality in the phone. An authorized Apple repair tech can pair a new screen to an iPhone with the click of a few buttons using proprietary Apple tech. Everyone else will have a much harder time.
“This is a clear case of a manufacturer using their power to prevent competition and monopolize an industry,” iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens told Motherboard in an email. “Society loses: small repair shops will wither and fade away and consumers will be left with no choice but to pay top dollar for repairs or replace their device.”
This is similar to a design choice Apple made with earlier versions of the iPhone, where TouchID was paired to the actual device. Apple used something called a “Horizon Machine” to pair new TouchID home buttons with broken devices, but independent repair companies couldn’t do this. The difference here is that TouchID broke only very rarely (or if the repair person made a mistake and severed a specific wire while doing another repair), whereas phone screens crack all the time.
A microcontroller about the size of a Tic-Tac attached to the screen itself is the culprit. The chip is paired to the phone and without it, the phone disables Face ID. Repair shops that have booted up phones with replaced screens see the error “Unable to activate Face ID on this iPhone.” Apple stores or independent repair stores that go through the nightmarish certification process to become authorized for repairs, can use special software to quickly pair a new screen to a phone and send the customer on their way.
It’s not that the chip is important to the process of Face ID. iFixit’s teardown of the iPhone 13 revealed that the Face ID scanner is entirely separate from the display. This appears to be an intentional design choice by Apple to keep people from repairing the iPhone themselves or taking it to repair stores that often charge far less for basic services.
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