It’s really no secret by now that Apple has some of the most restrictive repair policies in the consumer electronics market. It even sometimes runs afoul of
It’s really no secret by now that Apple has some of the most restrictive repair policies in the consumer electronics market. It even sometimes runs afoul of government regulations regarding warranties and third-party repairs. It has some pretty secretive procedures and proprietary tools for the job, which has left many in the third-party repair service industry coming up with their own solutions. That might have just become easier now that someone has leaked Apple’s internal videos showing its own official procedures for opening up iPhones and even MacBooks.
The videos are posted on YouTube on a certain Arman Haji’s account, but don’t expect them to be up there for long. Haji tells Motherboard that he got the videos from a someone’s Twitter account that just got suspended. Expect the same to happen here but, since it’s all over the Internet, the cat is truly out of the bag.
The set includes videos for 2016 and 2017 MacBooks as well as for the iPhone X, the latter perhaps the most interesting one of all. The show almost everything from opening up the iPhone X to replacing the battery to replacing the screen. More interestingly, the videos show the array of tools authorized Apple service centers use to achieve those goals.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about these videos is how they prove that third-party repair sites like iFixit have mostly gotten the tools and steps right. They groups often reverse engineer those tools and processes without help from Apple who, of course, frowns upon that industry. Now they can feel proud and almost vindicated.
The videos don’t include the 2018 MacBook Pro naturally, which would have been an interesting one given recent news. There is a video for data recovery for the 2016 and 2017 MacBooks, utilizing those models’ Data Recovery port. That component, however, is missing from the 2018 model, which makes data recovery from a failed logic board next to impossible.
