General > General Technical Chat
Apple locking down camera replacements
amyk:
The war continues... https://www.ifixit.com/News/45921/is-this-the-end-of-the-repairable-iphone
Not surprising, but the bastards are trying to be more subtle about it now, so that they can basically brainwash people into thinking that only Apple can make a fully functional repair :--
Cerebus:
It's not that, there's no marketing campaign accompanying it, which would be the case if the 'brainwashing' hypothesis held. It wasn't announced, it was just slipped out and someone noticed it in the field. It's no secret that Apple are rabidly anti 'right to repair', it's probably their worst quality. But so are many other manufacturers, it's just that the average mouthy tech blogger doesn't have a John Deere tractor so we don't hear about it. At least Apple, unlike John Deere, don't try to claim ownership of your own data and sell it back to you.
tom66:
My guess is this isn't so much as deliberate but some of the 'bokeh' and zoom functions (where multiple sensors are 'fused' together) require calibration data that is stored on the phone. If the SN# of the calibration data doesn't match the camera app just gets confused.
I work for an imaging company and the sensors on our devices are closely calibrated to the camera in the factory. That calibration data (non-uniformity correction, hot/cold pixels etc) is stored in the camera's flash memory and read out on boot up. While we don't check serial numbers match, if you put the wrong sensor on the wrong motherboard then you will get a horrible, uncorrected image.
There is a simple fix to this problem that Apple should implement. If a phone does not have camera calibration data for SN #xxx then it should download it from the mothership. These cameras will all be from recycled phones so there is no excuse to not have that data available. Right to Repair should require companies like Apple to make cost-effective repairs of these devices possible, and to sell the replacement parts, WITH the necessary calibration data.
I also suspect Apple is in a bind with things like Touch and Face ID. The security of these systems (payment processing up to £10,000, unlock and authorise remote starts of cars, etc.) is such that the devices must be absolutely certain that they have not been tampered with. That is why iDevices ask for a passcode on reboot, in case the touch sensor has been modified in the meantime with a MITM attack for instance. If you let people change these parts they could be modified parts that could e.g. store fingerprint data rather than passing it transparently to the crypto processor on the main board.
ebclr:
Until the idiots buy this phone, At some point even cases will stop the phone the work, The simple solution refuse to buy
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: ebclr on November 01, 2020, 06:21:01 pm ---Until the idiots buy this phone, At some point even cases will stop the phone the work, The simple solution refuse to buy
--- End quote ---
Erm, yes. No. Maybe. Sunday? Custard pies? The count of Montecristo? Ishmael, yes that's it, Ishmael! :-// :)
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