Have Your iPhone 6 Repaired, Only To Get It Bricked By Apple (theguardian.com)

New submitter Nemosoft Unv. writes: In case you had a problem with the fingerprint sensor or some other small defect on your iPhone 6 and had it repaired by a non-official (read: cheaper) shop, you may be in for a nasty surprise: error 53. What happens is that during an OS update or re-install the software checks the internal hardware and if it detects a non-Apple component, it will display an error 53 and brick your phone. Any photos or other data held on the handset is lost – and irretrievable. Thousands of people have flocked to forums to express their dismay at this. What's more insiduous is that the error may only appear weeks or months after the repair. Incredibly, Apple says this cannot be fixed by any hard- or software update, while it is clearly their software that causes the problem in the first place. And then you thought FTDI was being nasty ...

Comments

Apple always gets away with it.

[Ecuador]

Apple always gets away with it and the other vendors don't follow, because they don't have customers who will eat up anything.
Let me give you an example just from my experience. My 3rd iPhone 4S in a row has failed in the same exact way: wifi/gps disabled. Just do a quick google about the "grayed out wifi" problem, you will find thousands of posts and also a lot of iPhone 4/4S phones on ebay with that fault. Only the first of the 3 failed within warranty in my case and all three where always in an office and used once a week for testing/debugging (that's why I kept replacing it, I test on various devices). People have actually pinpointed the problem: the overheat detection of the wifi/gps module fails and the software disables it. In fact, this disabling was a "feature" introduced with iOS 6 IIRC, so people who had stayed with iOS 5 did not get the issue. For any other company there would have been a recall, since it would have been an easy class action otherwise, and even a software patch would fix it. But apple is happy with customers getting a new phone and their average customer doesn't mind much.
Ooh, another example, my boss, who you would call a dedicated Apple fan, had bought a mac mini 5-6 years ago. After 6 months it started killing his keyboards. He went through a few expensive/fancy keyboards before figuring out it was the mac mini and so he took it to the Apple store (Manhattan) where they diagnosed a faulty MB and told him it would take a week to have it replaced. He left it there, got a call about a delay and finally went to get it almost two weeks later. Instead of returning a fixed mac mini they told him they had voided the warranty because they found "dust" inside!!! And the only solution they offered was a 10%-off a new mac mini!!! And he took it!!! Bought the same thing, at a 10% discount!!! He didn't even flinch, I mean, I only found out because I asked, he did not find it interesting enough to mention. My jaw dropped when I heard it, I told him there is no such thing as warranty voided because of "dust", that if the device maker thinks they should not have dust they put a little filter in the computer intake (I do that in my custom builds), that a 6-month old mac mini in a no-pet no-smoke office would not have any dust anyway (and even if it did, why would it fail when decade old dusty components work fine). For all my arguments his response was "the apple genius told me my warranty is voided there is nothing I can do". He actually believed they were right. Even after I showed him the warranty which of course does not mentions dust he though they were right somehow...