Scammers sold 300,000 iPhones made using defective parts from a Foxconn factory

[Curious Pineapple]

1 minute ago, ryao said:

This kind of black market only seems to exist for the iPhone. The most that I have heard happen in terms of Xeons being counterfeit are engineering samples being sold and machines being factory overclocked to allow lesser grade parts to be sold as if they were higher grade ones. In some cases, the binning results in those processors malfunctioning from the overclocking.

I meant due to age, I have 10 year old workstations and a 10 year old Laptop, nothing wrong with any of them and if anything fails, I can just replace it.

[ryao]

36 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

If Apple didn't prevent 3rd party manufacturers from supplying quality parts there would be no issue. If BMW prevented Bosch from supplying custom air flow sensors to the public, then the only options would be unreliable knock-offs. If they coded batteries to the car and replacement was a dealer only job, then people will spring up offering to clone or even open up the battery and jamming the control board in something else.

There is likely some of that, but the overall picture is not quite so simple. Apple has increasingly taken over the R&D work for much of the iPhone’s components, with their SoCs being a prime example. With such parts, Apple entirely owns the IP and even much of / all of the process used to fabricate it. This makes the factory making them nothing more than a contractor providing labor. Thus Apple is not prohibiting them from selling things so much as they never had the rights to sell them in the first place.

 

You can buy parts that are entirely owned by third parties such as Corning’s gorilla glass from the manufacturer directly. Increasingly less of the iPhone is like that. Off the top of my head, the glass, some of the logic board components, the camera sensor and the NAND flash can be purchased independently. The screen and battery might be possible to buy independently as part of a bulk order, but they were likely custom orders so you would need to know the exact specifications to be able to order them, as I doubt the supplier would breach confidentiality to tell you what you need to tell them. Not many companies allow their suppliers to do such things, so Apple is not being particularly different here. They are only different in that they do not sell such parts independently of finished products.

 

In the case of cars, things are more like with Corning where the supplier entirely develops the part and gets the auto manufacturer to adopt it or some version of it (usually a more cheaply made version). Thus, they are free to sell their own stuff to whoever they want.

[TechyBen]

3 hours ago, ryao said:

In the case of the iPhone, the parts that Apple gets from suppliers/contractors are at such a high level of quality that there is not much room for improvement. For example, scientific analysis of the displays on the iPhone showing them to be the highest quality displays on any phone at the time that they were examined.

 

http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_11Pro_ShootOut_1P.htm

http://www.displaymate.com/iPhoneX_ShootOut_1a.htm

http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone7_ShootOut_1.htm

 

Furthermore, there literally is not any physical room in the iPhone to allow for improvement. Making something better in the same space as the original is not easy.

 

The only ways of improving on the iPhone known to me would be soldering a better/bigger NAND flash chip onto it or replacing the glass with a newer one from Corning. Maybe the battery could be swapped out for one that is designed for a higher cycle life (with the caveat that the phone would be unhappy about the replacement), although lithium ion batteries are really hard to judge as being better. It would be possible to get one that is unsafe from pushing the envelope too far (see the Samsung Galaxy Note 7), so that might be unadvisable.

That still dont mean it's ok to block third party parts. People do already mod the iPhone, just generally only in China etc (see Strange Parts youtube).

 

PS

Quote

 It would be possible to get one that is unsafe from pushing the envelope too far (see the Samsung Galaxy Note 7), so that might be unadvisable.

This is true for anything and everything. Everything is dangerous if done wrong, and anything can be faked. Still, we manage to get through each day.

[Curious Pineapple]

2 hours ago, ryao said:

There is likely some of that, but the overall picture is not quite so simple. Apple has increasingly taken over the R&D work for much of the iPhone’s components, with their SoCs being a prime example. With such parts, Apple entirely owns the IP and even much of / all of the process used to fabricate it. This makes the factory making them nothing more than a contractor providing labor. Thus Apple is not prohibiting them from selling things so much as they never had the rights to sell them in the first place.

 

You can buy parts that are entirely owned by third parties such as Corning’s gorilla glass from the manufacturer directly. Increasingly less of the iPhone is like that. Off the top of my head, the glass, some of the logic board components, the camera sensor and the NAND flash can be purchased independently. The screen and battery might be possible to buy independently as part of a bulk order, but they were likely custom orders so you would need to know the exact specifications to be able to order them, as I doubt the supplier would breach confidentiality to tell you what you need to tell them. Not many companies allow their suppliers to do such things, so Apple is not being particularly different here. They are only different in that they do not sell such parts independently of finished products.

 

In the case of cars, things are more like with Corning where the supplier entirely develops the part and gets the auto manufacturer to adopt it or some version of it (usually a more cheaply made version). Thus, they are free to sell their own stuff to whoever they want.

BMW order enough connectors from Amp/Tyco to have tooling tweaked, meaning that they're effectively a custom part. The difference between this and Apple is that I can walk into a BMW dealer, ask for an injector harness and be sold one. BMW won't refuse and instead offer me a new car, or a "refurbished" one. Of course,  2 days earlier the "refurb" was another customers car that couldn't be fixed either.

[ryao]

47 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

That still dont mean it's ok to block third party parts. People do already mod the iPhone, just generally only in China etc (see Strange Parts youtube).

Which third party parts are they blocking? They own so much of the iPhone’s design that much of it is not third party. At the very least it is not third party in the form that repair shops want it. For example, the only third party part of the custom Apple designed camera module should be the sensor. No repair shop wants just a sensor.

 

If you are talking about the use of authentication chips, it is both legal and at this point necessary to combat return scams that replace parts of the iPhone with third party knock offs to get genuine parts. Without those, Apple could not tell if parts were replaced since the precise external appearances can be duplicated. Those return scams reportedly lead to Apple reselling devices that had fake parts to people because they could not tell that parts had been replaced.

[GDRRiley]

This doesn't go against right to repair it proves a point.

We should be able to buy parts directly from any manufacturer for 3 years on phones and 5 for laptops or desktops.

I'd like this to be an industry wide law but that isn't going to happen.

 

If I'm buying a macbook screen or an iphone battery I want one that came of the same factory with the same QC.

I may not need the A+ grade, I'll often uses any A grade part. 2nd choice is used parts from dead or otherwise broken machines.

 

 

Apple has switched to slightly custom parts to make repair need to buy these rejected boards. 

That is why there is such a demand for them.

[ryao]

35 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

BMW order enough connectors from Amp/Tyco to have tooling tweaked, meaning that they're effectively a custom part. The difference between this and Apple is that I can walk into a BMW dealer, ask for an injector harness and be sold one. BMW won't refuse and instead offer me a new car, or a "refurbished" one. Of course,  2 days earlier the "refurb" was another customers car that couldn't be fixed either.

You did not buy that from Amp/Tyco. You got it through BMW.

 

If BMW refused to sell it like Apple did, you likely could not go to Amp/Tyco to get the same part that they sell to BMW. As you said, it is a custom part. If you wanted something compatible, you would likely need to do a bulk order of a custom compatible part that might not be exactly the same.

[ryao]

15 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

This doesn't go against right to repair it proves a point.

We should be able to buy parts directly from any manufacturer for 3 years on phones and 5 for laptops or desktops.

I'd like this to be an industry wide law but that isn't going to happen.

 

If I'm buying a macbook screen or an iphone battery I want one that came of the same factory with the same QC.

I may not need the A+ grade, I'll often uses any A grade part. 2nd choice is used parts from dead or otherwise broken machines.

 

 

Apple has switched to slightly custom parts to make repair need to buy these rejected boards. 

That is why there is such a demand for them.

Those “rejected boards” are stolen property. Apple owns them and they were supposed to be destroyed in accordance with Apple’s wishes. It is not actually legal to purchase them. They are also not slightly custom. They are entirely original designs made by Apple. For example, their custom ARM SoC that is on the logic board is not something that is sold outside of finished products. The ones on the market are either stolen or taken from phones that became organ donors. Some of those organ donor phones were also stolen. The iPhone’s logic board is the one part of the iPhone that cannot be made by a third party as a generic component.
 

As for the screen and battery of a laptop, they tend to be custom orders to match Apple’s specifications (who else still uses 16:10 screens in laptops?). You might have luck getting the same panel on a laptop (as they might not be a custom order) from the factory through a distributor, but you won’t have much luck with the lithium battery given that they are polymer versions literally designed for the device. The only way to get them from the same factory would be to do a bulk custom order with the same specifications that Apple gave the factory, but those are not public.

 

That said, since you are a single person, the factories likely won’t be interested in taking your order unless you want like 10000 of the same thing. The only way to get access to a reliable source of genuine parts would be if Apple were willing to sell them, but sadly, they are not interested in selling those. For a laptop battery, you would probably need to settle for a third party generic like those sold by ifixit.

[Curious Pineapple]

Just now, ryao said:

You did not buy that from Amp/Tyco. You got it through BMW.

 

If BMW refused to sell it like Apple did, you likely could not go to Amp/Tyco to get the same part that they sell to BMW. As you said, it is a custom part. If you wanted something compatible, you would likely need to do a bulk order of a custom compatible part that might not be exactly the same.

And you proved my point, if BMW refused to supply parts like Apple does, then people would be scrapping cars due to a single connector, or hacking something else into a wiring harness and potentially causing a serious risk. Refusal to supply or in some cases even repair will lead to a demand for stolen, fake, faulty and potentially dangerous parts.

[GDRRiley]

2 minutes ago, ryao said:

They are also not slightly custom. They are entirely original designs made by Apple. For example, their custom ARM SoC that is on the logic board is not something that is sold outside of finished products. The ones on the market are either stolen or taken from phones that became organ donors. Some of those phones were also stolen.
 

As for the screen and battery of a laptop, they tend to be custom orders to match Apple’s specifications (who else still uses 16:10 screens in laptops?). You might have luck getting the same panel on a laptop (as they might not be a custom order), but you won’t have much luck with the lithium battery given that they are polymer versions literally designed for the device. The only way to get them from the same factory would be to do a bulk custom order with the same specifications that Apple gave the factory, but those are not public.

the only "custom" part is apples SOC the rest are common chips I can go  buy.

I'm more talking VRM controllers, and other chips on their laptops that apple has slightly tweaked to make laptops harder to fix

 

16:10 is amazing, most Microsoft devices are 3:2 or 15:10.

I'm saying apple should be required to stock parts for years after they launched. 

 

you didn't get what I said so let me summarize

 

This boards got out and were turned into iphones because there is a demand for these boards from repair shops because apple refuses to sell parts. If apple was selling parts the demand would be lower for these rejects making them less valuable and making the Risk VS rewards worse. 

 

There will always be clones or devices made from rejected parts sold in China it is how the culture and country is.

[Blademaster91]

20 minutes ago, ryao said:

Which third party parts are they blocking? They own so much of the iPhone’s design that much of it is not third party. At the very least it is not third party in the form that repair shops want it. For example, the only third party part of the custom Apple designed camera module should be the sensor. No repair shop wants just a sensor.

 

If you are talking about the use of authentication chips, it is both legal and at this point necessary to combat return scams that replace parts of the iPhone with third party knock offs to get genuine parts. Without those, Apple could not tell if parts were replaced since the precise external appearances can be duplicated. Those return scams reportedly lead to Apple reselling devices that had fake parts to people because they could not tell that parts had been replaced.

Well if Apple sold parts available to the customer they really wouldn't have this problem, because I don't know of any other manufacturer that goes to the lengths of making sure you cannot get parts by putting authentication chips or codes on everything. What defines a "defective" part? If these parts still work then they aren't defective and could be sold at a lower cost to repair techs as "A" or "B" grade parts.

[ryao]

3 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

the only "custom" part is apples SOC the rest are common chips I can go  buy.

I'm more talking VRM controllers, and other chips on their laptops that apple has slightly tweaked to make laptops harder to fix

 

16:10 is amazing, most Microsoft devices are 3:2 or 15:10.

I'm saying apple should be required to stock parts for years after they launched. 

 

you didn't get what I said so let me summarize

 

This boards got out and were turned into iphones because there is a demand for these boards from repair shops because apple refuses to sell parts. If apple was selling parts the demand would be lower for these rejects making them less valuable and making the Risk VS rewards worse. 

 

There will always be clones or devices made from rejected parts sold in China it is how the culture and country is.

This thread is about their phones rather than their laptops.

 

Would you make another thread for their laptops?

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, ryao said:

This thread is about their phones rather than their laptops.

 

Would you make another thread for their laptops?

I'm mentioning a few specific things around laptops because I know them better than I know iphones. But iphones have many of the same issues.

[ryao]

5 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Well if Apple sold parts available to the customer they really wouldn't have this problem, because I don't know of any other manufacturer that goes to the lengths of making sure you cannot get parts by putting authentication chips or codes on everything. What defines a "defective" part? If these parts still work then they aren't defective and could be sold at a lower cost to repair techs as "A" or "B" grade parts.

Why do you think that the authentication chips are meant to restrict parts availability? They were meant to enable Apple to tell if devices being returned contain the original parts. If one gets missed and somehow makes it to a customer as a refurbished model, the warning that the battery needs to be serviced would cause them to come back to get things fixed.

 

I am not sure if even selling their own parts cheaply would tackle the return scam because it would still cheaper to just scam Apple to get genuine parts from a phone that is then returned with either counterfeit versions or worn parts from an old phone. Apple cannot undercut the nearly free parts that the iPhone return scam gets.

 

They could just repair all iPhones for free for a period of like 5 years to tackle this, but they are not that generous. Doing that would also wipe out the market for third party repair, so if they did the one thing that would fix the problem, we would not have people complaining about the issues for third party repair as there would be none.

[Sauron]

23 hours ago, ryao said:

It seems like he just handed Apple a gift against the right to repair guys.

Quite the opposite, this proves that Apple's current policies did nothing to stop this sort of thing.

[ryao]

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Quite the opposite, this proves that Apple's current policies did nothing to stop this sort of thing.

Apple seems to have trusted the guys at Foxconn. I guess that won’t happen anymore.

[ryao]

22 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

I'm mentioning a few specific things around laptops because I know them better than I know iphones. But iphones have many of the same issues.

iPhones are far more custom than laptops. The same things largely do not apply. Just look through the parts that go into building the iPhone in the strange parts videos. They are nearly all clearly custom designs Apple. They might have a few components in the parts that are not custom such as resistors, but those are not considered parts. Calling the logic board off the shelf because it is made with them is like saying that the SoC is off the shelf because it is made from silicon.
 

That said, most laptop manufacturers would sell you just about any piece of a laptop as a spare part, including the ones that are really third party components that they had no role in making (like a SATA drive).

[Sauron]

17 minutes ago, ryao said:

Apple seems to have trusted the guys at Foxconn. I guess that won’t happen anymore.

What trust? They go to Foxconn because they're the cheapest, things like this have been happening for years and Apple never cared because they spare more money by contracting slavers than they would gain by going to someone more trustworthy and less ethically abhorrent.

[ryao]

17 minutes ago, Sauron said:

What trust? They go to Foxconn because they're the cheapest, things like this have been happening for years and Apple never cared because they spare more money by contracting slavers than they would gain by going to someone more trustworthy and less ethically abhorrent.

If they did not trust them to do their jobs, then they would not have them build the iPhone. A contractor that you cannot trust is not worth hiring, no matter how cheap they are.

[AnonymousGuy]

Stealing parts that Apple paid for is just straight up illegal.  If they're defective parts...Apple still paid for them and can order them to be destroyed or launched to the moon.  It's their parts to do with as they please.

[Sauron]

5 minutes ago, ryao said:

If they did not trust them to do their jobs, then they would not have them build the iPhone. A contractor that you cannot trust is not worth hiring, no matter how cheap they are.

That's not how corporations think. And to trust Foxconn they'd have to be unbelievably stupid, way too stupid to become the most valuable company in the world.

[Sauron]

Just now, AnonymousGuy said:

Stealing parts that Apple paid for is just straight up illegal.  If they're defective parts...Apple still paid for them and can order them to be destroyed or launched to the moon.  It's their parts to do with as they please.

So long as Foxconn delivers what Apple ordered they can do whatever they want with anything else they produce. Apple paid for a certain amount of parts, not for the entire production cycle. So no, Apple did not pay for these defective parts. Though this is still illegal because copyright.

[ryao]

21 minutes ago, Sauron said:

So long as Foxconn delivers what Apple ordered they can do whatever they want with anything else they produce. Apple paid for a certain amount of parts, not for the entire production cycle. So no, Apple did not pay for these defective parts. Though this is still illegal because copyright.

Apple has Foxconn assemble parts that Apple had built elsewhere. Apple should own them given that Foxconn is just an assembly plant. The contracts for the parts are between Apple and other companies, not Foxconn and other companies. Furthermore, these parts include Apple’s SoC, which Apple definitely owns. It is not property of Foxconn and Foxconn cannot do whatever it wants with it.

[ryao]

30 minutes ago, Sauron said:

That's not how corporations think. And to trust Foxconn they'd have to be unbelievably stupid, way too stupid to become the most valuable company in the world.

The only thing that they trust Foxconn to do is to assemble components that they had made elsewhere according to a process Apple likely designed, box the finished products, ship them out and destroy the ones that were defective. Apple presumably does not give Foxconn anything more to do than that given that they do not seem to source any components from Foxconn. I am not sure if Foxconn even does anything other than assembly for third parties. Assembling others’ property seems to be their entire business.

[TechyBen]

14 hours ago, ryao said:

Which third party parts are they blocking? They own so much of the iPhone’s design that much of it is not third party. At the very least it is not third party in the form that repair shops want it. For example, the only third party part of the custom Apple designed camera module should be the sensor. No repair shop wants just a sensor.

 

If you are talking about the use of authentication chips, it is both legal and at this point necessary to combat return scams that replace parts of the iPhone with third party knock offs to get genuine parts. Without those, Apple could not tell if parts were replaced since the precise external appearances can be duplicated. Those return scams reportedly lead to Apple reselling devices that had fake parts to people because they could not tell that parts had been replaced.

Battery, screen, *ribbon cables*, etc. Anything they finally add a chip too. As said. I can buy wheels/bolts etc for a car. Entire assemblies. I really really don't care for the protection of "knowledge" or skills.