Image: Alex Parkin/ The Verge
We started making this video with one question in mind: “What makes iPhone repair so difficult?” And immediately the answer was: a lot.
I’ve never repaired a phone before, so I was particularly nervous that the first one I was opening was an iPhone. This wasn’t just because I didn’t want to destroy a phone with a mistake but also because I was somewhat familiar with Apple’s reputation with repairability. However, I wanted to test out a new repair feature Apple introduced recently with iOS 18 called “repair assistant” to see if it fixes a years-long practice of Apple’s that makes iPhones incredibly difficult to repair.
Before iOS 18, replacing components of an iPhone like the display or battery without going through Apple’s repair channels would reduce the functionality of the device because iPhones are programmed to recognize when parts are swapped out. This is because of a design choice called “parts pairing.”
Apple uses parts pairing to assign serial numbers to parts inside a device and tie those parts to the logic board. This means you can’t replace any of these parts on your own or at a repair shop without having a way to pair a new part’s serial number to the device. If a…
