Today I learned that apple decided to completely lock down the iPhone 12 to prevent hardware manipulation. A nice or horrible side-effect, depending on what you are into, this also means you can no longer swap parts of a phone to repair it. If you still do, the device will maybe refuse to boot until you plug it into a charger. Once it does boot, it’ll not only refuse the use any of the existing battery health or face-ID features, but also refuse to re-initialize them and have various odd issues along the way.¹ It basically denies “owner” of those pieces of e-waste the ability to repair them or get them repaired to non-apple prices. Apple itself seems to be able to re-pair² those phones, but I wouldn’t expect those capabilities to leave apples own stores.

I came across this will watching a random series of YouTube videos as so often. When ending up about one, where a repairman was swapping parts of two brand new iPhones.