UPDATE 10:20am July 24th: Unsurprisingly, both the videos and Arman Haji’s YouTube channel appear to have been taken down. However, another YouTube user has published the clip here.
Original story follows…
Videos purportedly demonstrating Apple’s internal iPhone and Mac repair methods have been posted online.
A total of 11 clips have been uploaded to YouTube, featuring the Apple logo and copyright notice, show how to open up an iPhone X, replace the battery, camera, internal speaker and display. Apple has not commented on the legitimacy of the videos, but Motherboard sources confirmed to the site that these are indeed internal videos, probably used to help train the company’s support employees.
Other repair videos pertaining to the iMac Pro, MacBook trackpad and MacBook Pro Touch ID sensor are also part of the collection.
Apple is unlikely to be pleased with the emergence of these clips given its often hardline stance on do-it-yourself and third-party repairs. In April 2018 the iOS 11.3 update disabled the touchscreen of iPhone 8 models repaired outside of Apple’s own authorised service providers. Until early 2017, having a screen repaired by a third-party source also voided the iPhone warranty.
Related: Best smartphone
As Motherboard points out, the videos appear to show how effective the DIY community has become in mirroring how Apple repairs its devices. The official process looks an awful lot like videos we’ve seen from teardown sites like iFixit, for example. Regardless, we still wouldn’t recommend doing this at home, even if you had access to a lot of the bespoke tools Apple uses.
The videos were discovered by Arman Haji who posted them to his YouTube channel after his Twitter account was suspended for doing so. He said: “When I saw these videos I downloaded them out of curiosity, and when his account got suspended, I wanted people to still see them, so I uploaded them to YouTube.”
Have you ever attempted to repair an iPhone yourself? Have you experienced problems with the firm after third-party repairs? Let us know @TrustedReviews on Twitter.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
