You may love your brand new iPhone 13, but the cool cats at iFixit have learned through a recent teardown that replacing the smartphone’s screen through a third party repair service could disable the Face ID feature.
Via the recent teardown, iFixit noted that Apple has added a small microcontroller to the iPhone 13 screen. Unless Apple pairs your iPhone and this microcontroller, FaceID will not function. Worse yet, the pairing process requires tools only Apple and members of its Independent Repair Provider Program have access to. This, in turn, could lead to an error message that says “Unable to activate Face ID on this iPhone.”
Being a part of Apple’s Independent Repair Provider Program also brings its own difficulties, and many reports that indicated that shops must deal with restrictive contracts and requirements in exchange for access to Apple-specific tools. Shops must also provide repair logs to Apple’s cloud servers, which synchronize the serial numbers of the phone and screen.
iFixit did discover a workaround that can bypass the problem. However, this requires carefully removing the microcontroller from the original screen and then soldering it onto the replacement. It’s a very difficult and work-intensive process.
This tends to boil down to the age-old controversy between Apple and the right to repair, and it seems as if the lion’s share of iPhone 13 repairs could require AppleCare, or at least a local repair shop that’s in Apple’s favor.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via The Mac Observer and iFixit