For years the most expensive fact about an iPhone has not been the price but the repair. Apple “pairs” major components to the phone’s serial number, so a screen or battery moved from one iPhone to another — even a genuine Apple part — produces a warning that the part is unverified, and some functions, including Touch ID and Face ID, may simply stop. Independent repairers and the right-to-repair movement have fought the practice for a decade. This week Apple gave way, partly.
What changes
In an announcement on its newsroom, Apple said that from later this year — the window it gave runs from August into November — iPhone 15 and newer models can be repaired with used genuine parts and will work fully afterwards. The serial-number matching step disappears for those parts. Initially the policy covers displays, batteries and cameras; biometric sensors — Face ID and Touch ID — follow later. A phone repaired this way will show the part’s history in Settings rather than an alarm, and the calibration that makes a new screen’s True Tone and a battery’s health readout work will run on the device without Apple’s intervention.
The catch: parts get tracked too
Apple has not stopped caring where parts come from; it has changed how it checks. Activation Lock — the feature that makes a stolen iPhone useless without its owner’s Apple ID — now extends to components. If a display or battery came from an iPhone that is in Lost Mode or activation-locked, the receiving phone will limit that part’s function. The goal is to kill the trade in parts harvested from stolen phones, which is the main reason Apple has given for pairing all along. Legitimate used parts pass; parts from a snatched phone do not.
What it means in Dhaka
Bangladesh has no Apple Store and no authorised repair beyond a few premium resellers, so nearly every iPhone here is fixed in an independent shop with parts from the grey market — many of them salvaged from other iPhones. Today those repairs produce the “unknown part” warnings that make customers suspect the shop. From the autumn, on iPhone 15 and later, a genuine used screen from a legitimately dead phone will work cleanly. Two things remain true, though: parts from stolen phones will now be worse than useless, since the phone will flag them, and third-party non-Apple parts are still outside the scheme. The honest shop’s position improves; the one buying screens from snatchers loses its business model.
How to check what is inside a phone before you buy it
The same system that tracks parts gives second-hand buyers something they have never had here: a way to see a phone’s repair history that the seller cannot edit.
On the phone, open Settings → General → About and look for Parts and Service History. It lists the display, battery and camera, and marks each one as a genuine Apple part, an unknown part, or not replaced at all. An entry reading “Unknown Part” means a non-genuine component, which is not necessarily bad but is certainly not what a seller charging original prices should be charging for.
The section does not appear at all if nothing has been replaced, which is itself the answer you want.
What Activation Lock on parts changes in the market
The quieter half of the announcement is that salvaged parts carry the lock status of the phone they came from, so a display pulled from a stolen iPhone reports itself as stolen when fitted to another.
That is aimed squarely at the economics of phone snatching. A stolen iPhone is worth little as a phone because it cannot be activated; its value has always been in the parts. Removing that value is the only intervention that reaches the person doing the snatching, rather than the person who lost the phone.
Sources: The Verge, News18, via Prothom Alo.
