Is Apple Locking iPhone Batteries to Discourage Repair? Also: Foldable iPads!

Yeah, I’m just gonna lean right into Bettridge’s Law with this video title. Right on in.

So, the story is this:

A couple of days ago, Justin from TheArtofRepair YouTube channel discovered that, all of a sudden, swapping out the battery on an iPhone resulted in the newish battery health monitoring system turning off and popping up:

"Important battery message: Unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine Apple battery. Health information not available for this battery"

Since then, we’ve seen headlines like Vice’s “Apple Is Locking Batteries to Specific iPhones, a Nightmare for DIY Repair” and, of course, iFixit’s “Apple Is Locking iPhone Batteries to Discourage Repair” and just a ton more like them.

Now, I’m going to push back kinda hard on using the term “locking” for any of this. Not because I’m an evil Apple apologist or defender, even though I can feel some of you just itching… itching to start typing that in the comments right now already.

But because I think it’s just dumb and let’s Apple off the hook far too easily.

Let me explain...

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