France is fighting to save its iPhone from an untimely death

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every time a The new iPhone comes out, a team of technicians from the French city of Toulouse begin to disassemble it. In the three years they have been doing this, they have found a device that is gradually becoming a fortress. Today’s iPhones are packed with parts that cannot be repaired or replaced by anyone other than an expensive Apple-accredited repair shop. And France doesn’t like that one bit.

It is a problem that is getting worse and worse, says Alexandre Isaac, CEO of the repair academy, the renowned research and training group that runs the Toulouse workshop. Every time a new iPhone is released, your team finds another part that has been locked to only work with a specific Apple device. First it was just a chip on the motherboard, he says. Then the list of parts with repair restrictions was extended to Touch ID, Face ID, and finally the battery, display, and camera.

By forcing people to pay a reputable technician more than the value of a used iPhone for a simple repair job, Apple is incentivizing people to throw away their devices rather than repair them, Isaac says. The Repair Academy estimates that an Apple Certified Technician charges customers twice as much as an independent repair shop. “A lot of people see Apple as super green,” Isaac says, referring to the solar panels at the company’s California headquarters and the recycled aluminum used to build MacBooks. The Repair Academy has been gathering evidence to prove that this is not the case. Instead, Apple engineers are proactively trying to make iPhones harder to repair, he argues.

It’s a problem Isaac has been tracking for years. And now a Paris prosecutor has decided to take action. On May 15, the prosecutor announced that there will be an official investigation into allegations that Apple is following a business model of planned obsolescence—a term that refers to designing a product in a way that intentionally limits its useful life.

The prosecutor, who has delegated the investigation to France’s Department for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Prevention (DGCCRF), will have powers to fine the company and also test whether Apple’s iPhone repair restrictions break French law. as activists claim. For years, France has been at the forefront of the right to repair movement, ushering in Europe’s first movement repairability scoring system. But this case cements the country’s willingness to take on Apple and the way it builds its products.

“France is pushing for the right to repair in a way that no one else has yet,” says Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability for iFixit, a US group that campaigns for the right to repair. “This is the first time we’ve seen a movement against planned obsolescence through part pairing on a national level.” Apple did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. The company recently published its Environmental Progress Report 2023.

Part pairing, also known as “serialization,” works by matching a phone’s serial number to the serial number of an internal part so that the phone knows if the screen, battery, or a sensor has been replaced. “On the iPhone, the most pernicious way is if you try to swap two screens from two working iPhones,” Chamberlain says, adding that the swap won’t work because the serial numbers don’t match or the customers will. being bombarded with warnings from their iPhone telling them that their screen is not verified.