This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair.
The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware, not the traces on the PCB.
About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way.
Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID, etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might need repair.
It's not really useful for most repairs. These PCBs are very dense. The traces and even vias are buried below the surface. At best it might give them some hints about where to probe if they've never worked on that phone model before, but in a practical sense they're not going to be doing many repairs based on the schematics.
The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.
Yes, that's what people like Louis Rossmann famously do. Apple, in turn, tries to serialise each chip and make it only boot if all the serial numbers match.
> This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair. The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module".
I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.
I mean, even the firmware binaries would be a game changer. But really, it'd be the appropriate tool chain to re-sign a replacement chip so that the overall device doesn't reject it. Provided there isn't some kind of mutual key exchange that gets fused out upon factory programming.
It is valid to say they do not have the majority of trade-secrets in the schematics.
However having high quality documentation that is easily accessible is always the first step, and if there are information there that are important it is _much_ more likely it will be known.
It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.
I'm not a repair tech, but I do enjoy watching them work and I suspect they'd strongly disagree with you. It is always useful to know part numbers and how they are connected with each other even of the components are themselves "black boxes".
In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy.
At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.
Eh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty. You just replace the PCB or tell the customer to buy a new phone.
> YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty.
My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up getting stuck on a black screen during boot.
I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews. Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong, and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped.
I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT.
For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was well worth it.
There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would definitely make sense to repair such cases.
I'd argue that VAT is just a bad way to do taxes in general. The only thing it really accomplishes is slowing down the economy. Much better to target wealth/income instead IMO.
Not cost-effective for a repair shop in the US, but in other countries with lower cost of living, including China and many Asian countries, technicians go to great lengths to replace individual components on PCB boards.
They are doing some wild stuff in Asia like adding physical SIM card slots to eSIM only iPhones (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w). I imagine having schematics like this would be at least marginally helpful in developing those techniques.
> it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
Schematics are extremely valuable!
Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
> It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
None of this is true.
Competitors save no R&D at all because these chips are custom to Apple.
The schematic doesn't show routing of the PCB. It shows logical connections between components. The routing is not represented.
Decoupling capacitor placement is also chip specific so it does not translate to other vendors. At this level of PCB design the board is simulated in very expensive software to determine how the power distribution network performs.
> but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
Not in the slightest. This shows logical connections between Apple specific parts. There are no portable industry secrets hidden in this document.
I'm sorry but no. Unless you are producing a 1930s radio these sorts of schematics are next to worthless. There's nothing super clever about PCB routing or resistor placement and it is completely dependent on the chips used (which are increasingly including the actual resistors and capacitors internal to the chip).
Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs an AMD motherboard schematic.
You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB design. But that's just not how hardware works.
The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going into the design of their M series chips and their software/firmware.
I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court, and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not have a right to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them. The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any administration, and there's no way that the Supreme Court would cede the idea that the government has an absolute obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a tort.
> I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires.
Statute of Limitations is about how long you have to file the case, by no means is it a deadline by which you must fully prove damages and have no opportunity to continue your case after it passes.
There must be some sort of legal agreement governing the data sharing. NDAs tend to have something like:
> The parties acknowledge that monetary damages may not be a sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure or use of Confidential Information [...list ways Apple is allowed to nail disclosing partner...]
The law is that you have to submit your schematics to the FCC if you want to sell a device with wireless communications so the FCC can validate that you aren't improperly using the wireless spectrum.
The US might be corporate captured but it's not THAT corporate captured. The US government still has a bigger stick than apple does.
Specially when megacorporations have fortunes in fiscal paradises, which is only possible because their local law has ample loopholes. Threaten to close the biggest loopholes and they will obey.
I believe monopolies and megacorporations are a necessity for authoritarian governments.
Asking for past "examples" is like trying to compare apples to oranges in this scenario. My comment illustrates why this isn't comparable to another administration.
Given how friendly Tim Cook is to Trump, and how being friendly to Trump gets you special carveouts/exemptions, I tend to think they are not afraid of retaliatory tariffs. But, in this day and age you really never know, so definitely a possibility.
It's just very hard to sue a government agency. The FCC, as a federal agency, is subject primarily to lawsuits that challenge its rulemaking, implementation, or enforcement actions. This falls outside that scope.
IIRC there's a law that says the government is immune to lawsuits, so you can only sue it when there's another law that says you can in specific circumstances. This is why you can't sue the police when they bulldoze your house based on bad information, and you have to hope your own insurance covers it.
What you're thinking of is "qualified immunity" and that protects individuals--govermenment offcials--from being sued when carrying out duties related to their jobs.
There is no way in hades that the FCC would dare to do this deliberately; and Louis Rossmann should have known that. Instead he gets clickbait for after they're revoked. /s
It's interesting seeing the sheer number of tiny inductors and capacitors required to keep internal RF noise down. It's amazing that they can cram all those tiny discrites in there.
> This was likely not an intentional act against Apple, which tracks given that the company has been especially supportive of the Trump administration.
Tim has made some terrible choices – I'm sad this is so accurate.
Hot take: Publicly available schematics, part lists and utilities for service and maintenance should be part of FCC certification requirements, at least for mass-market goods like phones and TVs.
For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even offer.
But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.
I’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is).
However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private.
The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients.
Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer.
Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
I share this sentiment for the most part. The only nuance is we probably shouldn't give away core technologies that are closely related to cutting-edge weapons, which would spark an arms race. Let's accelerate competition for everything else, though.
For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that has been salvaged from something and try that.
Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.
I've seen a whole lot of videos of laptop repairs where the only problem was a bad capacitor, and replacing the capacitor removed the short and fixed the laptop.
The capacitors that fail in laptops (and other full size electronic devices) are typically electrolytic caps, which have much shorter lifetimes than other capacitors.
Phones do not have electrolytic capacitors because they are too small.
> It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density.
There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
> iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail
Those are actives. On a highly integrated device like this it would most likely be an application-specific PMIC (power management IC) that isn't generally available. It would be an IC that would be salvaged from one board and transferred to another.
What kinds of application-specific things would it do? Have a weird pinout? Have slightly different voltage thresholds? Have a strange sequencing between different power supplies? None of that is rocket science; you could program an off-the-shelf microcontroller to do any of that (maybe with a breakout board and a couple of bodge wires).
It's far more complicated than that. You are not going to replace an iPhone PMIC with a microcontroller and some bodge wires. Even if you could nail all of the logic, the bodge wires alone would be an order of magnitude more loop inductance than the tightly designed PCB and it just would not work.
The PMIC for a modern SoC is tightly integrated with the SoC. It handles power management, supply sequencing and timing, transitions between power states, standby modes, battery charging, and communication with the SoC. There is digital communication between the SoC and the PMIC to control all of this.
This isn't something you kludge together with a microcontroller and some off the shelf parts.
All of the above, plus implement the control interface expected by the driver and maybe control loops to keep the voltages in range at the point of load. You probably could do it with a breakout board, but good luck getting the right voltage drops to the chip (or fitting it in a cellphone case).
I would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a certain market share. It might be too much for smaller companies and reduces innovation and competition.
Hotter take: consumer devices should always have publically available schematics.
It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese companies will have to publish their schematics too.
Schematics cannot be copyrighted and are extremely useful from R&D point of view. Competition can absolutely copy it verbatim with no consequences. Only thing that can somewhat be copyrighted is exact layout (the same way a photograph would be copyrighted), but that is tenuous.
For complex products that is maybe no big deal, but for smaller businesses, having all details laid out is a gift for cloners to get a cheaper device to the market based on original designs - when it would be not feasible otherwise to reverse engineer it.
Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic.
However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk.
In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
Yeah, that's why I specified mass-market products as a target for such a regulation. The big guns certainly don't have anything that cloners could want to use, their "secret sauce" is in the display technology (for TVs) and their userspace applications (for phones) and neither would be exposed by an extensive right-to-repair legislation.
Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
apple showed bad faith to the fcc at every stage (remember iphone 3g always transmitting at full blast 1W when that was reserve for emergency only low signal?). why do they get the courtesy of filling in private?
They all know how to design a phone already, and don't have access to the proprietary Apple chipsets. Everything else is just industry standard electronic engineering. What would they gain? The specifics of how some power supply is connected?
Not sure why you would think the specifics of how one of the largest company’s in the world designs their phones wouldn’t be useful. There are entire companies that exist solely to generate their own schematics from teardowns because they’re so valuable to certain consumers.
Did you read what FCC published at all? They published the BOM, with specific part numbers and alternatives, the full schematics, and block diagrams of where the chips are laid out. Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this info.
Hard to beat “every single part used” from this document. You talk as if the electronics market vendors have some ability to identify what capacitor models are used.
Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this info.
I'll disagree and say that any teardown org would be able to figure this out on their own in an afternoon, and end up with more information than the PDF in the process. You vastly over-estimate the value of schematics showing wire traces from one black box to another.
No teardown org will know what the models of passives are, nor would they be able to figure out all the traces between various parts “in an afternoon”. This stuff takes days or weeks depending on the depth of understanding you want.
I know everyone likes this story, but they frankly learnt much more about the western phone market several years before that, when everyone (Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, Sony, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telefonica, O2, AT&T, then Google,...) educated HTC on how exactly they should build a phone for their markets.
HTC built up the required R&D and supplier-structure in China then, years before they put their own logo on the first device.
The remaining gap was the lack in experience on mobile platform/UX design and localization, something Microsoft wasn't very experienced themselves. But Google came to the rescue with Android, so Chinese vendors just had to study the UX on other devices and rebuild them in Android...
This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair.
The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware, not the traces on the PCB.
About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way.
Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID, etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might need repair.
It's not really useful for most repairs. These PCBs are very dense. The traces and even vias are buried below the surface. At best it might give them some hints about where to probe if they've never worked on that phone model before, but in a practical sense they're not going to be doing many repairs based on the schematics.
The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.
I suppose you could transplant the chips from a damaged board.
Yes, that's what people like Louis Rossmann famously do. Apple, in turn, tries to serialise each chip and make it only boot if all the serial numbers match.
> This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair. The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module".
I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip, but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back of his repair shop.
I mean, even the firmware binaries would be a game changer. But really, it'd be the appropriate tool chain to re-sign a replacement chip so that the overall device doesn't reject it. Provided there isn't some kind of mutual key exchange that gets fused out upon factory programming.
It is valid to say they do not have the majority of trade-secrets in the schematics.
However having high quality documentation that is easily accessible is always the first step, and if there are information there that are important it is _much_ more likely it will be known.
It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.
I'm not a repair tech, but I do enjoy watching them work and I suspect they'd strongly disagree with you. It is always useful to know part numbers and how they are connected with each other even of the components are themselves "black boxes".
> It is always useful to know part numbers
In modern phones the key part numbers for ICs aren't going to correspond to anything you can buy.
At best, you can see the part numbers for the passives and their alternate suppliers. The part numbers for most of the actives aren't going to be useful to anyone outside of the manufacturing chain for these parts. A repair tech would simply source the donor parts from an identical phone model.
Eh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty. You just replace the PCB or tell the customer to buy a new phone.
> YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or microscopic inductors might be faulty.
My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up getting stuck on a black screen during boot.
I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews. Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong, and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped.
I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT.
For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was well worth it.
There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would definitely make sense to repair such cases.
I'd argue that VAT is just a bad way to do taxes in general. The only thing it really accomplishes is slowing down the economy. Much better to target wealth/income instead IMO.
Your original comment talked about "most commodity PCBs," but it sounds like you really meant to limit your scope to phone PCBs.
Laptops, motherboards, microwave ovens and whatever else has "commodity PCBs" are much more repairable than the highly size-optimized phone market.
Not cost-effective for a repair shop in the US, but in other countries with lower cost of living, including China and many Asian countries, technicians go to great lengths to replace individual components on PCB boards.
They are doing some wild stuff in Asia like adding physical SIM card slots to eSIM only iPhones (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w). I imagine having schematics like this would be at least marginally helpful in developing those techniques.
> it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
Schematics are extremely valuable!
Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
> It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I wonder why it is there" etc.
None of this is true.
Competitors save no R&D at all because these chips are custom to Apple.
The schematic doesn't show routing of the PCB. It shows logical connections between components. The routing is not represented.
Decoupling capacitor placement is also chip specific so it does not translate to other vendors. At this level of PCB design the board is simulated in very expensive software to determine how the power distribution network performs.
> but you might use it to design your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed by multi trillion corporation.
Not in the slightest. This shows logical connections between Apple specific parts. There are no portable industry secrets hidden in this document.
I'm sorry but no. Unless you are producing a 1930s radio these sorts of schematics are next to worthless. There's nothing super clever about PCB routing or resistor placement and it is completely dependent on the chips used (which are increasingly including the actual resistors and capacitors internal to the chip).
Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs an AMD motherboard schematic.
You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB design. But that's just not how hardware works.
The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going into the design of their M series chips and their software/firmware.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250928013949/https://fccid.io/...
If anyone is curious
Any other admin and Apple would sue them. But in this case I think Apple will just apologize to them for not removing the watermark.
Very nice to see these out in the open though. Saves some work. Even if it is the 16e.
> Any other admin and Apple would sue them
I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court, and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not have a right to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them. The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any administration, and there's no way that the Supreme Court would cede the idea that the government has an absolute obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a tort.
> I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil statute of limitations expires.
Statute of Limitations is about how long you have to file the case, by no means is it a deadline by which you must fully prove damages and have no opportunity to continue your case after it passes.
There must be some sort of legal agreement governing the data sharing. NDAs tend to have something like:
> The parties acknowledge that monetary damages may not be a sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure or use of Confidential Information [...list ways Apple is allowed to nail disclosing partner...]
That ain't how things work.
The law is that you have to submit your schematics to the FCC if you want to sell a device with wireless communications so the FCC can validate that you aren't improperly using the wireless spectrum.
The US might be corporate captured but it's not THAT corporate captured. The US government still has a bigger stick than apple does.
>Any other admin and Apple would sue them
Examples of this happening in the past?
Not this necessarily. But corporations have sued other administrations for a number of things. But they are afraid to cross Trump
Specially when megacorporations have fortunes in fiscal paradises, which is only possible because their local law has ample loopholes. Threaten to close the biggest loopholes and they will obey.
I believe monopolies and megacorporations are a necessity for authoritarian governments.
> But they are afraid to cross Trump
If that were the case, there would be some examples of it like the person you are responding to asked for.
Maybe other administrations haven't been sufficiently incompetent to give this kind of cause.
big maybe, but neither has this admin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,....
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/business/us-steel-nippon-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/29/biden-faces-slew-lawsuits-bu...
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Asking for past "examples" is like trying to compare apples to oranges in this scenario. My comment illustrates why this isn't comparable to another administration.
> Apple would sue them.
Apple fears the tariffs.
Given how friendly Tim Cook is to Trump, and how being friendly to Trump gets you special carveouts/exemptions, I tend to think they are not afraid of retaliatory tariffs. But, in this day and age you really never know, so definitely a possibility.
It's just very hard to sue a government agency. The FCC, as a federal agency, is subject primarily to lawsuits that challenge its rulemaking, implementation, or enforcement actions. This falls outside that scope.
IIRC there's a law that says the government is immune to lawsuits, so you can only sue it when there's another law that says you can in specific circumstances. This is why you can't sue the police when they bulldoze your house based on bad information, and you have to hope your own insurance covers it.
What you're thinking of is "qualified immunity" and that protects individuals--govermenment offcials--from being sued when carrying out duties related to their jobs.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
I think it's more likely they were referring to sovereign immunity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
Louis Rossmann posted a video to commend the FCC chair on defending the right to repair by publishing these schematics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TlgrIAI8x4
There is no way in hades that the FCC would dare to do this deliberately; and Louis Rossmann should have known that. Instead he gets clickbait for after they're revoked. /s
I saw the clip. It's deep fried sarcasm through and through.
“Ridiculous statement… not.” was annoying when gen-x pushed it in the 90's, and it's not less annoying now that gen-z spells it “/s”.
Nice little post-hoc "/s" you added there. Can't have anyone think you skipped the video and actually thought that (cough cough).
It's interesting seeing the sheer number of tiny inductors and capacitors required to keep internal RF noise down. It's amazing that they can cram all those tiny discrites in there.
The Engadget article is just a shortened regurgitation of the original source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/29/fcc-mistakenly-le...
Actually this Reddit post predates that "original source" by several hours: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ntc1gt/the_fcc_has_...
"CEO Tim Cook even brought the president a gold trophy for being such a good and important boy." - haha, well played.
> This was likely not an intentional act against Apple, which tracks given that the company has been especially supportive of the Trump administration.
Tim has made some terrible choices – I'm sad this is so accurate.
Hot take: Publicly available schematics, part lists and utilities for service and maintenance should be part of FCC certification requirements, at least for mass-market goods like phones and TVs.
For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even offer.
But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.
I’d vote for politicians willing to champion something like this. I fail to see why this shouldn’t extend to owners of scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners should be able to provide these schematics to others for purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics to be as public to view as GPL code is).
However, some schematics are for products only used internally - like Google TPU’s or some cellular radio access network equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for which the public does not have any interest in the schematics and can remain private.
The schematics aren’t really “secret” in the sense of a recipe. There’s not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for a particular food product, it’s more of a process than just a list of ingredients.
Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every product. It’s just expensive to reverse engineer.
Personally I also think most material compositions should also be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be able to know what’s in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn’t required to list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
I share this sentiment for the most part. The only nuance is we probably shouldn't give away core technologies that are closely related to cutting-edge weapons, which would spark an arms race. Let's accelerate competition for everything else, though.
For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that has been salvaged from something and try that.
Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there. The values of those passives can be measured from parts salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been scrapped.
I've seen a whole lot of videos of laptop repairs where the only problem was a bad capacitor, and replacing the capacitor removed the short and fixed the laptop.
The capacitors that fail in laptops (and other full size electronic devices) are typically electrolytic caps, which have much shorter lifetimes than other capacitors.
Phones do not have electrolytic capacitors because they are too small.
> It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density.
There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
> iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do like to fail
Those are actives. On a highly integrated device like this it would most likely be an application-specific PMIC (power management IC) that isn't generally available. It would be an IC that would be salvaged from one board and transferred to another.
What kinds of application-specific things would it do? Have a weird pinout? Have slightly different voltage thresholds? Have a strange sequencing between different power supplies? None of that is rocket science; you could program an off-the-shelf microcontroller to do any of that (maybe with a breakout board and a couple of bodge wires).
It's far more complicated than that. You are not going to replace an iPhone PMIC with a microcontroller and some bodge wires. Even if you could nail all of the logic, the bodge wires alone would be an order of magnitude more loop inductance than the tightly designed PCB and it just would not work.
The PMIC for a modern SoC is tightly integrated with the SoC. It handles power management, supply sequencing and timing, transitions between power states, standby modes, battery charging, and communication with the SoC. There is digital communication between the SoC and the PMIC to control all of this.
This isn't something you kludge together with a microcontroller and some off the shelf parts.
All of the above, plus implement the control interface expected by the driver and maybe control loops to keep the voltages in range at the point of load. You probably could do it with a breakout board, but good luck getting the right voltage drops to the chip (or fitting it in a cellphone case).
I mean you can put an 0.1mm flat flex board between the board and your chosen microcontroller to get the power and ground pins in the right place.
I would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a certain market share. It might be too much for smaller companies and reduces innovation and competition.
Hotter take: consumer devices should always have publically available schematics.
It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese companies will have to publish their schematics too.
Schematics cannot be copyrighted and are extremely useful from R&D point of view. Competition can absolutely copy it verbatim with no consequences. Only thing that can somewhat be copyrighted is exact layout (the same way a photograph would be copyrighted), but that is tenuous. For complex products that is maybe no big deal, but for smaller businesses, having all details laid out is a gift for cloners to get a cheaper device to the market based on original designs - when it would be not feasible otherwise to reverse engineer it.
> Schematics cannot be copyrighted
Schematics are absolutely copyrighted.
Maybe you meant that the knowledge about connections between parts can't be copyrighted? Someone could have reverse engineered the connections and posted their own interpreted schematic.
However, the schematic that is shared is very much copyrighted. Any competition trying to use it internally in any way would put themselves at legal risk.
In this case, the value to competitors is virtually nil as the schematic is for Apple specific chips which competitors wouldn't have access to.
Yeah, that's why I specified mass-market products as a target for such a regulation. The big guns certainly don't have anything that cloners could want to use, their "secret sauce" is in the display technology (for TVs) and their userspace applications (for phones) and neither would be exposed by an extensive right-to-repair legislation.
Cloners need to be tackled differently anyway, I'd propose attacking these on the marketplaces - ban all sort of marketplace where the platform operator does not physically buy the product to resell it. The third-party ecosystem was an experiment, and it had a good run - but it also has significant downsides, and it's not just taxes or barely any enforcement of environmental safety laws, but particularly from companies not caring at all about waste. So much utterly cheap crap that would normally not pass any incoming QC from a classic big box store gets imported into our markets, our consumers discover it's crap... and while the consumers usually get a refund, the crap has to be disposed of at the consumer's and eventually taxpayer's cost.
Well didn't the FCC lose lots of people via DOGE ?
This is what you get when you fire people without figuring out what their job actually was.
78 employees have left out of ~1500 https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-trims-staff-and-spendin...
Correct. This is what happens when people who are actively hostile to governance are elected to government. Turns out the derp state was load bearing.
The meritocracy strikes again
apple showed bad faith to the fcc at every stage (remember iphone 3g always transmitting at full blast 1W when that was reserve for emergency only low signal?). why do they get the courtesy of filling in private?
Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, Poco, OnePlus, Honor, Realme all taking notes. Good guy FCC looking out for global competition.
They all know how to design a phone already, and don't have access to the proprietary Apple chipsets. Everything else is just industry standard electronic engineering. What would they gain? The specifics of how some power supply is connected?
Not sure why you would think the specifics of how one of the largest company’s in the world designs their phones wouldn’t be useful. There are entire companies that exist solely to generate their own schematics from teardowns because they’re so valuable to certain consumers.
Not sure why you would think the specifics…
Because the FCC didn’t publish specifics. I think one would get better, more specific information from a teardown. It’s even in TFA:
”Competitors could simply buy a handset and open it up to get to this information…”
Did you read what FCC published at all? They published the BOM, with specific part numbers and alternatives, the full schematics, and block diagrams of where the chips are laid out. Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this info.
A random vendor in Huaqiangbei likely can tell you more about what parts iPhone uses than this pdf file.
You talk as if that's some secret.
Hard to beat “every single part used” from this document. You talk as if the electronics market vendors have some ability to identify what capacitor models are used.
Did you read what FCC published at all?
Most of it, yeah.
Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this info.
I'll disagree and say that any teardown org would be able to figure this out on their own in an afternoon, and end up with more information than the PDF in the process. You vastly over-estimate the value of schematics showing wire traces from one black box to another.
No teardown org will know what the models of passives are, nor would they be able to figure out all the traces between various parts “in an afternoon”. This stuff takes days or weeks depending on the depth of understanding you want.
Because Chinese companies make the iPhone in China.
These phones are made in China. These companies have this and then some.
Check out the book “Apple in China”. Most of these Chinese competitors exist because they learned how to make phones by learning from Apple directly.
I know everyone likes this story, but they frankly learnt much more about the western phone market several years before that, when everyone (Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, Sony, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telefonica, O2, AT&T, then Google,...) educated HTC on how exactly they should build a phone for their markets.
HTC built up the required R&D and supplier-structure in China then, years before they put their own logo on the first device.
The remaining gap was the lack in experience on mobile platform/UX design and localization, something Microsoft wasn't very experienced themselves. But Google came to the rescue with Android, so Chinese vendors just had to study the UX on other devices and rebuild them in Android...
Their phones are already better for the most part, why would they care? It's not like they can steal the SoC itself