FCC Mistakenly Leaks Confidential iPhone 16e Schematics (appleinsider.com) 50
The FCC mistakenly published a 163-page PDF containing detailed schematics for Apple's upcoming iPhone 16e, despite Apple explicitly requesting indefinite confidentiality to protect trade secrets. AppleInsider reports: A cover letter is also distributed alongside the schematics, addressed to the FCC and dated September 16, 2024. The letter from Apple is a request for the confidential treatment of documents that are filed with the FCC. [...] The letter from Apple requests a series of documents are withheld from public viewing "indefinitely." The justification is that they contain "confidential and proprietary trade secrets" that are not disclosed to the public post-release, due to giving competitors an "unfair advantage."
The list of documents, Apple states, includes: Block Diagrams, Electrical Schematic Diagrams, Technical Descriptions, Product Specifications, Antenna Locations, Tune-Up Procedure, and Software Security Description. Other documents, such as external and internal photographs, shots of the test setup, and the user manual, are deemed to be less damaging and have "short-term confidentiality" requirements. In those cases, Apple asks for short-term confidentiality for 180 days after the equipment authorization is granted by the FCC.
The list of documents, Apple states, includes: Block Diagrams, Electrical Schematic Diagrams, Technical Descriptions, Product Specifications, Antenna Locations, Tune-Up Procedure, and Software Security Description. Other documents, such as external and internal photographs, shots of the test setup, and the user manual, are deemed to be less damaging and have "short-term confidentiality" requirements. In those cases, Apple asks for short-term confidentiality for 180 days after the equipment authorization is granted by the FCC.
Re:Thank You (Score:5, Interesting)
Umm, the phone is manufactured in China isn't it? They have the schematics already. Besides, schematics are easily reverse engineered
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Apple fan here.
Couldn't not care less about Apple's China connections, let alone anyone highlighting them.
Nice try, troll.
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I got nothing else to do man. Plus, it's free to reply.
Re: Thank You (Score:1)
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Manufacturers used to include a page in the manual with the schematics. You'd buy a washer or dryer and it would have this....
Also easily in airquotes. I mean... you could take photos of all components on a board, then delaminate (trim down with a CNC drill) one layer at a time, take photos of that, feed it into AI and tell it to trace all the paths and draw a nice schematic.
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You don't need schematics to manufacturer Gerbers into a PCB and then to populate a BOM. Schematics can also include many notes. For example, explanations on why specific design choices were made.
All that being said, it would be great if manufacturers did provide schematics. Perhaps this is one of the few advantages of having the administration gut the FCC.
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THIS! A lot of people don't understand that just because someone builds something for you doesn't mean you provide them all the engineered documentation. You don't. You provide them the *output* of that engineering documentation, and the minimum required for construction.
The "why" is unknown to assemblers of electronics. All they get is the "how", and those are very different things.
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For?
All you need to clone it is the schematic.... and the proprietary chips. An iPhone clone is pretty useless without a CPU.
The only thing leaking schematics can do to harm sales is increase the likelihood a broken phone can be repaired.
Re: Thank You (Score:1)
Upcoming? (Score:5, Insightful)
Upcoming? The iPhone 16e was released last year. These are schematics for a phone that has been out for a year.
The problem with this document's release is that it's technical information that was supposed to be kept confidential forever.
I'm assuming this is just an error on the FCC's part, and that they automatically released it after a year. Though with the current administration, Hanlon's razor is getting harder and harder to apply.
Re:Upcoming? (Score:4, Informative)
If by last year, you mean February 2025, sure.
Announced February 19th, shipped February 28th.
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If by last year, you mean February 2025, sure. Announced February 19th, shipped February 28th.
Thank you for proving beyond any doubt why the iPhone 17 is premature.
By about two fucking years.
Talk about shitting out fashion statements at a FOMO pace.
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All the other 16 models came out in September 2024, the cheaper 16e is newer.
Presumably they did that to maximise the sales of the more expensive models.
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It was a shot across the bow to cow Tim Cook.
Indefinitely to a few months is quite efficient (Score:2, Insightful)
Thank DOGE
Re:Indefinitely to a few months is quite efficient (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not sure why you're downvoted
Some people don't like it when you point out the folly of their ways.
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"negative impact on the efficiency and capability of our government." This is precisely what the right wingnuts and the Maggots want. They do not want an effective government. It is sort of biting them in the ass now. Their "Justice Dept" has lost a lot of top talent so much so that the Eastern District of Virginia lost its head honcho because he saw no valid case against Comey. So la Presidenta took one of his attorneys, a former insurance attorney, and had her bring the case. The case was all of two pages
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And yet, they couldn't even indict Subway Guy (someone threw part of a sub sandwich at an "ICE" (?) (you can't really tell since anyone can wear stuff that says ICE on it) official. And they couldn't even indict the guy who assaulted that DOGE sex predator employee.
It isn't a high bar, true, but the DoJ seems to have made it much higher for some reason.
Even Comey's was only able to be indicted
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No longer confidential. (Score:2)
Guess what.. since the Info has been published by a government entity. The Schematics are no longer confidential.
I guess now we get to see whether competitors will truly gain an "unfair" advantage or not.
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Too bad it wasn't the T2 chip. Having the complete documentation on that would make getting Linux on Apple's hardware a lot easier.
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Too bad it wasn't the T2 chip. Having the complete documentation on that
Likely wouldn't help much. The T2 chip has been discontinued and doesn't exist in Apple silicon macs; which is all new Macs for the past several years, since they developed all new silicon, and the CPU package has all the hardware security management embedded into it now. The other thing is the T2 is not basic logic circuits that could be exposed by schematic; it's a programmable SoC that runs only a specific micro-OS supplied by App
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I'm wondering if jailbreakers aren't going to get one just for "reasons".
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Well, my understanding is the repair people have managed to get schematics for many Apple devices including other iPhones. I'm guessing the jailbreakers got the dets on any iPhone they wanted already.
The news, as far as I understand it, is not so much that schematics have been revealed, but the FCC themself revealed them to the world. By accident -- and the FCC did not violate some NDA or other laws in the process. Thus the schematics became legally public due to their mistake. The schematics are no
Something something (Score:2)
Best and brightest.
Oh no (Score:2)
The tech specs to prove how shitty their designs are.
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Re: Oh no (Score:2)
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In the spirit of Starship Troopers "would you like to know more?", if you wish to actually learn how bad Apple engineering is, give them a view.
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blackornegax hit the nail on the head.
But a quick summary that doesn't even need these schematics to confirm:
-Proprietary, non-standard components
-Components unnecessarily soldered
-Batteries are garbage
-Parts pairing
-Antennas are still garbage, though not as bad as it used to be
Apple favors form over function every single time and their forms aren't even that attractive. They will do anything and everything to increase the cost of owning their products over time and try to lock you in instead of just making
Links? (Score:1)
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Looks like the FCC have fixed their error, but you can find the schematics here: https://zh.ifixit.com/Document... [ifixit.com]
Apple undocumented remote control ;) (Score:4, Insightful)
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Our guess is that this unknown hardware feature was most likely intended to be used for debugging or testing purposes by Apple engineers or the factory, or that it was included by mistake. Because this feature is not used by the firmware, we have no idea how attackers would know how to use it.
We are publishing the technical details, so that other iOS security researchers can confirm our findings and come up with possible explanations of how the attackers learned about this hardware feature.
Of all the vulnerabilities ever found, how many of them were found by random researchers/programmers, versus how many found by insiders (devs, QA etc)? With how vulnerabilities are often obscure, "how did they ever find this?" is a question I often wonder. An easy answer is, the guy who programmed it found the problem (maybe while debugging). Or (wild speculation) maybe a tiny % of the time, caused the vulnerability intentionally, only later to have "found" the CVE. Who knows tho, not enough information.
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The Mystery of CVE-2023-38606: Apple's Secret iPhone Backdoor Exposed? [twit.tv]
Discovery in Schematic ! (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
I mean it's a phone, not an atomic bomb or something. The schematics are basically worthless and, more or less, just what the SoC vendor specified in their datasheets. If you remove the chip names it's probably impossible to distinguish one from the other.
There's nothing in there that isn't essentially public from the moment the device arrives on the market. It's also not where the "secret sauce" is in.
So what? (Score:2)
FCC is only interested in the radio part. All of the radio part is already well-established technology, and the schematic will only maybe tell someone which of various well-known approaches Apple decided to use.
The only point of this is that FCC is, like most bureaucracies, incompetent, and can't keep a secret.