People want a way to know if devices on the used market have been screwed with - and I am cool with that. These devices are becoming more and more expensive, so there is a higher consumer interest in knowing the history of the device they are purchasing used.
Some refurbishers are good, and some are absolute
garbage. How will a consumer know, when purchasing something on the used market, which it is? Many even use
little pieces of rubber to hold poorly soldered chips in place, or use
high temperature BGA profiles to save time when replacing GPUs at the expense of the health of the board. I wouldn't want to buy poorly refurbished devices with the junk, cheap aftermarket LCDs, or crap batteries either. And, I'd appreciate having a way to
KNOW what I am getting when I hop on the used market. I I think there's a better way to go about it.
I am using an LG G8 I got off eBay for about $300 right now.. I like buying used. I have no reason to spend full retail on something I will scratch within a week. The ability to know its history would be great, and I understand and respect the opinions of people who think it is cool that the manufacturer provide the user with tools to help them get that history!
The problem is when the tool is so poor, it tosses up the same error code regardless of what is in the phone. A knockoff battery with punctures does the same thing as the original, with zero cycles. It's too far in the other direction: and whether it is coded as such out of laziness or malice, it doesn't change the fact that it uses poor wording, which I think is at the crux of the debate here.
Service.
What do consumers think when they see service?
I typically don't like Apple's attempts to fight the "right to repair", but this doesn't actually seem so unreasonable. They have a reputation to maintain and don't want sketchy third-party repairs to hurt that. Notifying the user that they have an unofficial configuration, without disabling any functionality, seems harmless enough. It could even help those who buy a used phone and want to ensure it hasn't been tampered with.
I think this is much more of a PR move to protect their phones' (already shaky at times) reputation, rather than a money grab. The $69 for an official replacement isn't probably a significant factor.
My only issue with it is the word service. For over 14 years their laptops have said
service battery when the battery in the machine was either near dead, or only putting out 1 volt. Apple consumers have come to associate the word
service in the battery health indicator to mean that the battery is a useless piece of junk.
By all means, let people know when the screen has been replaced, battery replaced. Let them know if that tristar chip ever had the pain of speaking to a non-OEM charger
(which actually puts way more mileage on the device than any of these 3rd party batteries do - I'd actually get behind this in a "tristar health" app! no sarcasm).
The word service used prior to clicking is what I find lame - it implies, based on prior use of the word, that the part is defective/dead/close to dead when it isn't. Short of that word, I could care less.
