These are security-related items that are being replaced by those from unknown vendors. A very bad idea.
Consider: your TouchID does more than just open your phone. It also authenticates ApplePay transactions, and many other apps depend on the integrity of TouchID for authentication purposes. Off the top of my head, my own phone uses TouchID authentication to open 1Password (which contains ALL my accounts and passwords), several financial and health applications, and so on. Not to mention four credit cards stored in my Wallet.
If my TouchID were compromised, I'm not entirely convinced that bricking my phone is the worst-case scenario!
Exactly. I hope they can find a more graceful way out of this, but the fact is, Apple Pay is far more secure than a credit card now, if it is with original parts. Here's what security is on the net: you show your identity to someone, and that link is encrypted so no one else can see. Banks, websites, everything, depends on that link. If there's a failure, it's on the provider. If somebody finds a software way to fake out Touch ID, Apple has a huge fiduciary duty to fix it. To do that, Apple had to make a software/hardware bond. If you say, sure, anyone can replace an Apple Touch ID button with a part not known to the pairing, it breaks, then you've said, I don't want a secure phone. People get angry at Apple, accusing them of "just doing this because". Well, it's really secure and convenient, and that's what users want more than anything, including the newspaper that broke the Snowden story. Would this reporter want to have his conversations overheard? No. He picked an iPhone. He got it fixed in Macedonia, at a shop that didn't know how to repair it. So we trust, in matters of security, a wider and wider group? Who is he? Foreign correspondents are targets of all kinds of agencies and interests throughout the world "What's that Guardian guy going to report on? On that? Hmm. What crossroads will be be at tomorrow afternoon?" Does he trust that repairman? Does an NSA cellphone get fixed at some guy's shoe repair and cellphone shop? No. If you can't get a software way in, or it's at least difficult, wouldn't agents be taking it apart, figuring it out, and figuring out how to make a malicious home button? Or making the GPS indicate it's off when it's on? Or the camera to start without the light coming on? It becomes something untrustworthy. A hardware back door is quite possible. Now, I think they've failed on the customer service side. A friend of mine had an iPad mini, and he sat on it. It was about three months past warrantee. Apple took a look at it, and he got a replacement for it for $180. The original was was $700, it was fully-loaded. In under an hour, he had the whole think replaced from iCloud and he was walking out the door. Why not something like that, if it works? A lot of people say, well, why not just keep the passcode enabled? Maybe, but I think anything like that has to be thought about before you commit. Nothing would be worth enabling some behavior, and then discovering that somebody, six months later, was emptying bank account with this access because you forgot _blank.
