Apple FINED MILLIONS for misleading customers on Error 53 in Australia

hi today I'd like to talk a little bit about error 53 and the nine million dollar fine that Apple got in Australia over-the-air 53 Fiasco yes I'm using a wired microphone I forgot to charge my double-a batteries for my wireless setup it's way too hot in New York right now to turn off my air conditioner to use the mic built into the camera so deal with it now what happened with error 53 is something that I can't just start by talking about the Australian case there's a bit over 200,000 new subscribers to the channel since I last talked about error 53 so I really think I have to go through the history of it I have to go back to how these devices function and I have to talk about it from the beginning to give you a real understanding so that you can come up with your opinion for yourself as to what you think of what's going on here so let's just go back to the absolute beginning of this with the iPhone 5s the iPhone 5s is the first iPhone where the home button was not really just a home button anymore but a fingerprint sensor the point of the fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5s was twofold to allow you to login to the phone without typing a passcode and to allow you to log into a secure applications like chase bank or by Nance without typing in some long passcode on a phone keyboard because that can be a pain in the ass and that was an understandably so great feature good on Apple for implementing touch ID in the iPhone 5s now the thing with that is that if you're going to have some way of just getting into the phone without a passcode you need to make sure that that is secure so that it cannot be screwed with by anybody who just wants to you know be able to hack into the phone and get people's data and why are money out of their bank accounts using their chase app with a hack fingerprint sensor so you need some sort of security the security that Apple amento implemented with the secure Enclave is actually very good security what they did is they made it so that the home button is paired to the CPU and everything inside the phone and what happens when you change that home button with the fingerprint sensor on it is that you no longer get touch ID it doesn't work anymore so if you replace the home button on an iPhone 5s yourself you will not get touch ID the iPhone 6 took this one step further and they took it one step further where it has nothing to do with security it's just a mistake and there's no reason for it and it's screwed over users what happened with the iPhone 6 same security where if you change the home button the fingerprint scanner no longer works however when you go to date the phone to a new version of iOS well what happened is that wood brick itself with error 53 you would do the update it would finish and then the phone would boot with error 53 and it would no longer work you couldn't revert to an old version you couldn't get your data back from it in any way shape or form you couldn't take it to Apple to have it fixed that you could get your data when you would go to Apple they'd say yeah not much we can do but that'll be a low low price of $2.99 to get you a refurbished phone don't delay buy today and that's what would happen when you went to the Apple store this is where it starts to get a little shady for a couple of reasons and first thing I want to do before I get into everything else is talk about security because will show up in my comments over and over and over is you just don't understand security this was done for security so it's important that I discuss why this has nothing to do with security now when it comes to security the way that this works is when you change the button if you change it to whatever type of button you want as long as the button has changed touch ID no longer works that's all you need for security there you don't need another measure what error 53 does is it only breaks the phone when you go to do a software update so if error 53 were done for security reasons why is it that error 53 would be done when you do a software update rather than being done the moment the phone boots up with the different home button it has nothing to do with security some people wait up to nine months before installing a software update if this was a security feature that's a terribly programmed security feature because that means that after I install my knockoff evil doctor robotnik home button into the phone is steal your data I have nine months to do that does it make any sense now the way that this works as well is that when you install a home a new home button into the iPhone you can't just use the touch ID feature on it you need to reboot the phone so let's say I did make some magical evil home button that could hack into the secure Enclave the home button is not hot swappable in the same way that an SD card is hot swappable with an SD card I can pop it into my computer and out of my computer without turning it off I can pop it into or out of my camera without rebooting the camera and it'll work with the way that the home button with touch ID works once I unplug that and I plug it back in it will work without rebooting the phone now when you reboot the phone the phone is going to ask for a passcode even if it has the original home button in it so if I unplug the battery from the device and I plug the battery back into the device I cannot even use the original home button to log into the phone it will ask for a passcode because I have done a full power boot loop I need to have the home button installed while the phone is still on which I cannot do because it's not hot swappable and I need to have then reboot the phone to make it work which will then force the phone to ask for my passcode so I cannot get into the device even if I did manage to come up with some hacked home button which by the way in the past four years nobody has come up with so this has nothing to do with security if error 53 did have to do with security it would implement itself the moments that it noticed a knock off home button not nine months later when you update the phone now a lot of people are gonna say well why do you assume malice rather than assuming stupidity what if this was just a bug what if this was just a manufacturing defect what if it was just a software flaw why are you assuming malice rather than assuming stupidity and that's a great question and that's a criticism that I accept I did jump to assuming malice before doing a lot of research into whether or not this was a bug of some sort and I'd like to explain why that's the case because that's actually a very valid criticism of a lot of my videos that I will jump to assuming something bad of Apple rather than just assuming that they made a mistake the reason that I jumped to that assumption is because when people went to Apple stores with this issue what the Apple store clerks would say is that you must have brought this to a third party that fixed it and the third party did something wrong they messed up your phone further when news of this came out in 2015 Apple's response was that this is due to security of the phones and if you have something done in a third party they may have messed it up it was as my original landlord John Groce party used to say when we found bedbugs in our new space that we were paying over three thousand dollars a month for it's probably something that you guys did it was one of those things Apple never decided to look into whether this was a bug that wasn't their first reaction their first reaction was oh maybe we did something wrong okay let's look into that why is there 53 exist Apple's first reaction was to say okay well this is actually a security thing this has to do with security and you brought it to a third party that must have messed up the device they didn't do any reflection for even a minute to say that maybe it's something that we did it was because of that that I then jumped to the assumption that this was done maliciously to mess with people's devices and that Apple was full of it and they were full of it for a long time now if I had a guess I would say that that reaction that that statement from Apple came from somebody in either PR or marketing who has even less of an idea how these devices are put together than the dude at tieless of tech that was something that just made no sense this has nothing to do with security I believe that I had every right at that time to assume that this was being done maliciously to mess with people who are getting their devices repaired now you may say Lois as an independent repair shop you should know that by changing the home button it's going to destroy the device and you know what fair enough maybe I should know that we're changing the home button should destroy the device but let's go through this here every iPhone from the two to the five allowed you to change the home button with no issues the 5s even with touch ID you would change the home button and you could update the phone no issues you just wouldn't have touch ID anymore the iPhone 6 was the first phone where if you did this you would have this issue no were in the service manual did it state that you would have error 53 no we're even in Apple's own service manuals given out to Apple authorized service providers does it say that if you change the home button you will get error 53 how is it that I'm supposed to know of something that a never affected previous iPhones B is not included in Apple's own internal documentation on how to fix the phone when it came out and C is not said at all in the EULA regarding the software update no were in that EULA does it ever state this will break your phone if you change the home button with error 53 and you will not have access to your data doesn't say that anywhere and when you take the device to the store they stand by that mantra that you must have taken it to an independent repair shop they messed it up even if the independent repair shop did a perfect job of installing the new home button did not damage any cables used an authentic Apple screen even if they took the screen off of an iPhone 6 that they purchased from the Apple store itself put it onto another person's iPhone 6 that device if it was perfectly serviced we'd still give you error 53 if you updated the software this is not something that I think a reasonable person can imagine independent repair shops or even Apple Authorized repair shops had any ability to know about and the reason I say that is because it took Apple damn near a year to figure this out for themselves if it took the 900 billion dollar company almost a year to figure it out for themselves how is it that we would be able to figure this out for ourselves but I digress what happened is after about a year of people talking about this and this issue getting more and more media attention and Apple getting more and more bad PR they realized that it was actually something that was designed for production error 53 was put there so that when the phone to be programmed at the factory if something went wrong with the pairing between the home button and the CPU rather than that phone being shipped to the customer it would get error 53 it would be bricked at the factory before it reached the customer so this was done as a level of quality assurance and quality control at the factory but error 53 was never designed or intended to make it into users phones that were being repaired or a user device that was being sold and Best Buy or Verizon or the AT&T store that's what Apple said so that means that this was indeed a bug so when Apple said this must be a third-party repair shops messing up phones when Apple said this must be this is a security feature we did this to help you all that stuff that Apple said in the beginning of 2015 was completely an utter eviscerated rendered invalid completely inaccurate and complete BS by their own statements in 2016 when they issued a bug fix for error 53 the bug fix for error 53 allows you to connect a phone that was bricked by error 53 to a computer and then have that phone unbreached you would not have touch ID functionality anymore that would be gone but you would have access to your data and the phone would work as a phone again the same way it did with the iPhone 5s now fast-forwarding well what happens to all those people that went to an Apple store after they got error 53 and just gave up and paid to 49 or 349 or whatever the rate was to have their phone replaced well seems like all those people kind of got screwed now doesn't it all those people who were given a refurbished device to replace their perfectly good device that just had a software issue caused them to not have a working phone anymore that really sucks now don't get me wrong I understand why Apple would say we don't want to work on a device that somebody else has worked on if we can prove that they messed it up if I open a phone and I see that there's a long screw damage and there's liquid damage and a tech tried to plug in the battery backwards and the screen connector upside down so it's all jagged and messed up I probably would not want to work on that device if I can prove that another technician damaged it I understand if Apple would say we're gonna charge you more money to just do an out of warranty replacement on this because you messed it up no normal repair for you I can understand that to some extent if the user messed it up but when you're offering zero options to the end-user for repair when there's no proof that it was messed up when it's actually your own bug that caused this that really sucks so that means that a lot of users pay 249 - 349 to have these devices replaced with refurbished ones when there was nothing wrong with them now credit where credit is due Apple did a much better job of implementing touch ID the secure Enclave and the fingerprint sensor from a security perspective than their Android competitors if you look at phones like the HTC One Maxx - the Samsung Galaxy s5 and s6 they were far less secure than the Apple devices so good on Apple for making a device that was more secure that's a good thing and we should be complimenting Apple on their security there however just because Apple made a device that was more secure does not mean that they get to wave the get-out-of-jail-free card of security anytime they have a book error 53 was a bug this was something that was designed for when they were being manufactured this was not something that was supposed to make it into the retail devices when somebody has error 53 and they go to the store and at the store they say tough pay us - 49 - 349 to replace your totally fine phone with a refurb that they're then going to refurbish when they get it back and sell to somebody else that's wrong when Apple says this was a bug our apologies for this bug but then doesn't refund all the people that pay 249 - 349 to get in out of warranty furbished phone from them that is wrong they do not get to wave error 53 around for that bug I can simultaneously complement Apple on their superior security to their Android counterparts when dealing with the fingerprint scanner while simultaneously realizing that the security excuse they gave for error 53 is complete when you look at how the secure Enclave works so what did Australia do at this point when they realized that Apple was billing people - 49 - 349 for refurbished device swaps and then taking those old ones unbreaking them and then selling them to people well they find them nine million dollars right they sure showed Apple they gave them a lesson nine million dollars it looks like apples total equity right now is a hundred twenty six billion around their total assets three hundred sixty seven billion total liabilities two hundred forty billion if I look at all this that would be like you finding me I'm just gonna do some quick math and the fly in my head it would be like you finding me five 250 dollars when you look at what my net worth as an individual as a business is when Apple is fined nine million dollars for what they did that would be the equivalent of finding me somewhere between five to fifty dollars so let's say for two years straight I tricked hundreds of thousands of people into giving me two to four hundred dollars for something that I should not have been charging them that for and then after years of charging hundreds of thousands of people 300 bucks when I should not have been doing that you find me five - 50 bucks does that sound fair to you if anybody thinks that this is a win in Australia's court that look at Australia's consumer protection they're not going to let large companies push people no no no no you don't get I this is not even remotely impressive I understand that in this instance that the maximum that they could be fined under that current law is nine million dollars and I can respect that at the same time I am NOT going to be waiving this as some sort of flag of victory like look at the Australian Government Australia showed Apple whose book no they didn't know they didn't I I could have made hundreds of thousands of dollars over a year and you find me five bucks like really really that's what you're saying just the amount of money that Apple made off of this alone is way more than what they were find what I do find impressive about it is not the dollar amount but rather the fact that people are waking up to this and that consumers are realizing what's going on the press is actually more important in the font I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below that's it for today as always I hope you learned something and I will be doing a board repair livestream as soon as my double-a batteries get finished charging and the air conditioner makes it cool enough to work in here

Channel: Louis Rossmann

Views: 880,608

Rating: 4.92343 out of 5

Keywords: error 53 fix, iphone error 53, fix error 53, touch id iphone 6, iphone 6 error 53, iphone 6 error 53 solution, australia, fine, apple, 6.6 million

Id: cDYeby1Vanw

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018