Parts missing? I don’t believe this at all. A phone is basically a single board, screen, battery, lenses, audio bits. Everything is so jammed in that there’s no room to think parts are missing. No tech would make this mistake and Apple doesn’t benefit from generating a hostile customer experience. This is made up.
I used to work for Apple. I don’t believe the missing parts story because as you said, how would that even happen. But, if any parts have been replaced, especially the home buttons / finger print reader, they will refuse to fix, and I never understand why. So that may be what happened.
Also Jobs was 100% behind this stuff. It’s so annoying when people treat him like he was some tech god. He was a twat.
The refusal is likely tied to liability, in that they see any aftermarket parts or OoW repairs as a potential failure point and fear the customer may blame them for it. It wouldn’t even matter if the quality of work or parts is as good or better. There’s also another factor of trying to oversimplify any repairs/service to allow them to eventually hire unqualified/uneducated ‘techs’ for things who don’t have a clue what’s going on.
Sorry details may be fake, but I do believe an apple employee would pull some shot because policy dictates they sell new equipment over fixing old equipment.
Every apple fanboy I talk to gushes about how amazing the genius bar is, helping them when they get their iPhone stuck in their ass.
But every casual user who has different problems beyond getting an iPhone stuck in their ass seems to get the same response: “Buy the next version”.
I dunno though I’m forced to use the apple products from work.
I was a tech in a store and covered a fee on a replacement device because it was the second time the guy had to come to us. I gave a young woman (student) a free laptop because she’d had a super long repair history during my last week in that role. Apple conditions their retail employees to treat customers well and it’s something I missed getting to do for people forever after.
When I moved to the mothership, the only mantra was always about doing right by our customers. When I was interviewing for that gig, I asked one of the interviewers what he considered challenging about the job and he said that (coming from Microsoft to Apple) the company had an “insane” focus on its customers. It really is a top-down attitude. The company may be high sniffing their own farts, but they believe they’re uniquely focused on doing the right thing.
The only way i would believe it is if they meant a screw or two or one of the flat metal plates that is used to secure other components. Ive repaired i pho es and they are a pain tk deal with and sometimes you forget exactly which screw goes where when they are mostly so small they all look the same. I misplaced a small plastic component thst acts as a sound amplifying cone to direct your voice soundwaves to the microphone use for phone calls and it made it so people couldnt hear me unless i used the speaker phone. But thats no good reason not to repair. They should have drawers filled with those screws and other internal irrelevant components
A lot of it is single board, but there are smaller PCB layered in there connected by ribbon cables or press-in connections. I replaced the battery in my iphone and it’s a tedious but doable DIY project. Anyway, the way it’s assembled doesn’t lend itself to missing parts. Parts of or the whole phone won’t work. No way would phone arrive “missing” parts - unless there was external damage to any cameras or switches.