Last week, iFixit's repair champions got their hands on the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro and found many similarities between the two devices. They also seemed reasonably easy to repair, with both having a repairable score of 6/10. Now, however, a new development is making me reevaluate this site.

From a hardware standpoint, there appears to be no technical reason why the new screen and camera module cannot be incorporated, but for the iPhone 12, it appears that steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized third-party repairs. This is unfortunate given the high cost of first-party repairs.

The news comes again courtesy of iFixit, which found that plugging another camera module into the iPhone 12 produces "extremely strange results." While the camera appears to work fine at first, it often fails during use, refusing to switch to ultra-wide, responding only to certain modes, or becoming completely unresponsive.

One possible reason for this stems from internal training documentation seen by iFixIt, which apparently states that authorized repair technicians must use Apple's cloud-linked System Configuration app to repair the iPhone 12's camera and screen.

"This does not mean that the iPhone camera or screen will not work at all without the touch of an official technician," the site writes, adding that it has performed multiple screen replacements across 12 iPhone models without issue (other than an on-screen warning about the dangers of fake displays) ." it added. The site also emphasized that there were no problems with the iPhone 12 Pro's camera during the exchange, which may suggest that this is not intentional after all - and could even be resolved with a software fix.

However, iFixIt is not convinced." Taken together with the system configuration documentation and all the other bugs, tricks, and intentional lockouts that stand in the way of Apple's fully functional iPhones, we take this as a sign that things will not get better unless there are major changes from within, from customer requests, or from the law. We are taking it as a sign.

For now, the 6/10's repairable score has been maintained, but the site has stated that it will "actively re-evaluate" how it scores iPhones in the future. iPhone 12's new Ceramic Shield Protection has proven to be quite efficient at preventing damage from drops from ridiculous heights. . just as it has proven to be quite efficient in preventing damage from drops from ridiculous heights.