[HN Gopher] FCC Accidentally Leaked iPhone Schematics
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FCC Accidentally Leaked iPhone Schematics
Author : mikhael
Score : 201 points
Date : 2025-09-29 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.engadget.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.engadget.com)
| avidiax wrote:
| Louis Rossmann posted a video to commend the FCC chair on
| defending the right to repair by publishing these schematics:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TlgrIAI8x4
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| There is no way in hades that the FCC would dare to do this
| deliberately; and Louis Rossmann should have known that.
| Instead he gets clickbait for after they're revoked. /s
| Tade0 wrote:
| I saw the clip. It's deep fried sarcasm through and through.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Nice little post-hoc "/s" you added there. Can't have anyone
| think you skipped the video and _actually_ thought that
| (cough cough).
| cwillu wrote:
| "Ridiculous statement... not." was annoying when gen-x pushed
| it in the 90's, and it's not less annoying now that gen-z
| spells it "/s".
| jmclnx wrote:
| Well didn't the FCC lose lots of people via DOGE ?
|
| This is what you get when you fire people without figuring out
| what their job actually was.
| pohl wrote:
| Correct. This is what happens when people who are actively
| hostile to governance are elected to government. Turns out the
| derp state was load bearing.
| dmix wrote:
| 78 employees have left out of ~1500
| https://www.insideradio.com/free/fcc-trims-staff-and-spendin...
| jajuuka wrote:
| Any other admin and Apple would sue them. But in this case I
| think Apple will just apologize to them for not removing the
| watermark.
|
| Very nice to see these out in the open though. Saves some work.
| Even if it is the 16e.
| gruez wrote:
| >Any other admin and Apple would sue them
|
| Examples of this happening in the past?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Not this necessarily. But corporations have sued other
| administrations for a number of things. But they are afraid
| to cross Trump
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > But they are afraid to cross Trump
|
| If that were the case, there would be some examples of it
| like the person you are responding to asked for.
| tempestn wrote:
| Maybe other administrations haven't been sufficiently
| incompetent to give this kind of cause.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| big maybe, but neither has this admin
| scarface_74 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stor
| es,....
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/06/business/us-steel-
| nippon-...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/29/biden-faces-slew-
| lawsuits-bu...
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Specially when megacorporations have fortunes in fiscal
| paradises, which is only possible because their local law
| has ample loopholes. Threaten to close the biggest
| loopholes and they will obey.
|
| I believe monopolies and megacorporations are a necessity
| for authoritarian governments.
| sanskritical wrote:
| > Any other admin and Apple would sue them
|
| I doubt Apple could demonstrably prove damages before the civil
| statute of limitations expires. This is a nonstarter in court,
| and furthermore this is not negligence by the FCC. You do not
| have a _right_ to keep your FCC filings from leaking under all
| circumstances, and the FCC has not assumed a civil obligation
| externally to your rights to do so. Government agencies do not
| sign NDAs when corporations submit technical documents to them.
| The Federal government has no obligation in statute to keep
| them secret, you asking them to is a polite suggestion to the
| FCC and holds no bearing in law. Even if you could prove
| damages, trying to bring a case under the Federal Tort Claims
| Act against the government for this would be a nightmare in any
| administration, and there 's no way that the Supreme Court
| would cede the idea that the government has an absolute
| obligation your filings secret forever under pain of civil
| penalties. It's an embarrassing clerical error, but it isn't a
| tort.
| ronsor wrote:
| > Apple would sue them.
|
| Apple fears the tariffs.
| fortran77 wrote:
| It's just very hard to sue a government agency. The FCC, as a
| federal agency, is subject primarily to lawsuits that
| challenge its rulemaking, implementation, or enforcement
| actions. This falls outside that scope.
| immibis wrote:
| IIRC there's a law that says the government is immune to
| lawsuits, so you can only sue it when there's another law
| that says you can in specific circumstances. This is why
| you can't sue the police when they bulldoze your house
| based on bad information, and you have to hope your own
| insurance covers it.
| fortran77 wrote:
| What you're thinking of is "qualified immunity" and that
| protects individuals--govermenment offcials--from being
| sued when carrying out duties related to their jobs.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
| majorchord wrote:
| I think it's more likely they were referring to sovereign
| immunity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_U
| nit...
| freedomben wrote:
| Given how friendly Tim Cook is to Trump, and how being
| friendly to Trump gets you special carveouts/exemptions, I
| tend to think they are not afraid of retaliatory tariffs.
| But, in this day and age you really never know, so definitely
| a possibility.
| gred wrote:
| There must be some sort of legal agreement governing the data
| sharing. NDAs tend to have something like:
|
| > The parties acknowledge that monetary damages may not be a
| sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure or use of
| Confidential Information [...list ways Apple is allowed to nail
| disclosing partner...]
| cogman10 wrote:
| That ain't how things work.
|
| The law is that you have to submit your schematics to the FCC
| if you want to sell a device with wireless communications so
| the FCC can validate that you aren't improperly using the
| wireless spectrum.
|
| The US might be corporate captured but it's not THAT
| corporate captured. The US government still has a bigger
| stick than apple does.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Hot take: Publicly available schematics, part lists and utilities
| for service and maintenance should be part of FCC certification
| requirements, at least for mass-market goods like phones and TVs.
|
| For competitors they're useless anyway - the big guns (think
| Samsung, Apple, Motorola, ...) all know how to design a
| smartphone and none of them will want to get caught copying a
| competitor. Chinese cloners and repair shop suppliers somehow
| manage to reverse engineer even highly complex PCBs in a matter
| of weeks, to the tune you can walk around in Shenzen and have a
| multitude of deepest level repair options, including upgrades by
| reballing and replacing storage options that Apple doesn't even
| offer.
|
| But actual repair shops and repair cafes here? They would greatly
| benefit from having quality documentation and access to tools.
| nicce wrote:
| I would say that mandatory for any project which reaches a
| certain market share. It might be too much for smaller
| companies and reduces innovation and competition.
| Aurornis wrote:
| For phones, it wouldn't make a difference to most repairs. The
| repair shops that work at PCB level swap major components
| between PCBs. It's rare that one of the passive components is
| the cause of a failure on a PCB at this density. Even with the
| schematic it would be hard to diagnose many failure modes
| without a lot of trial and error. So they don't waste their
| time, they just swap the major ICs into a different board that
| has been salvaged from something and try that.
|
| Schematics for high-density boards like this are not as
| informative as you might expect. It's mostly connections
| between balls of ICs and the values of passives here and there.
| The values of those passives can be measured from parts
| salvaged from boards if necessary. More likely, the technician
| would simply steal the part from another PCB that has been
| scrapped.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > It's rare that one of the passive components is the cause
| of a failure on a PCB at this density.
|
| There have been a few videos posted here or showing up on my
| YT feed for phone repairs, iirc the voltage/battery
| regulators are things that do like to fail (and pretty
| obviously, when looking at the pcb with a heat camera).
| Aurornis wrote:
| > iirc the voltage/battery regulators are things that do
| like to fail
|
| Those are actives. On a highly integrated device like this
| it would most likely be an application-specific PMIC (power
| management IC) that isn't generally available. It would be
| an IC that would be salvaged from one board and transferred
| to another.
| kragen wrote:
| What kinds of application-specific things would it do?
| Have a weird pinout? Have slightly different voltage
| thresholds? Have a strange sequencing between different
| power supplies? None of that is rocket science; you could
| program an off-the-shelf microcontroller to do any of
| that (maybe with a breakout board and a couple of bodge
| wires).
| InitialLastName wrote:
| All of the above, plus implement the control interface
| expected by the driver and maybe control loops to keep
| the voltages in range at the point of load. You probably
| could do it with a breakout board, but good luck getting
| the right voltage drops to the chip (or fitting it in a
| cellphone case).
| kragen wrote:
| I mean you can put an 0.1mm flat flex board between the
| board and your chosen microcontroller to get the power
| and ground pins in the right place.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I've seen a whole lot of videos of laptop repairs where the
| only problem was a bad capacitor, and replacing the capacitor
| removed the short and fixed the laptop.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I'd vote for politicians willing to champion something like
| this. I fail to see why this shouldn't extend to owners of
| scientific and industrial equipment as well (and the owners
| should be able to provide these schematics to others for
| purposes of repair, effectively meaning I would like schematics
| to be as public to view as GPL code is).
|
| However, some schematics are for products only used internally
| - like Google TPU's or some cellular radio access network
| equipment. I think that there exist FCC-approved devices for
| which the public does not have any interest in the schematics
| and can remain private.
|
| The schematics aren't really "secret" in the sense of a recipe.
| There's not really a way to precisely determine the recipe for
| a particular food product, it's more of a process than just a
| list of ingredients.
|
| Schematics are right there inside the physical circuit board
| for anyone to inspect. You already give them away with every
| product. It's just expensive to reverse engineer.
|
| Personally I also think most material compositions should also
| be made public by similar logic. I think consumers should be
| able to know what's in their blankets, dishware, and alcoholic
| beverages as well. Apparently beer/liquor isn't required to
| list ingredients either, which is mind-blowing to me in 2025.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| I share this sentiment for the most part. The only nuance is
| we probably shouldn't give away core technologies that are
| closely related to cutting-edge weapons, which would spark an
| arms race. Let's accelerate competition for everything else,
| though.
| txrx0000 wrote:
| Hotter take: consumer devices should always have publically
| available schematics.
|
| It doesn't even matter if the Chinese companies get it. That
| will only accelerate innovation because nobody would buy an
| unrepairable clone if repairability is the norm. The Chinese
| companies will have to publish their schematics too.
| varispeed wrote:
| Schematics cannot be copyrighted and are extremely useful from
| R&D point of view. Competition can absolutely copy it verbatim
| with no consequences. Only thing that can somewhat be
| copyrighted is exact layout (the same way a photograph would be
| copyrighted), but that is tenuous. For complex products that is
| maybe no big deal, but for smaller businesses, having all
| details laid out is a gift for cloners to get a cheaper device
| to the market based on original designs - when it would be not
| feasible otherwise to reverse engineer it.
| cornstalks wrote:
| The Engadget article is just a shortened regurgitation of the
| original source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/09/29/fcc-
| mistakenly-le...
| 333c wrote:
| Actually this Reddit post predates that "original source" by
| several hours:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ntc1gt/the_fcc_has_...
| paxys wrote:
| Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, Poco, OnePlus, Honor, Realme all
| taking notes. Good guy FCC looking out for global competition.
| Liftyee wrote:
| They all know how to design a phone already, and don't have
| access to the proprietary Apple chipsets. Everything else is
| just industry standard electronic engineering. What would they
| gain? The specifics of how some power supply is connected?
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Not sure why you would think the specifics of how one of the
| largest company's in the world designs their phones wouldn't
| be useful. There are entire companies that exist solely to
| generate their own schematics from teardowns because they're
| so valuable to certain consumers.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Not sure why you would think the specifics..._
|
| Because the FCC didn't publish specifics. I think one would
| get better, more specific information from a teardown. It's
| even in TFA:
|
| _"Competitors could simply buy a handset and open it up to
| get to this information..._ "
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Did you read what FCC published at all? They published
| the BOM, with specific part numbers and alternatives, the
| full schematics, and block diagrams of where the chips
| are laid out. Any teardown org would be absolutely
| salivating at this info.
| rs186 wrote:
| A random vendor in Huaqiangbei likely can tell you more
| about what parts iPhone uses than this pdf file.
|
| You talk as if that's some secret.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| Hard to beat "every single part used" from this document.
| You talk as if the electronics market vendors have some
| ability to identify what capacitor models are used.
| mikestew wrote:
| _Did you read what FCC published at all?_
|
| Most of it, yeah.
|
| _Any teardown org would be absolutely salivating at this
| info._
|
| I'll disagree and say that any teardown org would be able
| to figure this out on their own in an afternoon, and end
| up with more information than the PDF in the process. You
| vastly over-estimate the value of schematics showing wire
| traces from one black box to another.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| No teardown org will know what the models of passives
| are, nor would they be able to figure out all the traces
| between various parts "in an afternoon". This stuff takes
| days or weeks depending on the depth of understanding you
| want.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Because Chinese companies make the iPhone in China.
| ambarp2 wrote:
| Check out the book "Apple in China". Most of these Chinese
| competitors exist because they learned how to make phones by
| learning from Apple directly.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| I know everyone likes this story, but they frankly learnt
| much more about the western phone market several years before
| that, when everyone (Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, Sony,
| Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, Telefonica, O2, AT&T, then
| Google,...) educated HTC on how exactly they should build a
| phone for their markets.
|
| HTC built up the required R&D and supplier-structure in China
| then, years before they put their own logo on the first
| device.
|
| The remaining gap was the lack in experience on mobile
| platform/UX design and localization, something Microsoft
| wasn't very experienced themselves. But Google came to the
| rescue with Android, so Chinese vendors just had to study the
| UX on other devices and rebuild them in Android...
| lousken wrote:
| Their phones are already better for the most part, why would
| they care? It's not like they can steal the SoC itself
| us0r wrote:
| These phones are made in China. These companies have this and
| then some.
| Animats wrote:
| It's interesting seeing the sheer number of tiny inductors and
| capacitors required to keep internal RF noise down. It's amazing
| that they can cram all those tiny discrites in there.
| leakycap wrote:
| > _This was likely not an intentional act against Apple, which
| tracks given that the company has been especially supportive of
| the Trump administration._
|
| Tim has made some terrible choices - I'm sad this is so accurate.
| MountDoom wrote:
| This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also isn't
| an accidental victory for the right-to-repair.
|
| The schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are
| the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module". The
| magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware,
| not the traces on the PCB.
|
| About the most useful thing you're getting out of this are
| capacitor values, which are easy to measure either way.
|
| Things used to be different 2-3 decades ago, but nowadays, most
| commodity PCBs are exceptionally boring - it's mostly just
| digital signal routing and some power-related stuff.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| I'm not a repair tech, but I do enjoy watching them work and I
| suspect they'd strongly disagree with you. It is always useful
| to know part numbers and how they are connected with each other
| even of the components are themselves "black boxes".
| MountDoom wrote:
| Eh. YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs
| replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare for
| anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally not
| cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or
| microscopic inductors might be faulty. You just replace the
| PCB or tell the customer to buy a new phone.
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| Your original comment talked about "most commodity PCBs,"
| but it sounds like you really meant to limit your scope to
| phone PCBs.
|
| Laptops, motherboards, microwave ovens and whatever else
| has "commodity PCBs" are much more repairable than the
| highly size-optimized phone market.
| rs186 wrote:
| Not cost-effective for a repair shop in the US, but in
| other countries with lower cost of living, including China
| and many Asian countries, technicians go to great lengths
| to replace individual components on PCB boards.
| frankchn wrote:
| They are doing some wild stuff in Asia like adding physical
| SIM card slots to eSIM only iPhones (see
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Ja_x7JI0w). I imagine
| having schematics like this would be at least marginally
| helpful in developing those techniques.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > YouTube nerd-bait aside, real-world phone repair techs
| replace screens, batteries, and charging ports. It's rare
| for anything else to fail, and when it does, it's generally
| not cost-effective to troubleshoot which of the BGA pads or
| microscopic inductors might be faulty.
|
| My mom's Samsung phone suddenly failed to charge a year
| ago, but in a weird way. Tried some tricks but it ended up
| getting stuck on a black screen during boot.
|
| I handed it to a repair shop in town that had good reviews.
| Three days later they called back. I asked what was wrong,
| and it turned out they had to replace one charging chip, a
| power sequencing chip and a third chip I can't recall the
| purpose of, along with the USB port. The reason it took so
| long was they got a bit further for each chip they swapped.
|
| I'm in Norway where prices are high, and we have a 25% VAT
| on top. I paid $180 including VAT, or $144 before VAT.
|
| For that I might have gotten a very cheap Android phone on
| sale, however my mom's phone was a premium model from a few
| years earlier. Besides, less e-waste and saved me time
| reinstalling everything. Personally I think the repair was
| well worth it.
|
| There's discussion here in Norway to drop VAT on repair
| jobs such as this, and in that case I think it would
| definitely make sense to repair such cases.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'd argue that VAT is just a bad way to do taxes in
| general. The only thing it really accomplishes is slowing
| down the economy. Much better to target wealth/income
| instead IMO.
| luma wrote:
| It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean
| parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty
| quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made
| available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID,
| etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then
| sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might
| need repair.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I suppose you could transplant the chips from a damaged
| board.
| immibis wrote:
| Yes, that's what people like Louis Rossmann famously do.
| Apple, in turn, tries to serialise each chip and make it
| only boot if all the serial numbers match.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| It is valid to say they do not have the majority of trade-
| secrets in the schematics.
|
| However having high quality documentation that is easily
| accessible is always the first step, and if there are
| information there that are important it is _much_ more likely
| it will be known.
|
| It is not "a much less of a deal" as you say, it is a pretty
| big deal for a global product that billions of people touch.
| varispeed wrote:
| > it's mostly just digital signal routing and some power-
| related stuff.
|
| It still saves competitors on R&D. As in "ah they routed it
| this way, nice!" or "They have this capacitor here, we don't. I
| wonder why it is there" etc.
|
| Schematics are extremely valuable!
|
| Sure thing if you copy the schematic, routing, you don't
| suddenly get a working iPhone, but you might use it to design
| your own device that will have robustness of a phone designed
| by multi trillion corporation.
| cogman10 wrote:
| I'm sorry but no. Unless you are producing a 1930s radio
| these sorts of schematics are next to worthless. There's
| nothing super clever about PCB routing or resistor placement
| and it is completely dependent on the chips used (which are
| increasingly including the actual resistors and capacitors
| internal to the chip).
|
| Consider, for example, how useful this schematic would be vs
| an AMD motherboard schematic.
|
| You imagine that because apple has a bunch of money to spend
| that they are spending more than a competitor would on PCB
| design. But that's just not how hardware works.
|
| The money Apple is spending on R&D is almost entirely going
| into the design of their M series chips and their
| software/firmware.
| armada651 wrote:
| > This is much less of a deal than it might appear. It also
| isn't an accidental victory for the right-to-repair. The
| schematics are basically "here's a black-box SoC and here are
| the data lines connecting it to a black-box camera module".
|
| I don't think right-to-repair folks would have much use for
| anything more than that hardware-wise. You can give a
| technician the HDL or lithography masks to Apple's A17 chip,
| but it's not like he has an EUV lithography machine in the back
| of his repair shop.
| henriquenunez wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250928013949/https://fccid.io/...
|
| If anyone is curious
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| apple showed bad faith to the fcc at every stage (remember iphone
| 3g always transmitting at full blast 1W when that was reserve for
| emergency only low signal?). why do they get the courtesy of
| filling in private?
| wnevets wrote:
| The meritocracy strikes again
| fuddle wrote:
| "CEO Tim Cook even brought the president a gold trophy for being
| such a good and important boy." - haha, well played.
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