FCC Accidentally Leaked iPhone Schematics

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.

> 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.

>The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware

But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them.

A trace on PCB is much more important. Boardview is a must to do board repair.

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".

> 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.

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.

>The magic of the iPhone are the black-box chips and their firmware

But a technician won't care about those magic. All they care is whether they can get those FW and chips, and there is mechanism to flash/replace them.

Actually this Reddit post predates that "original source" by several hours: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ntc1gt/the_fcc_has_...

> 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.

>Any other admin and Apple would sue them

Examples of this happening in the past?

> Apple would sue them.

Apple fears the tariffs.

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...]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trade secrets. They've existed since the beginning of time. If they publish the schematics their competitors can make similar products which reduces their incentive to innovate and they go spend money somewhere more profitable. Or worse, they patent the design and sit on new tech for 20 years which stifles innovation for other companies.

I guess an argument can also be made for security. Publishing schematics makes it easier bad actors.

why would you need gerber files ?

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?

These phones are made in China. These companies have this and then some.

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.

Their phones are already better for the most part, why would they care? It's not like they can steal the SoC itself