Eleven videos that appear to depict Apple’s internal processes for repairing iPhones and MacBooks have been uploaded onto YouTube. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the videos’ authenticity — but they do appear to be the real deal, according to Motherboard.
The videos have Apple’s copyright, and the videos depict Apple’s trademark disassembly and repair tools that are manufactured exclusively for the company.
If these are, in fact, genuine, then Apple has a lot to be angry about. The company has long fought against users’ right to repair their own devices, often because doing so allows Apple to sell its repair services and incentivize customers to sell or trade-in old devices for newer ones more frequently.
Apple’s taken off-brand repair shops to court, and it’s created devices that need specialty tools to crack open. It even creates software updates that disable certain features on phones repaired with third-party parts. As of right now, the initial leaker is still at large — Arman Haji, the YouTuber who uploaded the videos, originally downloaded them from a Twitter account that has since been suspended.
The amazing thing about these videos, as Motherboard points out, isn’t just that they were leaked to begin with, but that the repair processes mirror what third-party vendors have been doing for years. Despite the fact that these vendors don’t have access to Apple’s repair videos or specific tools, they’ve been able to reverse-engineer their own answer to these complex problems.