A report by the Gaurdian revealed that iPhone 6 users’ devices were rendered useless after encountering the error message.
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If your iPhone has been turned into a brick by the update, contact Apple Support to see if anything can be done.
Apple may be emphasizing that error 53 is a security feature, but removing iPhone owners’ personal choice to seek out third-party vendors is not going down well.
One other perplexing issue is that a few of the users have also reported error 53 issues without any third party repairs being done to their iPhones at all.
So with an unofficial iPhone 6 fix, the pairing between Touch ID and Apple’s service can be invalidated, which then leads to Error 53 after updating iOS. “But, if the sensor can’t be trusted, clearly the whole phone should not be bricked – it should simply disable Touch ID and Apple Pay”.
Essentially, as Apple has told the press, the phone’s Touch ID button needs to interact with a “secure enclave” where your fingerprints are stored. “If a customer encounters Error 53, we encourage them to contact Apple Support”, a company spokesperson was quoted as saying. This has always been an issue with the Touch ID sensor, but Error 53 made it a lot worse.
An Apple spokeswoman informed, “We protect fingerprint data using a secure enclave, which is uniquely paired to the touch ID sensor”.
Many have criticized this move, including Kyle Wiens, head of the electronics-repair site iFixit.com.
“Bricking [disabling] the phone so that you can’t even recover the photos on it is ridiculous”. Specifically, if Apple believes it’s been tampered with, it will shut down the phone completely. To ensure your phone stays in good working order, they will manually move the touch ID sensor from the broken glass face plate to the new face plate when repairing a cracked screen. This seems to harsh, since Apple calls victims of error 53 to its service center, and even gives them the option of purchasing a brand new device. With subsequent restores and updates, additional security checks usually result in error 53’s being displayed on the screen.
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But some Apple experts criticised the implementation of the feature, while praising Apple’s thinking in attempting to keep phones safe.
