Reading the article it appears they support it because language was added to allow them to continue to act as they have been

They do not have to stop enacting security features or making it clear that 3rd party parts were used. So they can likely continue to disable key features of devices and add nag notifications when parts are replaced by anyone but them

The repair self service they have is good for individuals but pointless for repair shops and that makes it kind of pointless overall. The pricing for parts is actually not bad, it’s higher than 3rd party obviously but not that much more. But when you factor in the tool rental simple repairs like battery and lcd swaps quickly become about as much or slightly more than just paying apple to do them.

So don’t buy the tools and just buy the parts? That makes more sense if you’re doing a ton of phones. Like a repair shop. You can do a iPhone 12-14 per an ifixit guide at home for sure and it’ll work fine but if you really want it to be sealed up well and waterproof you should at least have a press, which is pricey and bulky enough to not make sense to buy for a single battery or lcd swap. And then a repair shop would buy a lot of the other tools apple provides that make the overall process smoother and far less likely to leave your phone with scratches and gouges.

So why don’t repair shops just buy the apple parts? Because apple won’t sell them to you without the device serial number. So unless you want to drop off your phone, wait for the shop to order parts, a couple days for them to show up, etc. that’s not really ideal. And the shop can’t buy in bulk and save that way. Whereas when the iPhone 15 comes out I’ll probably buy like 50 iPhone 14 batteries because they’ll start coming in more often and buying 50-100 at a time might get me 1-5$ off per battery or more, which will save me a lot if I actually sell them all (I only do cell phone repairs as a side thing so 50-100 might actually take me awhile to get to).

But there is also a mixed point here. Apple does this because it (hopefully) lowers the value of stolen iPhones. The iCloud lock makes most modern stolen iPhones pretty worthless from a functional standpoint. But they’re still potentially worth a lot for parts. A stolen locked iPhone 14 is easily worth 300 in parts, probably a bit more if it’s clean and not a base model. That’s why apple would probably rather have it that salvaged parts simply wouldn’t work at all but I’m sure there’s some legal thing that makes them think that won’t fly. So instead you get the current thing where a battery powers the phone but you don’t get the metrics and you get a nag screen, the lcd works but you don’t get auto brightness or trutone, the front camera works but faceid doesn’t, etc. they want to make it essentially pointless to steal an iPhone (or turn every iPhone theft into a more confrontational and potentially violent crime I suppose. Pickpocketing turns into “tell me your iCloud password” at gunpoint).

The obvious counter to this is that it creates massive e waste. The iPhone (and most cellphones at this point) refresh cycle is already ridiculous; very few new features are added, spec bump, camera upgrade. because what groundbreaking thing can really happen in a year to a 14 year old platform when it’s forced to release year after year. At any point you can go on ebay and find thousands of locked iPhones for sale; I’m sure a ton of the parts end up trashed. Perfectly good parts of the latest tech that have tons of service life left being tossed for essentially nothing