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Comment by spdionis | Hacker News Reader

I understand where the author is coming from. It is traditional to repair your broken things somehow. It is a bit ingrained in our mentality. BUT.

What moral right does he have to claim that Apple SHOULD make their products fixable? Who are these people to tell Apple (or any other company) if they have to include a technical manual or not? I'm with him when he's against Apple attacking people who try to repair their devices but there is no real reason Apple has to support repairing beyond their own offering. From a moral point of view the technical manual and ease of repairing might just be features, that are arguably more or less valuable, and Apple owes nothing.

After all I don't ship my code together with a manual on how to fix bugs...

Note: I don't like Apple, just wanted to add some reasonableness.

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Considering the massive environmental cost of making these electronic devices I think it is absolutely in the consumer, the manufacturer and society's interests to ensure the products are not made more difficult to repair than they need to be.

There are significant externalities behind every iPhone most of which are borne by manufacturing and recycling plants in India and China. The more a manufacturer can do to ensure their product stays out of landfill and in use the better off we all will be.

But what if Apple's method of "ensuring the product stays out of the landfill" is build quality? What if that build quality is inversely proportional to repairability? I've had both iDevices and Android based devices and in my experience the iDevices last much longer. Anecdote, YMMV, etc.

We are still required to give Apple the benefit of the doubt in case they made a trade-off between repairability and quality and not attack without proof.

Furthermore if we leave the realm of "moral" and "not moral" Apple is not required to keep in mind society's interests in mind by anything except law and any discussion in that direction should not refer to companies but to government (which, ok, may not be that effective). Even then, most complaints don't give much consideration to the environmental impact as a first-order issue and leave it as a two-liner before the conclusion.

Apple is not required to keep society's interests in mind, that is true. But we are allowed to alert our fellow citizens about the fact that the company at best doesn't care and at worst is obstructing what may be in our best interests. I'm not suggesting in the piece that Apple is evil—I'm suggesting that the company is worth questioning on these arguably important issues it has either ignored or purposefully made worse.

"Apple is not required to keep society's interests in mind, that is true"

Maybe they should be?

Make sure you let the rest of the Global 500 and their shareholders know.

Apple certainly isn't alone in this.

If we back up for a bit and think why corporations exist in the first place, why society allows and facilitates rather than criminalizes corporate endeavors, it becomes clear the idea is that they fulfill a useful social function. And that function is the development, production and distribution of goods and services.

But they have to operate within a framework of rules which ensure (to some extent) they fulfill these functions without impacting society negatively (excessively so at least) and that their net benefit to society is a plus. These rules change from time to time.

There isn't a reason that long term externalized costs should be allowed to be pushed onto society as a whole in the interests of these entities realizing short term profits. That happens far too often and will be the death of capitalism as we know it if left unchecked. We as a society should demand better. Unfortunately, government all too often isn't the solution to the problem and the cures it provides are sometimes worse than what was attempting to be cured. But we need to keep the proper role of corporations in mind and demand a level of accountability. Not doing so leads to a very bad place.

> What moral right does he have to claim that Apple SHOULD make their products fixable?

I don't understand what you mean, exactly. I would say that he has no moral right to demand that a law be passed forcing Apple to make their products fixable, or to include a manual, or whatever. But he has every moral right to tell Apple what he thinks they SHOULD do — just as they have the moral right to listen or not.

Point taken. On the other hand OP is talking as if Apple is doing a capital crime instead of a business/feature decision which is at least misleading.

I think his concern is mainly for developing countries and our environment in general, and a respect for the devices (saying that if you recycle a phone, the good plastic will be mixed in and forever become a lower grade).... I think it's more of preserving things instead of throwing things away and it's a frustration that apple (and others) who seem to care about the environment are making things worse in favor of ease of manufacturing....

/rant

I've got a samsung 1900x1200 monitor that died on me recently (smelled a popped capacitor) and I'm not giving up on it until I fix it :)

LCDs are often super easy to fix! Do it! The common failure modes are usually backlight or backlight driver failure, and power supply failure. The backlight driver can usually be replaced wholesale, the backlights themselves can easily be replaced, and the PSU often fails because of bad capacitors releasing their magic smoke. I've fixed many LCDs because of bad capacitors! You just want to make sure that the capacitor failed because it was old and not because something else shorted it out (i.e. there isn't some other issue).

I live in the third world country and I know what you mean. But I strongly disagree with forcing companies to design for repairability. Companies should be free to design their product like they want.

Environmental issues should be analyzed and discussed besides that.

> What moral right does he have to claim that Apple SHOULD make their products fixable?

If you are purchasing a product, you then own it, and should have the ability to fix it. If you're not allowed to fix it, then you don't really own it. There's no problem with self-repairs voiding warranties, but apart from that, locking a user out of a device that they own is a moral stance that should be actively defended, not considered default.

> What moral right does he have to claim that Apple SHOULD make their products fixable? Who are these people to tell Apple (or any other company) if they have to include a technical manual or not?

If Apple sells hardware instead of lending it, Apple should make it possible to repair it when it breaks. Apple's products are too expensive to treat them as disposable equipment.

Apple should also make it possible to use alternative OS on their hardware, too (because they're selling the hardware; consumers should be able to do as they please with it), but that's another matter.

And yes, the same applies to other electronics manufacturers.

"If you don't like it, don't buy it" doesn't seem to exist any more.. everyone's entitled to everything being how they want the world to work

> "If you don't like it, don't buy it" doesn't seem to exist any more.

Indeed, it doesn't exist anymore. It disappeared at the time when (almost) all the consumer electronics manufacturers stopped producing fixable things.

Software is licensed, not sold, so its quite different to a physical device that is sold.

Of course the comparison was very far. Suppose though that I'm a contractor selling my work and as a result the software is my employer's. Even if he owns all of it usually I'm not required to provide such a manual. Even if I did that would come as a (big in this case) extra.

There is still the EPEAT thing though.

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