Why Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair
theverge.com
theverge.com
They were arguably the first PC manufacturer to take design seriously and while Macs began to become more difficult to repair beginning with the iMac in 1998, there's no questioning that the component choices (from the external to the internal) lent itself to an increasingly sleek design that eventually led Apple to create the best-in-class laptops and desktops.
This push towards sleek design also gave Apple the chops to create the original iPod in the first place...which eventually lead to the revolutionary iPhone...which completely upended the mobile phone industry.
As a PC fan, I love creating and building my own box...carefully selecting my motherboard, case, processor, and memory in the process...and I rest easy knowing I can upgrade my machine over time...
But I wouldn't question the value that highly integrated designs that Apple and others have brought to the table. You can feel the quality in the products they make. There's a lot of careful thought and design. Modularity and repairability are a necessary sacrifice to build products that sleek.
Take a look at the failed Project Ara by Google: https://atap.google.com/ara/. It would have brought modular parts and design to the mobile phone industry. While a great concept, and something that appeals to my custom rig PC roots, it may not actually have been that useful in practice for the vast majority of the general public.
And yet nearly every single person I know has had their power cable for their iphone and/or macbook fray after a year or so. Meanwhile the "ugly" Sony one that I have for the past 7 years, continues to work just fine. Apple do make well designed products, but they're not above sacrificing functionality for looks, and when they do, its kinda embarrassing. Especially rookie mistakes like not having proper heat dissipation for their laptop GPUs. Also.. didn't the first unibody macs have several design flaws with the hinges and the battery bulging, etc ?
>Modularity and repairability are a necessary sacrifice to build products that sleek.
Apple can already repair it themselves. They're artificially restricting the supply of parts so others can't repair it. Apple repair costs are substantially higher and its unfortunate that they're against other repair shops competing with them.
Astonishingly wasteful (both in dollars and electrical waste) to buy a new $70 brick when it was never the brick that broke.
Now you can just buy a $7 cord from Amazon when it breaks. Of course, go for an off-brand if you want one that won't fray in <1 year.
I'm very careful with my laptops and never needed MagSafe (luckily) but during the years I broke 6 or 7 chargers. Sometimes it was a year, sometimes two, but the cord always snipped. No matter how careful I was.
Once again, the $70 brick isn't the thing that's broken when the cord frays, so I'm not sure why you'd be cool with buying another one unless you just have a bunch of fuck-off money.
I'm not sure how math factors into it, but I see how financial sense and thrift do.
I can replay with equal validity that I've NEVER had an Apple cable fail either power or data and that goes back to my Newton 2100 which is still working with original cables.
Plus add to that I work in a public library and we loan out cables and MacBook Airs and we've never had any cables fail. Plenty stolen but that's another story. 8-(
I've seen PLENTY of people treat their cables without a thought to protecting them from poor treatment. People that pull out the cable using the wire, retrieve their dropped phones and PCs buy reeling up on the cable.
There's no cables that can survive that and be cost effective in the quantities that Apple needs to produce. Sure a 3rd party cable maker can but their scale of production is minuscule compared to Apple's.
I am sure Apple could produce a more robust cable if they wanted to, but it would probably not lock slick enough.
I find comments from folks like you ignorant and of low quality. I'm sorry you and your friends have had issue - I can just as easily say that me and my friends have never had any issues with their Apple cables (which is true by the way). What does that mean? Nothing.
If you're going to make 50 million of something then your quantity of scale in production is UNIQUE and you can't compare the product of that production to other people that can a) source much lower quantities b) produce them slower and c) have less distribution and support issue.
As for your repair comment you think Apple takes defective motherboards and reworks them? Haha. Even back in the 80's when I was an Apple Certified Repair tech and went down to the North Carolina Level 3 center for repairs the folks there loved to show us the "motherboard" closet - a room with hundreds of motherboards waiting for rework "if they have time". Even then it was cheaper to make a new motherboard than take the time to diagnose and rework an old one.
If consumers want reliable and cheap (yes cheap) technology then manufacturers are going to choose those qualities over repair-ability. I for one would choose cheaper over more repairable considering the methods for mass producing electronics go hand in hand with more rugged electronics.
You'll need to prove this statement - "They're artificially restricting the supply of parts so others can't repair it" but you can't so I'm going to ignore it.
You don’t know me, but in 12 years of solely using Apple laptops and phones (obviously < 12yrs for the phones), I’ve never once had a cord/cable fray or fail. I’ve had 4-5 laptops and 4 phones.
I do know people that seem to have them fray constantly though. I have no idea what these people do to their cables.
This is too silly to even deserve a comprehensive retort. It's about small cost savings that add up over massive units sold and the money to be made on new units. Essentially you can be paid significantly more for making slightly worse items. It is wholly 100% about money.
At the very least they never tried to disable their devices if repaired by a third party...
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple...
Its about money.
The original Thinkpad design is the laptop equivalent of blue jeans - functional, comfortable, durable, fashionably flexible, and timeless. Are blue jeans as "high" fashion as an evening gown? No. Does that make them "bad" fashion? No.
I for one want more blue-jean electronics.
I mainly notice as I've been considering getting one of the older models and upgrading cpu, maxing ram, newer gtx1080 etc.
This aspect of products is not so black and white, and comes down to the design decisions made by the product people and engineers.
Mostly skill.
I've seen techs performing successful BGA replacements on laptop MOBO's in repair stands in Mexico with pathetic equipment.
Board repair only makes economic sense in certain markets where the price of electronics is high compared to to disposable income.
IBM countered with VGA and the Adlib and Soundblaster cards came out to have better sound and Windows 3.x sold a lot and Windows 95 basically put competitors to near bankrupt or almost bankrupt status.
Jobs came back and saved Apple using a BSD Unix solution that used the Mac GUI aka OSX.
Other than profit for Apple, best at what?
Everything Apple is not.
Two things Apple did good on their laptop: the touchpad (not the pizza tray they've put on latest models, the smaller one) and the friction of the lid, that is perfect.
Other than that unibody is a heating disaster, retina screens are useless and created (another) double standard, keyboards got worse and worse up to the point they don't have real keys anymore, the UI, well, classic Apple UI, hide everything behind the curtain, if we say you don't need it, we'll forbid anybody else from even trying.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
Funny but most folks are not like you - they want their computer to do stuff for them without drama.
It's easy to throw out a bunch of hackneyed Apple insults and to use your own personal preferences to stand in for the majority of folks who use and enjoy the form and function of Macs and other Apple gear.
It's a shame companies do this, not just to phones. Laptops and small-form-factor desktops have the same problem.
A few years back, a coworker had a problem with a laptop, Lenovo R500, I think, that required replacing something inside the laptop (I forgot what part exactly). I found this maintenance manual, and it was exemplary, with lots of diagrams and drawings that made taking this machine apart and putting it back together a cakewalk even for somebody as clumsy as me (meaning, I successfully performed the "operation", with hardly a clue what I was doing guided solely by the excellent manual, and it ____ing worked!)
That is the standard, vendors should aspire to. And I think, Douglas Adams was on to something - if you design something with repairability (is that a word?) as a goal, I would not bet surprised if the result was also more reliable.
This isn't unique to technology either. Making a simple repair to most modern cars is an exercise in frustration even if you have all the necessary documentation.
I just recently replaced the headlight assemblies on my Toyota Tacoma. I had to disassemble the entire front of the truck to get them out. The grill, bumper cover, and wheel well liners all had to come off just to get the headlight assembly out. I had a bucket full of screws - many of them those garbage plastic ones - a garage full of parts, and a bloody hand by the time I even got to the meat of the project. It literally took me about four hours and 14 pages of directions start to finish.
Twenty years ago I did this same thing on a Dodge Spirit. Three easily reachable bolts and the headlights came right out. New one popped right in, and tighten three easily reachable bolts. Took like 15 minutes.
It seems like everything is becoming more complex and difficult to repair.
It was a four hour job when on my older cars it would have taken less than one hour.
It's maddening.
Physically large car, so there is plenty of room to get in and out to work.
Body on Frame instead of unibody construction, so damaged body panels are easy to change out.
Unchanging Design: the final body design was originated in 1992 on the Grand Marquis, and is otherwise unchanged.
It has a small block V8 and it's a dream to work on any bolt-on component, unlike most newer vehicles.
The answer is no. Why should the 99% of folks that don't care sacrifice cost, reliability or other qualities for your ability to repair it on your own?
Probably not but it is what I think and well, I tend to advocate for my position more than the position of others.
Do you think 99% of people that own a Ford Escape are going to go under the car and replace a U joint whether it takes 1 hour or 4 hours.
Reading is fundamental. I was speaking of replacing an alternator and the U-joint was in the way.
Why should the 99% of folks that don't care sacrifice cost, reliability or other qualities for your ability to repair it on your own?
Just going with your figure of 99%... They should care because it will have an effect on how much it costs them to have the repair performed by a professional mechanic. If you don't think that a professional mechanic will charge more to perform replacement of a difficult to reach component, you're woefully uninformed on the subject.
The more difficult it is to repair something, the more expensive it will be to hire a professional to perform said repair.
The "easy" way involves removing the air filter housing. Fortunately that's only held in by one screw.
I did that too with my ThinkPad, a couple of times, and I got at least two more years out of it! https://jeena.net/repairing and https://jeena.net/thinkpad-t410-speakers-fix
http://manuals-apple.9manuals.com/a38175/686191APL.pdf
(Hope the link works for anyone interested)
Then there's the service manual for the first edition ipad:
http://manuals-apple.9manuals.com/a38175/380639APL.pdf
Where they describe the sim tray as the only user serviceable part.
FWIW, I have both of these devices and they both work still work fine...
Because of the way apple has locked it down, the software on it can't be replaced with something less broken, even though hardware-wise it is basically a raspberry pi with a touchscreen.
Louis Rossmann talking about how Apple devices are designed to fail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfrYOWlKJ_g
Also, my iPad 2 broke down after a year and a half. Not buying Apple again!
I think it would be great if Apple designed their products to be user serviceable so if something like a screen breaks all you have to do is buy the screen and repair it yourself instead of sending to a repair store, but I definitely don't agree that Apple designs their products to fail.
Pluses: Individual parts are available to order directly from HP. Once you've identified your machine's exact variant, you can get the service manual and replacement part numbers. The actual disassembly+reassembly was (in my case, at least), really easy, with just a few screws.
Minuses: The parts are expensive, model-specific, the correct model number is sometimes confusing to find. Opening the machine can be a destructive operation, for some models. Internal connections don't always use standard interfaces. Close to every model seems to have customized parts, and there are a lot of model variations, so finding second-hand replacement parts is difficult.
As seems to be the usual trend, I'm sure that the business models would be a better experience and the consumer models would be worse.
It took me more than 5 hours to perform a simple cleanup task.
It's not much use giving us step by step instructions on how to service each part when it involves removing more than 60 different screws.
Those things were definitely not build to be serviceable.
I've sworn of many manufacturers / vendors for crap lines.
If you want to have a quality brand, you're going to have to apply it uniformly.
I have a hunch that can be said for most laptop vendors. There is reason "business notebooks" cost so much more. I'm not saying it's a good reason, but it's there.
I replaced the SSD, wifi card, and repasted the CPU/GPU cooler. The operation took me 30 minutes.
On a different note, i worked for a while at a local repair shop. And one task i had was to file the various repair manuals they received. They were massive tomes stuffed with wiring diagrams and whatsnot, and usually they came some 10 or more at a time. A corridor wall was basically dedicated to the cabinets to house them.
Apple generates 7bn from services with 700mn active phones. Without "planned obsolescence" the 700mn number would be much higher as would services revenue.
Edit: services is iTunes, music, App Store, iCloud, etc. 7bn for comparison is bigger than Netflix (2.5bn) and aws (3.5bn)
This has meant that Android has something like 2bn daily actives vs Apple's 700mn across devices. Apple's profits are mostly sitting in cash -- a pretty poor use of capital. And it's a lot of cash, some 250bn of it. It's ridiculous and the opposite of Amazon's strategy. Especially if Apple intends to move to services, it only makes sense to have more active subscribers.
Furthermore, hardware monetisation is upfront but services revenue is recurring (user lock-in, inertia to switch, better forecasting, etc).
Supposing Apple had 1.5bn active devices, their services revenue would be considerable higher than the current 7bn quarterly recurring. That would surpass hardware profits in the long run and Apple wouldn't sit on idle cash.
As the market starts to saturate, customer acquisition becomes costlier. A good example of this is AOL Internet when they were printing so many free Internet CDs (for giveaways) that they took up 70% of the world's CD production capacity. Their rationale was that acquiring customers would never be this cheap again (Microsoft and others were entering into broadband). So if they acquired the customers for cheap today, they could monetise them much more easily (the LTV was considerably favourable in terms of SAC).
It's hard to say what could have been. But what's certain is that Apple is less of a hardware company now and more of a services company as is clearly apparent now from their earnings reports.
At a time when Facebook, Amazon and Google are all vying for market share, Apple seems to take pride in hoarding cash through profits. You have to wonder if it's the right strategy.
I don't see how making their devices easier to repair would have at all made them get more market share. I really don't think it affected it a statistically significant amount. If anything I'd argue their focus on making the phones more "stylish", at the expense of repairability, probably was beneficial for their market share.
Also market share doesn't tell the whole picture since iOS users are known to be more willing to spend money so don't forget to factor that in. I do see how it might be good for them to consider making less in hardware if they are going to be more profitable by selling more services, but it's not as though iPhones are more expensive than Android phones as far as I know.
I work for Google but opinions are my own.
“Highly-integrated design allows us to make products that are not only beautiful, thin and powerful, but also durable, so they can last for many years,” the company said. “When repairs are needed, authorized providers can ensure the quality, safety, and security of repairs for customers. And when products do reach end of life, Apple takes responsibility for recycling them safely and responsibly.”
Sounds reasonable to me.
>When repairs are needed, authorized providers can ensure the quality, safety, and security of repairs for customers
Do you think this is reasonable when Apple tries as much as possible to minimise the alternative at the cost of consumer choice?
This is why you see a lot of Torx heads on electronics and automobiles.
As far as the penalobular screw goes… yeah, that is I think deliberately weird, but when you buy your replacement battery or screen or whatever part, the company will either include for free or minimal charge the pentalobular bit, so it isn't really stopping you from repairing. What I think the bit does prevent is consumers opening and peeking around in their phone. Curiosity is great for learning, but it generally doesn't come with a grounding strap. The ICs in the phone are trivially damaged, not necessarily immediately destroyed, but set on a path to future failure by static charges too small to be noticed by the curious finger. Apple finds themselves on the warranty hook to replace these failed boards. It is certainly in their interest to keep sight seers out of the phones.
But
Why won't they sell me a screwdriver?
And anyway, isn't it moot? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A0P3XUY/
If it's no longer under warranty then using the screwdriver wouldn't void the warranty.
I wasn't aware you could obtain drivers now.
http://www.cio.com/article/2411922/consumer-technology/the-c...
Besides, Apple wouldn't necessarily want devices to be unserviceable - repair fees are a source of income as well.
And the justification is that it's not at all anti-consumer. Allowing consumers to disassemble the devices will practically guarantee that they break (and in a manner that voids the warrantee). The only people who should be disassembling them are people specially trained to repair them, or experts who have a lot of practice disassembling electronics safely. The former have the screwdrivers already, and as I already said, it's not that hard for the latter to get their hands on the screwdrivers.
And if someone wants to void their warranty than that's their business. My Thinkpad is largely modular and designed to be disassembled/parts replaced. Several years now and somehow it's remained intact...
And yet it's a barrier to their repair. Is it excuseable? Is there a reason you felt the need to mention how "hard" it is to find these specially-designed screwdrivers, and yet don't at all give a good reason for why they're used in the first place?
>Allowing consumers to disassemble the devices will practically guarantee that they break
That's a responsibility for customers, not Apple. Better still, Apple could release the kind of documentation that would prevent customers from breaking devices when opening them up, but they've chosen not to do that. Do they really care about the danger of home repair, considering that?
>The only people who should be disassembling them are people specially trained to repair them
That should really be the choice of the customer. Apple devices are not in the common interest - your neighbour pulling apart their phone is none of your business. Why do you feel this shouldn't be available to whoever ends up owning the device?
It's not much of a barrier. If that stops you, then you probably weren't going to be able to fix anything inside the phone anyway.
This would be missing the point. There is a barrier in place. It hasn't been justified by anybody for technical reasons, so it exists only for the sake of being a barrier to repair. Is that acceptable behaviour from a company?
I think that as far as the actual repairability of Apple devices goes, focusing on the screws is bikeshedding. The screws are trivial to get around. Why not talk about the glued-together, soldered-on parts instead? Those seem like much bigger issues to me.
The screws aren't important as a barrier to repairability, but because they have no other purpose. It is not a consequence of product design to select a screw solely on the virtue that it makes user repair more difficult. On principle, the screws are more significant as a reflection of Apple's negative attitude towards its customers.
Ah. From experience, the only thing that stopped me from disassembling things as a youngster that I couldn't have gotten back together were often unusual screws. In my mind, that's a more reasonable reason to use specialized screws, because they aren't more than a token barrier to actually repairing the device. Since I don't have access to Apple's internal design documents, I have no idea if that's actually their stated reason, but it makes more sense to me than malice on Apple's part.
It's easier to get a hold of the necessary screwdrivers than to actually repair the device.
> That's a responsibility for customers, not Apple.
That's incredibly naïve. If Apple does nothing to make it hard to open up their devices, then consumers who don't know any better will decide to try and "maintain" their devices themselves (e.g. swapping the battery) and will end up breaking them. Apple has a responsibility to their customers to avoid making it easy to break their devices. And besides just protecting their customers, this also saves Apple money because they don't have to provide support to customers whose devices "just broke, no really I didn't open it up".
Using custom screws is a fairly minor roadblock all things considered. It won't stop anyone who knows what they're doing, but it will prevent the average customer from trying to muck with their device and breaking it.
> Apple could release the kind of documentation that would prevent customers from breaking devices when opening them up
Haha no they couldn't. There's not a chance in hell that Apple could provide any sort of documentation that would prevent the average customer from destroying their device, unless that documentation simply said "DO NOT OPEN YOUR DEVICE". Apple devices are not designed with end-user repair in mind, and the only people that should be opening them up are people with expertise in disassembling electronics, not average consumers.
> That should really be the choice of the customer.
What choice? "Do I want to break my device, or not?" That's not a useful choice.
> your neighbour pulling apart their phone is none of your business
Not my business, no, but it definitely is Apple's business. Not only does Apple not want to see its customer destroy their phone, but Apple also doesn't want to have to provide support to that customer now that they've done that.
What is this in response to? That's exactly what we're talking about - the use of proprietary screws to try and prevent users from opening up their devices. Nobody is debating what the choice of screwhead is for.
>Using custom screws is a fairly minor roadblock all things considered. It won't stop anyone who knows what they're doing, but it will prevent the average customer from trying to muck with their device and breaking it.
And yet you also state that the screw is not a real barrier. If someone is determined enough to replace their battery that they're willing to open up their phone to do it, what about the act of buying a special screwdriver online to do it is suddenly too much? It seems to me that the screws don't really help to protect against customers at all.
> Apple devices are not designed with end-user repair in mind
Which is the original point of contention - by designing devices which are not intended to be repaired at home, Apple takes away from the rights of its customers, with the added benefit of lining its own pockets with repair fees and replacements. The excuse of "making your device harder to repair" shouldn't be "we don't want you to repair it", if you're trying to defend on principle the idea that Apple isn't deliberately trying to hamper home repair.
If they are, then there's no point continuing the original discussion - Apple's difficulty of repair doesn't come from its great design, but because they are made to be unrepairable, and Apple is guilty of all the shameful practises they're being accused of in the first place.
It's a response to you saying "… and yet don't at all give a good reason for why they're used in the first place?".
> It seems to me that the screws don't really help to protect against customers at all.
I really don't get what you're trying to argue here. Yes, people can get around it. That doesn't mean it does nothing. It's a deterrent.
> Which is the original point of contention - by designing devices which are not intended to be repaired at home, Apple takes away from the rights of its customers, with the added benefit of lining its own pockets with repair fees and replacements.
Are you kidding? Or do you really believe that Apple is making money off repairs?
Repairing devices is not a profit center for Apple. I'm sure they try to also make it not a cost center, but Apple is not maliciously forcing people to get repairs through them out of a desire for money. To Apple, the ideal device is one that never needs repairs.
Hell, Apple is literally famous for giving out free out-of-warrantee repairs to people. How does that match up with your claim that they're trying to line their pockets?
> if you're trying to defend on principle the idea that Apple isn't deliberately trying to hamper home repair.
What? No, of course Apple is deliberately trying to hamper home repair. I don't see how you could have read my comments and got the idea that Apple wasn't trying to do that. In fact, my central point about the screws is Apple's trying to deter people from repairing devices at home. They're not making it impossible (in fact, they're not even making it particularly hard), but they are definitely trying to encourage people not to attempt home repair.
> If they are, then there's no point continuing the original discussion - Apple's difficulty of repair doesn't come from its great design, but because they are made to be unrepairable, and Apple is guilty of all the shameful practises they're being accused of in the first place.
This is complete bullshit. Apple does not design their devices to be unrepairable. They just don't design them to be repairable. Unfortunately, designing devices to be small, not waste any space whatsoever, and get the best battery life and performance possible, also has a tendency to make the device hard to repair, because components are placed in such a way as to maximize the aforementioned goals rather than to be accessible for repair. This also leads to things like soldering components so you can avoid mounting brackets (and this probably also makes repair less likely, because the soldered component won't come unseated), which is a far bigger issue for repairability than the damn screws you're obsessed with.
A deterrent how? Scenario: you want to repair your Apple device. You go online to order a new component, conveniently at the same time you get a cheap screwhead to open the device, and everything goes on as expected. If you don't know any better not to open this incredibly fragile device, nowhere along the way have you had a learning experience.
>Repairing devices is not a profit center for Apple. >To Apple, the ideal device is one that never needs repairs.
These are strong assertions about how Apple operates on the inside. But on the outside, an iPhone screen repair out of warranty can still run in the region of $150, and screen repairs are on the cheap side of services Apple provides. I sincerely doubt that Apple doesn't generate a profit with prices like that.
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/screen-damage
>Apple does not design their devices to be unrepairable. They just don't design them to be repairable.
These statements are, to me, identical. Repair factors into the design of devices - Apple engineers didn't suddenly forget about it while making an iPhone. If the device isn't meant to be repairable, you're instead intended to replace it, which is wasteful and also a boost to Apple's profits.
I don't get it. You're arguing both that using custom screws is some horrendous thing that Apple's doing to screw over customers, and that it's not even a deterrent at all because you can buy screwdrivers for it. You can't have it both ways.
> I sincerely doubt that Apple doesn't generate a profit with prices like that.
Why do you doubt that? Do you have any information about what the BOM is for the repair (and don't forget, replacing the screen also means replacing the Touch ID sensor too). Do you have any information about how long it takes for an Apple repair technician to actually perform the repair, and how much they get paid? Do you actually have any information at all as to what it costs Apple to perform repairs? Because it doesn't sound like you do.
That said, it's certainly possible that an individual out-of-warranty repair might cost more than strictly necessary, but if so this would presumably be to offset the cost of in-warranty repairs. I really have no idea if any individual Apple repair costs more than strictly necessary, but repairs as a whole are not something Apple does for a profit.
> These statements are, to me, identical.
Then you have an awfully rigid black & white view of the world, and there's not much more to discuss here.
I certainly can, because my argument doesn't rest on the screws being effective. The only important part is that Apple chose a screwhead on the sole basis that it tried to be a barrier to customers, which is a principle that I take issue with. If the screws were later easily bypassed, more power to the consumer, but it doesn't excuse the design choice.
But you need to see things from the perspective of the average consumer. The only reason the average consumer would want to open up an iPhone or a MacBook is to do something like swap out the battery. And since these devices aren't designed with that in mind, the average consumer is very likely to damage or destroy their device in attempting to do so. Apple has a responsibility to remove the obvious easy ways for a customer to accidentally destroy their device. In this way, using custom screws is no different than trying to make the screen less likely to crack when dropped.
But Apple isn't making it impossible to open their devices. They're just making it so the average consumer can't do it. It's not that hard to get pentalobe screwdrivers. Heck, ifixit.com even sells them. Here's a screwdriver bit you can buy for just $4.95 (https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Tri-point-Y000-Screwdrive...). It's not that big of a deal.
I think that the average consumer is more likely to go buy a new one, or put up with the nuisance of a short battery life. Almost all the Apple replacement batteries that I see on Amazon come with the special screwdrivers anyhow. So if they're determined enough to actually order a battery, it's almost inevitable that they'll also get the tools to do whatever damage they can.
> Apple has a responsibility to remove the obvious easy ways for a customer to accidentally destroy their device.
I don't think that Apple has a responsibility to protect customers from their own conscious actions, but I think some of the minor roadblocks make sense from a business perspective; no manufacturer wants to deal with a customer that "repaired" their own device and expects the company to still honor the warranty.
It's been true of all hacker/tech forums since well before the "no wifi, less space than a Nomad. Lame" era.
Remember the (probably apocryphal) stories about Van Halen's contract requiring a bowl of M&M's with one color removed? It was supposedly a signal to them that somebody had actually read their contract closely.
Maybe there's something similar going on with the screws. Could it be a way for Apple to better ensure that Foxconn is using the hardware that the contract specifically calls for?
That's not a hypothetical, btw. Louis Rossman (an unauthorized repairman) has some good youtube videos where he calls around to get quotes from authorized vs unauthorized repair centers. The difference in what they are able to offer is dramatic and repeatable.
The real issue here is not so much with smartphones, but with printers, cars, and other devices that have more predatory business models.
The ability to disassemble something has nothing to do with its durability.
It seems to me that people buy new phones because they want the latest, I mean a lot of people just keep using their phones with broken glass or home buttons. Beaides, resell value is very high.
"According to the source, an Apple representative, staffer, or lobbyist will testify against the bill at a hearing in Lincoln on March 9. AT&T will also argue against the bill, the source said. The source told me that at least one of the companies plans to say that consumers who repair their own phones could cause lithium batteries to catch fire … "
Sound a little more fishy to you yet? Oh no sorry, we can't let you repair your own car, there are dangerous corrosive chemicals inside. You must take it back to the dealership for service.
You should read up on Louis Rossman, a guy who runs a YouTube channel to help people repair Apple products.
To be fair to Apple- People were trying to sue them when 4chan had a campaign telling people you could recharge your phone in the microwave (look it up). Yes, it sucks how people will mess up their own devices and then try to sue Apple. But that's part of the cost of doing business.
To be fair to the repair shops- Apple and other companies constantly try to use dodgy legal efforts like copyright claims to keep repair shops from posting schematics from computers in an effort to diagnose and repair components. Louis Rossman talks about these battles constantly.
Yes it's messy. No, there's not a perfect answer. But the car analogy is a good one. Manufacturers could make "better" cars if they could seal the engine compartment against service. They could also make cheap cars that break constantly and force people to come in for service.
Given my experience in the field, Apple's reliability and support is not nearly as good as people claim it is. At my work we constantly have problems, not the least of which are Apple's dodgy power connectors so virtually everyone in the office is limping along with black tape covering a frayed power cable waiting until the day it breaks or starts to spark and the need a new one.
Or when they lied and said you couldn't upgrade the RAM, so when we slap in more RAM for work, we're violating the warranty and have to take it out to get service.
And and and...
So, I go hackintosh or find a way to be rich somehow. The first look more possible.
Something that was surprising for me to learn is that e-waste recycling, while better than throwing something away in the garbage, is actually not great at recovering metals -- and it's orders of magnitude worse than just fixing the item and using it longer.
People really seem to ignore the power of marketing.
Lets not forget that for a long while every Android device in USA was a "droid" because Verizon was running ads after ads about their reskinned Motorolas. Even people outside of USA applied the theme to their Motorola phones to get the droid experience.
And these days everything is Galaxy because Samsung have for years been going toe to toe with Apple on ads spending.
And speaking of Apple. For a number of years every commercial break seemed to have one of their "see how easy it is" ads that basically was a step by step guide for launching maps, emails or messaging. So by the time joe consumer would touch an iPhone they had by rote memorization internalized those steps. So much for "ease of use".
“Modular design allows us to make products that are not only beautiful, thin and powerful, but also user-serviceable, so they can last for many years,” the company said. “When repairs are needed, Official Apple Service Manuals mean users are assured of the quality, safety, and security of repairs of their devices. We do not build with a short end-of-life in-mind, and we encourage a thriving aftermarket of parts and repair services for all Apple products.”
One can dream...
The current iPhone 7 is 7.3mm thick. An additional 10% would mean 8mm. It's not a razor -- you don't need to shave with it.
Some of those cases take you more than halfway towards 80s-carphone size...
> ...only 10% to 20% more space.
So not a matter of willpower then?
By making it modular you are sacrificing size, there are no two ways around it. The discussion gets nowhere if people keep claiming the same exact product can be built if you just try hard enough.
Apple, when compared with the android phone manufactures is probably a better choice for long term use. That is because while my android phone (asus) has a battery I can replace in under 1 minute, the software support probably won't last for 5 years like my daughters iphone5 which after a new battery is a perfectly functional updated device. So if you want to do something about the throwaway culture, minimum support periods might be a good thing to look at too.
If it were affordable, I'd just have this fixed and put a screen protector on it. Unfortunately, it's not, so I guess I'll be buying another iPhone in a few months...
For example, my Nexus 5 is vulnerable to Broadpwn (CVE-2017-9417), but since Google stop supporting it I'll never get the updated Broadcom firmware. LineageOS can't patch this, so I either need to live with the fact my device is vulnerable to WiFi takeover or switch to a supported phone.
I'm seriously considering picking up an iPhone because of this.
In reality, open hardware is also what's needed, so we can patch firmware ourselves when vendors cant or wont. That too is a massive uphill battle.
Also, realize that if we do get repairability laws, the incentive to target and optimize system updates to brand-new hardware will only grow.
And you'd rather not get security updates?
With Microsoft, I give them a bye primarily because aside their Surface line, they don't control every possible configuration, and have to deal with a wide ecosystem of hardware.
As for the external storage, I can use any flash drive with an OTG micro-USB port, which are common and cheap nowadays (or a regular drive with an OTG cable). But I rarely need the extra space.
Meanwhile, I can still run Linux pretty well on an old i386 machine.
Besides, you don't really want to try and run a modern kernel on anything less than say a pentium3 due to RAM constraints. As someone who tries this kind of stuff in an effort to keep some older hardware running, even when you do get it up, the experience can make it basically unusable. Waiting 30 seconds for a login prompt/whatever isn't "usable". Sure, you can disable 95% of the kernel, but all kinds of stuff actually have hard-coded dependencies on things you normally never use, simply getting the kernel up isn't the same functionality that was achieved (full X/WM/browser/etc) on the same hardware a decade or two ago.
Here's one of my projects, restoring a Teletype Model 15 from the 1930s.[1] This one was in bad shape. Those machines are 100% repairable; any part can be removed and replaced with common hand tools, usually just with a screwdriver. It took about a month to overhaul. I have it running, connected to a laptop computer. The typing quality isn't very good; I could do a rebuild on the type basket but haven't done so. The price of this repairability is a big, heavy machine.
There are people in Shenzhen who repair iPhones at that level. They un-solder chips with a hot air rework station, put down a solder paste stencil, put in a good chip from another broken phone, heat up the new chip to solder it in, and have a working board. It's feasible because it's such a monoculture - there are so many identical phones, and you don't need a broad parts stock. For brands with a lot of models, and a smaller markup over parts cost, few people bother.
[1] http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.htm...
I think the car industry is probably similar in that so many parts become more electronic and less mechanic and if a sensor is gone, the entire part has to be replaced. (Not a car geek, but the ones who are, please feel free to chime in here!). And with the EV revolution, that trend is going to be accelerated.
[1]: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/7/13/content-isnt-ki...
I don't think most people are doing that. They're buying much less costly phones. You can get a new, unlocked Nokia 6 (3GB/32GB LTE) with Android 7 from Amazon, Walmart and others for about $230. If you wish you can suffer lock screen ads and Amazon will sell it for $180. And they aren't replacing them every 24 months either.
I know the folks that frequent HN don't hesitate to spend $900-ish every 18 months, but this is not representative of most people.
When you get to $200 for something that lasts 3-4 years it approaches disposable. Most people will replace it rather than try to get it repaired. This isn't me advocating manufacturer's behavior. It's just the reality of the phone market; most people aren't going to care about this.
One thing i love about living where i do is that stores are mandated to list the total cost of the device once the contract duration have been accounted for.
Quite often the sticker price would be as close to zero as they could get away with, but the total after contract is often 1.5x or higher than just paying for the device up front.
Phones on the other hand should be an easy-battery swap away from future usefulness. And that's just from the hardware perspective. There is no functional reason my Nexus 5X should stop receiving security updates next year, other than the fact that Google wants to sell more Pixels (which I will probably buy because going without security updates is cutting off my nose to spite my face).
Thus getting updates out there for the UI layer will not be hampered by having Qualcomm etc drop support for their SOCs 12 months after initial introduction (meaning 6 months before they start showing up in the first devices).
And frankly i don't see how much difference there really is between Apple and Google here.
Google offer a bunch of compatibility tools etc that allow new APIs to function (up to a point) on older devices.
Similarly Apple will regularly leave out big ticket items on their updates for older devices, meaning that if it is something the app dev wants to make use of they can only support the newest Apple is shipping.
Never mind that i hear again and again that getting the latest iOS on an older device makes said device slow as a slug.
I thought changing the charging port should be relatively easy. Now it is certain that my cousin will lose all of his photos in the old phone unless he gets it fixed at an unauthorized repair center.
I would be auto syncing like crazy over iCloud or Google Photos.
> This is such bs. iPhone is one if not the only smartphone the oem support for about 5 years. My son is rocking a 5s currently with the latest os update. About a year ago, I swapped out the battery myself.
>This is basically an advertorial for the Right to Repair legislation. I continue to be amazed by how uncritically this topic has been covered. Jason Koebler at Vice has basically been an activist on this issue, rather than a journalist.
And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc.
This may be fine for vehicles (and even that is questionable now that cars are becoming more advanced and require more expertise to repair), it would be silly for consumer electronics which is a much more dynamic and fast changing industry.
And as for the story about environmental standards. EPEAT is a shit standard if it would have prevented Apple from creating a unibody Macbook Pro. It was right to change. The real reason that Apple lobbied them to change it isn’t some silly conspiracy about making them harder to repair, it’s about making better products.
I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR. Whenever a silly environmental story about Apple pops up, he’s the go-to guy for a negative quote.
Sorry can you explain why it's silly because the electronics industry is more dynamic?
> And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc.
From an environmental standpoint that doesn't sound like a terrible private interest group. If 3rd party repair gets support from manufacturers it lowers barriers to entry to the repair industry. Which would make repairs cheaper. That in turn would encourage more consumers to consider repairs over replacements. In theory, at least.
> I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR.
The saying "doing well by doing good" comes to mind.
I don't think this is completely true. Wasn't a big part of the John Deere controversy about exactly this, i.e. using copyright or some such law to effectively make diagnosing and repairing breakdowns illegal?
Companies can also push consumers into contracts or terms of service that disallow repair or modification.
Other vendors have the exact opposite problem (my LG G5 has a replaceable battery, but I have no idea how long it'll continue to receive OS updates from my carrier).
1) if the battery needs replacing within warranty doesn't that mean the user shouldn't have to? There is of course a case where the user thinks the battery life is bad but apple doesn't agree so the warranty doesn't help.
2) there is a difference between replaceable and user replaceable and my point was that "replacable" is usually enough since batteries are so rarely replaced compared to e.g screens. I have no stats but my personal guess would be that an average iPhone has at least one screen replacement.
And my six year old 5 has long since hit the proverbial trash. It was too slow about four years ago.
I remember previously fast iPhone 4s becoming close to useless when iPhone 5 came out after an os update.
I would've changed the "Why" in the title to "How", since that's where the article really illuminates some industry dynamics I wasn't aware of. Of course, if LIBOR taught us anything, it's that industry shouldn't be left to regulate itself...
It spends a lot of time talking about voluntary standards bodies for eco-friendly/sustainable technology development, and how those standards are manipulated by participants, rendering them utterly meaningless.
As the article explicitly says:
> It’s important to note that these are not government-enforced regulations
If they were it's possible they'd have a little teeth.
But if, as a society, we claim to value things like sustainability, and then leave industry to police itself, it should be no great surprise that the outcomes are poor. The Clean Air Act would've been an abject failure if it'd been the Clean Air Voluntary Industry Recommended Practices if you Feel Like It Group.
Maybe the voters claim to care about sustainability more than their actual choice of politicians reflects?
The problem is that a lot of the costs of unsustainable industry are a) externalized, b) largely invisible, or c) subsidized/hidden (e.g. burying replacement costs in contracts).
Safety and environmental regulations suffer from similar difficulties
That means you need leadership from government, as was the case with something like that Clean Air Act.
Though I must admit, in this case, I doubt you'll see that happen...
PC computers can be repaired easily and use standardized parts that are user replaceable. Why not make phones the same with standard hardware and open boot loaders?
A key factor is the large user base (many million) for each model of the iPhone, so 3rd party parts are usually cheap and diagnostics for almost any problem is easy to google.
Compared to e.g washing machines it's a pleasure to have a broken smartphone.
Android is another matter, and they're more than happy to work on those devices.
Not exactly a green thing to do in my opinion.
There are of course "compatible screwdrivers" out there, per the original post, but whether patented or not, it was a fairly transparent way of Apple keeping people out of their own hardware.
I tried to disambiguate that lots of people claimed new design was patented; it may however have just been rare / impractical to obtain initially.
(First google result) https://www.google.com/patents/US20140150613
Most people when I see they talking about it, and I suppose most people in general, would like stronger screens and more battery even if it meant a thicker phone, but the illusion of "last generation" and stuff like that make so, for marketing purposes, supported by the profit motive, that it should not be this way because "customers"... I'm sorry, I just think it's absurd that people take those tales uncritically like that.
My current phone is a middle-end Sony, it's screen already has that kind of shatter that starts to spread, the p2 connector stopped working these days, and after I bought it I could not find any of the accessories to help me preserve it(screen protection, cover, etc), had to buy some chinese stuff online that were worthless, it's less than a year old. We're systematically made of idiots. I still have an S3 that I used for 3~4 years, it's screen is intact and all the rest works fine.
That line of reasoning makes some sense for Apple - an iPhone user will probably replace an iPhone with another iPhone -- but makes little sense for an Android manufacturer.
There is no great likelihood that Android user is going to buy another Android device from the same manufacturer two years later.
On the other hand, Apple also gets continuing revenue from Its customers after the phone is sold. It has every reason to keep the software updated. I've never replaced an iPhone for poor battery life. It's been because I wanted more speed, more storage or a larger screen.
Also, what consumers want, and what is good for the environment, rarely mesh very well.
Unless, of course, you're arguing that the suppliers have coordinated to screw consumers. But that would be illegal, wouldn't it?
Only if proven. And there would be a tremendous cost to attempt to prove it.
Ultimately I do believe they create hard-to-repair phones exactly for the reasons they state - it makes it easier to make them thin and light - but I also believe this is harmful to consumers in the long run.
I have replaced screens and batteries on iPhones, it isn't wizardry but does require technical acumen and some special screw-driver/pry tools that won't break things.
It isn't an open standard like PC parts but there are lots of other industries that are mostly closed and engineer their products to only last a certain usage threshold. Engineering them to last longer costs way too much.
Nothing to see here, just the free market regulating itself. Good job!
Engineering is all about trade-offs - both physically/materially/technically, and in time and money.
As an engineer/designer you have a set of requirements to meet: Product Safety, Customer Needs, Marketing Needs, and Technical Requirements.
Then you can spend some time on Serviceability - but any time and money you spend on Serviceability is time you are not spending on improving the product and hopefully reducing the need to repair and replace parts in the first place.
Then you start manufacturing the thing, and problems come out of the woodwork. If you put a thousand parts together that's at least two thousand things to go wrong (and often many more). So you spend time designing for manufacturability/assembly - add an alignment slot to this connector, color coordinate these parts so it's obvious what goes together, make this bolt/fastener easier to insert. This is called Poke-Yoke, or idiot proofing. You spend a lot of time on this because there are a lot of idiots.
If you are good at manufacturing you learn how to make the thing quickly, with high quality, and with a small number of workers. This is called Lean Manufacturing.
The upshot of all of this, is that the connectors, parts, assemblies, fasteners, adhesives and all of that are designed so that the widget goes together right the first time, in such a way that an idiot can put it together, and it should work for a long time.
One way to see this aspect would be a PC compared to a laptop One is larger but you can replace many components with ease to a laptop that has a more limited and indeed costly replacement/repair factor and even then you are constraints limited compared to a PC. But it does get better, I can't but help feel that the lack of standards limit the drive to swap in and out parts. More so when those standards are driven by SOC manufacturers more than most and help to lock in phone manufacturers into certain brands of SOC.
Manufacturers have responded in exactly the way the majority of consumers asked them to, by making smaller lighter devices rather than repairable ones. Connectors add space and weight, making devices bigger and heavier and less desirable to the vast majority of consumers.
As a relatable example, consider PC building. In a standard PC case, you can pretty much throw together any selection of (compatible) parts and expect them to work. In contrast very compact mini-ITX builds can be very challenging, not all combinations of parts will fit in a given case, heat becomes challenging to dissipate without excessive noise, and assembly can be very fiddly, with exactly one right order to put all the parts together. And even if you are doing the smallest fiddliest case you can buy, you still will not actually approach the sizes that are possible with an engineered product like the MSI Trident 3/Corsair One/Zotac Magnus let alone the noise profiles.
That said, Apple definitely crosses the line from "compact product that is necessarily difficult to service" into actively obstructing service efforts, which is a problem. For example I accept that soldering parts down is thinner than socketing them, but it's an asshole move to glue components into place.
Apple is certainly not alone here, however. It's virtually impossible to find a phone without an integral (non-replaceable) battery nowadays, and MicroSD slots are rather uncommon as well (yes Google, I know there's a lot of bad flash out there, that's why I source nice stuff from camera stores).
I don't have any good suggestions to fix this, there's no "but wait there's a better way" at the end of this post. There was a prototype phone a while back that was built from pluggable "modules" but obviously it hasn't taken off. The closest thing is probably a dedicated hacker/tinkerer phone like the Neo900 but you will definitely have to live with it being 3-4x as thick as an iPhone. The iPhone is making enough compromises in terms of functionality (eg battery life, external antenna connector, etc) that there might be a niche for a more full-featured device but it's clearly not what the mass market wants.
The industry got hooked on 'upgrade every year or so' it did wonders for the bottom line because you could sell the same high margin product to the consumer again and again. It isn't surprising when you consider the people who designed and built your product are sitting there at the company still, and now what do they do? You can't really just lay them off (not and expect to catch the next wave of what ever) so you start them off designing and building the next version, which, as a requirement is "make it so that someone who owns the old one will want to buy the new one."
Great but that is then conflated with the challenge of disposing of the previous one which, for all intents and purposes, can't really be 'recycled' so much as separated into recoverable metal [1][2] and then either burying the rest or incinerating it.
And that gets conflated with the 'If you would just support it I could keep it' story line, where new features can't run on the old device (I've got an older iPad for example stuck on IOS 6 for that reason but its a great media player) and of course the FOSS community saying that if you document the device they would build alternative software packages for it.
And that gets conflated with 'if I could get it fixed I would' which would support repair shops (which seem to flourish in places like China but less commonly in the US) where problems are diagnosed down to the chip level and fixed on the spot. But that interferes with warranty calculations (you crack a screen and have a shop replace it, but then the mainboard develops an intermittent, was that a manufacturing problem or a repair shop problem? can be impossible to know.)
And all of that burys the state of the art which is that most of the toxic stuff has been taken out of electronics, and caveat people who violate the laws, or places which care to little to enforce the laws, the stuff is reasonably disposed and what can be recovered is.
What is missing is any sort of vision by either one of the agencies or organizations they talk with about what a better system would look like from an implementation level (we know about lax enforcement of the current stuff).
[1] https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/Case%20Study%20on%20Critical%...
[2] http://services.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/05/UL...
Where do you think most user-removed parts end up? In landfill. Whereas devices traded in to Apple can be recycled properly. Apple even has a custom-designed robot to disassemble iPhones to achieve maximum recyclability.[1]
They also offer zero support for the claim that Apple's approach shortens the lifetime of devices. Apple offers a battery replacement program![2] You can extend your iPhone's life! And they recycle the old battery properly. iFixit just doesn't like that they can't sell you the kits to do it yourself.
Apple's obvious motive, which this sensational article fails to dispute, is to make their devices smaller, watertight, and generally better. That is why they pack and glue the interiors with custom parts and seals.