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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about the pricing but the counter argument I hear regarding restrictions often is that Apple doesn’t want to tarnish the brand by letting third party vendors repair devices. They don’t want the situation where the third party mucks up the screen replacement and the consumer (however right or wrong) blames Apple for it in some part.

I imagine you could tie the pricing into the above argument somehow by saying you need to pay more to do the repair correctly (training technicians, buying the proper parts)

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They're basically doing what BMW and Mercedes dealers have done for a long, long time. Overprice the repair labor and repair parts, market the product to people who don't particularly care how much it costs, and charge a ridiculous amount for scheduled services.

There's a reason why a ten year old BMW 7 series has terrible resale value, the parts are incredibly expensive and rare/hard to find, in addition to the intentionally overcomplicated engineering of many subsystems. Using the 7 series as an example there is a steel cooling system tube that runs through the top center of the engine, with a rubber gasket on it. It's a thing that commonly fails and if you need to replace it, the "book rate" labor to do so requires something like 13 hours of labor (at $150/hour?), because it requires removing the whole engine.

Even if you are willing to take it to a third party small repair shop that specializes in german cars, your repair costs are going to be a lot higher than a ten year old Lexus.

Apple gluing things together in a way that can't be easily serviced (look at ifixit's repair scores and teardown photo galleries) is very similar.

Apple stores as the new car dealerships - I am digging the analogy.

your repair costs are going to be a lot higher than a ten year old Lexus

Ironically, one model of Lexus engine has the starter in a location that requires disassembling most of the top of the engine (and thus incidentally also requiring the replacement of many other soft parts like gaskets) to reach it:

http://www.lextreme.com/starter.html

That said, a lot of newer cars, not just luxury models, have seemingly been designed to make changing the simplest parts as difficult and involve removing as many other parts as possible.

yeah, like kia having the skid cover the oil pan. Or subaru requiring that you remove a front wheel well panel to change a headlight.

Having a skid plate covering (read: protecting) the oil pan seems like a good design to me.

problem is that there is no access hatch, you have to remove the whole plate to get to the drain.

That probably means the factory intended for topside oil changes. I switched to topside oil changing about 7-8 years ago and it's tremendously more convenient. I didn't trust it at first, so the first 3 I did, I did the vacuum process and then removed the plug. Never got enough oil out of the plug area to fill much more than a tablespoon, so I became a believer.

I use the MityVac 07300 and can recommend it highly if you have a good sized compressor to run it. They also sell a manual pump version.

I've replaced a headlight behind a front wheel panel before, though in a different brand of car. It wasn't difficult; just a bit more awkward.

(And with new cars quickly moving to LED lights, we won't be changing them very often anyway.)

I know this is off-topic but that's fascinating and prompts me to ask: do you know which Lexus models have that engine design? I'm guessing it's only the LS/SC/GS 400 models.

Except in Apple's case, Apple's products last longer and have higher resale value. Apple tightly controlling the supply chain and who repairs their products directly influences the secondary market value for their products.

When you go on eBay to buy a used Macbook, you can be reasonably sure that what you're buying has had "complete repairs" with original parts (if it was repaired at all). Buyers can be sure that the computer they bought didn't just have a pin bent back, but has some other unresolved problem that will lead to a failure later on. That increases demand in the used market and gets better prices for sellers.

Problem is, they leave no avenue for good third parties to exist. Their AASP policies are restrictive, expensive and overall make shops that are trying to give a legitimate experience less competitive.

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