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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

A bigger problem imo is the $700 display replacement. I have a similar problem with my wife’s broken MacBook, where replacing the display costs almost as much as the computer itself.

The problem with the MacBook is that the display is bonded to the glass and the aluminum back so that you have to replace the entire top assembly to fix the display.

It’s even more depressing to know that the ribbon connecting the display is also soldered on.

Apple (and Ives in particular) talks a lot about recycling, sustainability, and product lifecycle, but that seems like complete bullshit once you actually open up or try to repair one of their products.

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Yep, Louis rossman, a popular apple repair guy on YouTube talks similiar about this a lot. The overwhelming majority of problems are fixable for 10 minutes or less and less than a dollar in components. But apple will just tell you to buy a new board and purposefully makes it harder for repair. The whole 'sustainability' is a marketing act.

There was a hyped report where they said they recovered over 2204 lbs of gold from their hardware, this number quoted in every news story: https://www.geek.com/apple/apples-recycling-program-recovere...

2204 lbs is 1000kg converted to lbs, rounded down. If that's not a marketing number I don't know what is

They probably recovered less if there was less hardware to replace. You can't recover much gold from only a ribbon cable versus an entire display assembly.

And much, if not most if it will not be from Apple hardware IIRC. Apple is obliged to recycle old electronics, not just its own.

Actually I’m in NYC and the $600 quote I got for replacing the display is from Louis himself.

It was designed to be thrown out.

It makes you wonder how much of the privacy features are a marketing act too.

Not really. With recent articles talking about their push more deeply into health, privacy is a core feature and basis of trust. Very different than the marketing speak we get from other gigantic companies that are fundamentally ad brokers: privacy is at odds with their core business. Privacy is not at odds with where Apple is or is going, so there isn’t the business incentive there for them to violate it.

Their core business is propagating vendor lockin to tastefully designed highly-priced hardware of middling competence (but very good inter-operability). Privacy is something of a sauce. It's there, some people like it, but if you took it away I'm not convinced it wouldn't still sell. Their core audience by and large doesn't care about it at all.

I can assure you the message is consistent internally with action. It’s not just marketing.

Disclosure: I work for Apple.

Why is Apple so resistant to making repairable products? What is the obsessiveness with making ever thinner products?

I remember starting a job 2014 and choosing a macbook 2012, because of the macbook 2012 being more repairable. It seems to have served me well. Still using it, might consider upgrading to macbook 2015. But won't go beyond that before I hear from others that the current hardware issues have been resolved or the macbook turn more repairable.

Apple has definitely lost some of my trust.

I also wonder why Apple stick with their butterfly keyboard despite it having all of these issues. I would really appreciate any insight into this from you or any other Apple employee.

EDIT: To me having products that are not repairable goes quite counter to the narrative of doing your best for sustainability.

> What is the obsessiveness with making ever thinner products?

Comparing a thicker and thinner version of the same product, the thicker ones always seem more old-fashioned. I still own my Titanium PowerBook, and when it was new it was so sleek I couldn’t believe it was real, and now it feels so thick and old I can barely believe how I used to feel about it.

Well, that’s because consumers have grown to associate thickness to age, precisely because vendors have put a lot of effort in reducing it.

> Why is Apple so resistant to making repairable products? What is the obsessiveness with making ever thinner products?

I think the two are not connected. I think that they don't really care that much about repairable products, despite what they say, even internally, because as Upton Sinclair said:

> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Regarding the thinness angle, I used to think the same way. But their focus on thin (and also small) does drive the industry forward.

Random example from the present day: smartphones are becoming thinner and thinner. As a result, now we can almost have a pocketable flexible device. Besides the AMOLED tech needing to be invented, the device would be no use if each half of the flexible display would be 20mm thick. You couldn't realistically carry around a 4cm thick device (proof: we don't really carry books in our pockets). Well you could, if you were an NBA player wearing cargo pants. But everyone else couldn't, realistically.

Making devices smaller makes them more portable and users don't really care about marginal computing power gains as they do about marginal portability increases. VR/AR tech needs more computing power and better software but it also desperately needs a portability boost.

Random example from the present day: smartphones are becoming thinner and thinner.

Yeah, and in order to do that they ditched the universally used 3.5mm jack.

This is a killer argument for me never to buy an iPhone. At least not one of their recent models.

> Why is Apple so resistant to making repairable products?

I think it's a rhetorical question and we all know the answer to it.

How could you possibly know this? Every company I've every worked at is compartmentalized, and my experience is that Apple is especially compartmentalized, with secrecy and measures similar to governmental security clearance around various projects.

Because I experience it with the requirements on my own work, hear it internally in discussions, and see it addressed in upcoming work.

Seconding this. I also work at Apple but I don’t want to associate myself with my day job here.

Do you have an example of that action? Environmental problems start overwhelmingly at consumerism. Apple is releasing new devices every two years. These devices purposefully made to not be repaired, and apple certainly spends a lot of money into advertising.

That's no different from other companies, but apple is lying about it.

The person you're responding is only commenting on their privacy stance.

Not sure what repairing of devices has to do with that.

Ah Yep, I got mixed up. Hn doesn't thread well in large chats visually It seems.

And I can assure you once people lose trust, they started to question everything. And sadly there are increasingly lots of area where people find Tim Cook's Apple are very inconsistent.

Why then has iOS tracked our frequently visited locations by default for years?

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-see-your-iphone-locat...

According to Apple, “in order to provide useful location-related information in Maps, Calendar, Photos, and more. Significant Locations are encrypted and cannot be read by Apple”.

> The overwhelming majority of problems are fixable for 10 minutes or less and less than a dollar in components

By a skilled person having experience with electronics, who would be bored as hell to work as a simple employee in a repair shop, and conveniently ignoring what hiring such a person would would cost, and what it would take to do this reliably/QA.

In a small shop like Rossmans, this is relatively easy - but that does not scale at all.

And Louis has several Apple store stories in his videos where the idea is "This display replacement is so expensive, just get a new Apple laptop". So it seems Apple strategy is to no longer repair but push people into buying new stuff - I guess this looks much better in their P&L and KPIs (new sales vs. repairs). But my accounting knowledge is limited.

To be fair, I do know a few (mid-size) companies who tend to replace the entire system, then send the faulty piece back to a centralized repair facility which repairs the boards, and then they're used to repair another faulty piece. Don't know whether the large companies do this though.

The repairs at the central facility would be much more efficient if the repairable unit was a cable instead of half the machine.

Can't argue with that, but these repair houses have special tools which make the entire process almost as efficient as repairing a bulkier and modular device. At the end of the day, we can call it a user hostile measure and it needs to be tackled with government policies.

The repairs at central facility have fixed costs (shipping the device, tracking, paperwork), the not-repairs at customer center have fixed costs too. Carrying out simple repairs on site would be much more more efficient if they could be done on site. There is (albeit not trivially measurable) opportunity cost associated with customer inability to drop device for few hours and have it repaired.

Of course there is a delicate balance between various costs (design, manufacturing, repair, lost product upgrade sales, lost overall sales) and increased repairability may mean decreased profits, but I am arguing the main point.

Apple do this and call it "remanufacturing".

That's a pretty good gig for them, charge you $700 for a display replacement and then take your old display and remanufacture it for $10 to reuse somewhere else

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