Apple tells lawmakers people will hurt themselves if they try to fix iPhones
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
The in-person meetings in California came a few weeks after CompTIA and 18 other trade organizations associated with big tech companies—including CTIA and the Entertainment Software Association—sent letters in opposition of the legislation to members of the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. One copy of the letter, addressed to committee chairperson Ed Chau and obtained by Motherboard, urges the chairperson “against moving forward with this legislation.
I am shocked and ashamed that CompTIA would lobby against right to repair. To think that they are viewed as a high and mighty standards organization in the IT world - it's sickening to think that people worshiping them are essentially boot-licking - a term that I try to avoid using, but in this instance, unfortunately seems accurate.
The retail price for CEH doubled once they became an approved vendor...go figure.
Hooray for quality journalism?
If you are a member of CompTIA or certified by them or have any thoughts about them please reach out to me (my Twitter DMs are open: twitter.com/jason_koebler ... are Signal numbers allowed on here?), because I'm working on a deeper investigation about the group's shift from a certifications body to a lobbying arm of big tech.
I'm not sure that they have shifted away from being a certification body, they still issue a lot of certifications. I don't think they are considered very valuable certifications though.
There is nothing in the guidelines that says you can't post a cell number, I think you're good.
So the safety angle becomes even more silly.
>Why should Apple own the repair aspect?
And received a response:
>But they are [sic] not
Whether or not you can work around Apple not shipping parts is irrelevant. They are actively trying to make it harder to source parts and fix your devices.
I guess that would be relevant if they were trying to retrieve all spares back. Them not wanting make sourcing spares easier does not mean they own the repair aspect.
> There are also FAR fewer Teslas out there than there are iPhones and iPads.
Which ultimately makes sourcing iPhone / iPad parts even easier.
But irrelevant. That one entity is doing something bad in no way means that it's OK for another entity to do the same thing.
Besides, the right to repair movement is not focusing on computer products. It's covering a wide variety of products, including Teslas and (perhaps the most egregious) farm equipment.
There are more of us then there are of them. Break it down to the smaller case. Imagine 7 of us are in a lifeboat and 1 person has most of the food and the rest of us have a handful of dinner mints and candy bars. Do we vote to make the one guy share the food or do we hope our candy bars last us until we get rescued.
If necessary not only will we eat his food eventually the rest of us might decide to eat him.
The brackets did not take up all that much space, but apparently it was worth it to them to save a few minutes in manufacturing and a few seconds in assembly and just use adhesives directly against the unibody for fastening and stabilising.
Look, I bought a new car. It comes with cameras in the bumper. It made replacing a damaged bumper inherently more difficult for an average Joe. It doesn't mean though that it is impossible to replace it without visiting an authorised service centre. Same logic.
And the parts? Just went to iFixit, they‘re all there to buy. I‘m sure anybody serious about fixing these things professionally can source the parts.
You'd be surprised. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkPUoUJPJAQ
For less common hardware the situation is just as bad. Agriculture equipment has been a pain point for many to get repaired, as the parts are much harder to find and the limited number of certified repair shops can be pressured to stop servicing equipment deemed end of life by the manufacturer
Maybe it's OK to you to live in a world where you car can only be repaired by the dealer. "No big deal!" A valid opinion.
But that's fine until they want to charge you $2000 for something you can do yourself. Thank god the dealer will sell you the part and you can do that. Let me do it even if you don't want to.
Well SOMEONE's dad didn't have a small collection of junker vehicles in the yard to pull parts from growing up. Shoot, I know multiple people (including Dad) who rebuilt their Volkswagen Beetle engine in their unlucky girlfriend's living room (yes that unlucky girlfriend is now my mother) with hand tools. If you think working on cars requires expensive tooling, you just don't know enough rednecks! lololol
He ended the relationship right then and there.
Have you tried to find a mechanic who will rebuild a worn out engine and give a reasonable warranty on the work in your town? If a local professional can't make that work these days economically, it tells you something.
I see ads for cars that had a "rebuild" a few thousand miles ago and need serious work already.
You stick a vacuum line down the dipstick hole, suck out all the oil, replace the filter, fill the oil, put the dipstick back in. I didn't trust it the first time, so I sucked the oil out and then removed the drain plug to see how much oil I was missing; it was less than a shot glass worth.
Brake jobs don't require putting your body under the rotor/hub, making the risk of serious injury low. You could use jackstands, but I generally don't as I don't have my head or limbs in a crush area.
One tip: To aid removal next time, use Dow DC-4 silicone grease on the filter gasket (rather than motor oil or nothing) and the oil filter gasket just needs a little crush; lots of people over-tighten filters, making them needlessly hard to remove. Contact plus a half turn will put about 1/32" of crush on the gasket which is enough to seal.
In my short 55 years on the planet I've heard of 4 friends of friends[1] who died or were badly injured by having cars slip off a jack and fall on them.
[1] AKA friends coworker didn't show up one Monday. Friend recently had to dash across the street to jack a car back off of his neighbor.
Yeah never heard of anyone seriously hurt messing with ordinary consumer electronics. You would think if that were a possibility then UL etc would refuse to certify.
So in the case of Apple, if they still wanted to make expensive to repair 1st/certified-3rd party only devices they could, but they'd have to eat all the expenses of that. No foisting it off onto an unlucky 0.1% or 1% or 2% or 7% or whatever of customers, it should be their job to get it right. If it makes the retail price too expensive, then they'll naturally have to figure out how to lower the failure rate or decrease the repair cost. Extended warranties should never be a thing except for special extra commercial services (onsite repairs, specific SLAs, advance replacement and so forth).
Part of the reason is that the repair or replacement cost doesn't bother me enough for it to be worth putting it in a case (which is a privilege of being a well-paid software engineer; I understand not everyone can afford to have the same priorities).
But at any rate, if I were more price-conscious, repairability would matter much more than a longer warranty, since with repairability I could fix problems that are my own fault just as well as ones due to normal lifespan issues.
Do other people have different experience?
How long would an iPhone last without abuse?
Well, charging cables of course were broken after one or two years, that's problem for all Apple devices I've owned so far. Not a big problem, Chinese cables are cheap and of better quality anyway.
Well, I have. Specifically a Nexus. No experience with iPhones though.
My laptops and servers last even longer. I tend to get well over a decade out of them.
I want to be able to do "anything" to the physical object that I own. I know that interferes with economic calculations involving selling two more or less similar objects for substantially different prices when the manufacturer determines two different submarkets exist (one small, high end market and one low-end mass market usually, gaming versus AI in the case of GPUs).
I know this interferes with maximum profits which might make some manufacturers more reluctant to invest. My heart bleeds for them[/s].
I'm sure there is a large percentage of unethical reasons, but most of the stuff you read about is just lawyer departments lawyering and have little to do with reality (but sady does make rules within the reality of hard- and software). Most of the directions a lawyer department get are the kind of "make this happen, figure out how". It's not an engineer that makes something and then call the in-house counsel asking to make it really hard for everyone else in the world to touch his design; engineers are unlikely to care about that and more likely to want to share and engage with like-minded people.
But they can hire someone who does. Car maintenance is a pretty much perfect analogy. So it does affect everyone, even the least technically inclined.
How expensive is it to provide the ability to download PDFs?
> as is having parts logistics for consumers, especially if it's not your core business.
The manufacturer itself doesn't have to do this. It would be sufficient to allow third parties (such as, perhaps, the company that the manufacturer is buying the parts from) do it. That sort of thing would be in their core business.
No company is sharing their internal versions with the outside world. Making the versions for design, manufacture and internal testing alone is basically a multi-million department's work.
I suppose one of the things a lot of people don't take in to account that what you see as a consumer is just the tip of a very large iceberg behind it. This is the unfortunate way most of the countries that rely heavily on secrets/IP/law to function work. It's mostly a side-effect, because the protection also allows for a good position when dealing with other enterprises. Downside is that consumers suddenly are very much out of their league.
Every company I've worked for (and my own companies) has managed to do that exact thing in an economical way. The bulk of the work is in the initial creation of the document. From there on, only the changes have to be vetted.
It's hard to switch back and forth between larger and smaller contexts, I guess the real point is that it's not always easy to see how hard/easy it is from the context where the problem is. Even een combination of occam's razor and hanlon's razor doesn't always give a direction on which to think or research.
Are you mostly referring to companies in a specific country, or multinationals?
Mostly multinationals and US based companies.
Warranties are not really substitutes for being able to repair your own stuff, though, depending on your use case.
I personally find warranties less than useful, because to get a warranty repair, I'm going to have to go without the device for days and go through added hassle and often expense.
Then, what happens when the warranty period, even if reasonable, expires? Once again, you're on your own.
I'd much rather just fix the thing myself.
I don't think of Jobs as having been against repairability directly; rather, his singular pursuit of elegant designs resulted in a lot of other desirable features—repairability being a big one—getting steamrolled.
Of course you are more exposed to injury when you need to simultaneously use a heat gun and 1-2 other tools just to get started fixing a cracked display on an iDevice...
Edit: Speaking from experience here. Used to purchase broken iPhones in college, fix them, and sell them for a profit. The latest generations are miles away from the repairability of the first several generations.
Nobody is suggesting Apple provide these for free, but right now Apple will even block third parties from trying to provide equivalent jigs, tools, and documentation.
I’m all for Apple providing support for third-party repair shops. I’m against Apple being forced to allow actual end-users to open up and “repair” their phones, because the latter is not going to end well. I shouldn’t be allowed to open up my own phone, but I should be able to take it to a third-party repair shop with access to Apple tools and training materials.
The distinction I’m drawing is between end users and third-party repair shops. Users need to have a way to get support, and Apple Stores aren’t available everywhere, or aren’t necessarily offering repairs as cheaply as a third-party shop could. Third-party repair shops should be able to repair iPhones without voiding warranty, as long as they use Apple-supplied parts and with access to Apple-supplied training materials. But end users shouldn’t.
Apple uses highly specialized and expensive equipment for screen replacements (at least for the iPhone X screen). Even if third-party shops had the ability to buy the same equipment, I don't think they'd want to pay for it.
I did thousands of laptop repairs in my early 20s with essentially no training and no support (tooling) behind me.
Once you buy something it should be yours to fool with. For good and bad.
This is also a battle that has been lost once before. Desktop computer manufacturers used to put tamper-evident stickers on their cases stating that you would void your warranty if you opened your case. Congress made the industry BTFO on that one.
You can do whatever you want with your hardware, but the question is whether Apple should be on the hook for providing repair service afterwards.
What the legislation does do is require them to provide technical parts and details. Currently, my understanding is that Apple is strong-arming shops into either losing access to parts and knowledge (you don't become an Apple Authorized repair, and thus, lose access), or forcing them to lose business (you join, but Apple forces you to send them business as a condition and limits the types of repairs you, as a repair shop, can do).
My personal opinion is, if damage occurs during a repair: if it was due to error on the manufacturer's part, then it's under warranty. If it was your error, then it's not.
[1]: AFAICT, this is AB 1163, which is not cited nor mentioned in TFA: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...
If Apple is going to support a phone after a third-party repair (which I'm not sure I necessarily agree with), they should do it after I remove and reinstall a screw equally well.
If you want to risk damaging your device, that's fine, but it just doesn't make sense to demand that Apple then turn around and provide warranty service to a phone that was damaged by an unqualified user opening up their device and mucking with it.
Apple should support a phone after a third-party repair if the third party uses Apple parts and is qualified to do so using Apple training materials. The alternative is that Apple should be on the hook for providing at-cost first-party repair within a reasonable distance of their entire customer base around the entire world, but Apple doesn't seem to want to operate enough stores to adequately service the repair needs of all of their customers.
"This is dangerous to disassemble so we shouldn't have to provide instructions, tools, and documentation on to how to safely disassemble it."
Or
"Normal people can't repair these things, so we shouldn't be required to help normal people repair these things."
Those are exactly the arguments why Apple should provide documentation, parts, and tools! So people don't get hurt!
That being said, guitar amps, specially tube amps are indeed extremely dangerous, not only the caps, but also the 300, 400 and sometimes 500 volts DC around the tubes. You need to be extremely cautious when handling these, specially if they are powered and opened (to check voltages in various points of the circuit for example).
That being said, I've not seen a lot of guitarists actually opening and servicing their amp themselves, even if the circuits tend to be quite simple and easy to maintain/repair (few components, no SMD).
Was it potentially dangerous? I suppose... but so is using power tools. Frankly I'm more worried about fire every time I charge one of my 18650 flashlight batteries.
This is BS from Apple, and further it's paternalistic.
You have to know exactly which screws to remove, the direction to lift things, the connectors to discounted and when to apply force because lifting the battery requires a huge amount of heat and force.
If anyone should be lobbying against it, it should be ifixit...
packaging improve for the battery component so that it is not a risk or that such items not allowed to be taken into areas where they may be a risk.
heck they could even be regulated as such they be replaceable without disassembling the phone if Apple cannot render them safe otherwise.
Maybe you could make some sort of anti-trust arguments about the probably-a-little-too-tight relationships between wireless carriers and the device manufacturers, but there are a lot of handset makers to choose from and the market can choose who wins.
The parts and information are already available to the public, as noted by the article. The Right to Repair bill would compel companies to provide that information and parts directly.
Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US.
[1] final repair video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw
[2] first video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw
Apple doesn't "have" customs do anything. Customs enforces the law. Those parts are counterfeits, and importing them is illegal.
If they're not off-the-shelf, Apple has exclusive deals with their suppliers and forbids them from selling those parts to anyone else. Whatever you're buying as a "3rd party refurbish part" is either a fake, defective because it failed QA, or excess bulk that Apple didn't purchase. It's usually one of the former. Talk with some people in the device manufacturing biz about this - I've heard stories about suppliers getting customer support calls about QA issues when it turns out the distributor for the parts was selling both legit and counterfeits without the supplier or manufacturer knowing!
And this is a tricky issue - if I manufacture something abroad you're damn sure I want the feds to help prevent counterfeits from being imported. Doesn't matter if it's the final product or part of the supply chain. And in as a supplier, you're not going to manufacture something longer than you make money off it, and the repair volumes don't justify anything.
That said, I think a middle ground here could be a limits on exclusive deals between suppliers and manufacturers, and stricter "use it or lose it" policies on IP held by suppliers. So if Apple isn't buying batteries from FooBar corp anymore, they should be able to sell the batteries the previously did to repair shops stateside. Nothing nefarious there.
People will ship GENUINE/ORIGINAL apple parts, with lets say a cracked piece of glass, but otherwise good screen assembly, back to an OEM to have them replace the glass. When the REPAIRED part is returned to the company who sent them to an OEM, customs will destroy them as counterfeit, even though they aren't counterfeit parts, just repaired.
I'm oversimplifying, but if repairing something makes it a counterfeit, then the same logic could be applied to a dell computer that had its HD replaced while overseas and should be destroyed, using that logic.
In fact, many of the large companies have exclusive agreements with OEM chip manufacturers to not provide data sheets or technical info about chips, in addition to having an exclusive supply.
If cars worked this way, you would never be able to get them repaired anywhere but the manufacturer, but since the manufacturer doesn't replace components, such as the failed alternator, they have to replace the entire "engine assembly".
And yet
>Experts, however, say Apple's and CompTIA's warnings are far overblown. People with no special training regularly replace the batteries or cracked screens in their iPhones, and there are thousands of small, independent repair companies that regularly fix iPhones without incident.
This article wants to have it both ways. "Apple should release documentation because repair people need it" and "People repair their stuff all the time without incident."
A better argument would be actually to take Apple's side on the "safety" issue and say, "People are already trying to repair their stuff because your OEM repairs are too expensive, so you ought to provide them with docs/parts"
Likewise and related, why should perfectly fine hardware deprecate artificially just because Apple decides to lock their hardware down preventing third-party software installation?
It's unsustainable and an abhorrent corporate practice, IMO.
Didn't someone here say that in the EU, they only consider a market to have competition if there are at least 4 major competitors?
To make matters worse, not only are the two players colluding with each other, in many cases, but they're lobbying the very governments who set the rules by which they're allowed to play. I don't see how one can say that we don't need consumer groups' lobbyists, given how many corporate lobbyists there are.
People used to joke about how Apple's one-button mouse was insufficient. Today I've got only one bit of control over which smartphone platform I wish to use and support, and there's way more than one manner in which each of these is sub-optimal for my needs, or society's.
Right to repair + repairability legislation is the double-punch we need. Apple is probably concerned that the latter will be the next step after we get the right to repair things, but we really need it.
So long as I can determine repairability (by looking at the service manual or similar) then I'm fine letting people decide for themselves what they want to buy.
The only other argument I could see for a "repairability" law would be from an environmentalist standpoint, but I would want that law to allow a less-repairable item that was sufficiently recyclable.
What is the grey area, here?
Lots of parts in such devices that aren't standard components that you can just buy from the maker or an intended distributor. Recycled parts might be legally clean, but how do you know that's what the parts you're buying are?
"Are you threatening me?" -- The Great Cornholio
Seriously: That sounds like a... well, like a threat. Like they're willing to employ active measures to enforce Do Not Repair, and then say "I told you so!" when one of their designs just happens to draw blood if you attempt to open the case without specific foreknowledge and specialized tools.