Comment by csydas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csydas | Hacker News Reader

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I partially disagree.

The simple truth is that the market for third party non-Apple replacement parts is super sketchy. In the US and other countries where it's convenient to purchase from a reliable site like ifixit, you have legitimate options. For the rest of the world, you have AliExpress. It's not a matter of finding a local reseller, you really just don't have many good options.

I opted for my own 3rd party replacement via AliExpress and a few other resellers who shipped to the country I'm in, and while the price was right (about $10 or so), the battery shipped was just trash. It did not charge properly, even when I wired it up myself, and once fully charged that way, the batteries turned out to be counterfeit and had labels posted over the actual capacities.

It's a mine field, and unless you have the technical background to know whether it's the phone or the battery itself causing the issue, it really starts to look like it's Apple making things bad. In my case, I have the rudimentary knowledge to know that I just was sold batteries that were not fit for purpose. Go to the most common online retailer for most US persons (Amazon) and you are inundated with shoddy 3rd party batteries, the exact same ones I got from AliExpress.

How exactly are they supposed to protect the consumer here when __not__ noting that this is an unofficial battery results in the phone/user getting the impression something is wrong with the phone, not the battery.

I love iFixit, but in this case, I feel maybe they're misjudging the situation. I'd totally trust a battery from them 100%, but it's not feasible to ship to my country of residence from iFixit. Many people in the world are in this situation.

I think the big issue here is that Apple seems unwilling to distinguish between reputable aftermarket companies and those that aren't. I can see how they're trying to protect consumers from shoddy batteries, but this goes beyond that. If someone hasn't seen it yet, there are youtube videos of people having their iphones damaged and not having their photos backed up. The Apple Geniuses and on the offical forums tell them, "No sorry, no way to get them back, because of security chip, all your data is gone." Meanwhile, 3rd party repair centers are able to make the phone fully functional again. Apple is straight up lying to their customers and will delete posts from anyone on their forum that even attempts to offer advice on someone who just lost a lot of valuable pictures/video/files.

This is just more of the same. Apple needs to be more open so reputable companies like ifixit can keep doing what they're unwilling to, due to low profits or for whatever reason.

Elsewhere in this thread people talk about batteries bought from iFixit lasting only a few months.

They don’t seem reputable.

I'd say Apple is partially to blame for the replacement parts market being shady, for three reasons:

1. You can't get genuine Apple replacement parts in such a way that the end-consumer can actually verify they are not counterfeits.

2. Apple charges an exorbitant brand premium for genuine Apple products.

3. Apple doesn't believe that unapproved persons are capable of repairing its devices correctly.

If one could order a replacement battery from Apple, at a price that approaches the actual cost of a genuine replacement battery, plus the actual cost of QA, plus the actual cost of splitting off single units from the batch and shipping them, most would never need to bother with sketchy third-party batteries. You could just buy an Apple battery, and either DIY replace it, or take it to an electronics repair-person that you trust.

So it is Apple making things bad. By refusing to recognize consumer right to repair at all, it is automatically excluding the possibility that there is a difference between a shoddy home-repair, and one that would otherwise meet Apple's repair standards, if only it had been performed by an Apple-blessed individual.

A shop that values its reputation would almost certainly offer customers the choice of OEM-original replacement parts, or brands known by them to be good, such as iFixit parts, if it could. As it is now, the only OEM-originals they can get, come from devices purchased new for the explicit purpose of dissassembly for parts, and broken, unrepairable devices that still have some good parts in them. That pushes the prices up.

Batteries have serious shelf life issues.

There would be nothing to prevent there being poorly stored batteries that are genuine being sold and causing the same issue.

Batteries fail on a predictable schedule. You can either design your whole battery-powered product to fail roughly when the intrinsic battery fails, or you can design the battery to be replaceable.

Apple is trying to have the cake, by designing a product with a longer except-for-the-battery service life, and eat it too, by making the battery intrinsic to the construction, and not easily replaceable. These are incompatible goals for product lifecycle. Either you make cheap garbage that may break before the battery fails, or you have to account for repairing or replacing a failed battery in a product you have not owned in any way ever since you sold it to the consumer.

The consumer-friendly way to go about this would be to offer OEM-blessed battery replacements by sanctioned professionals AND sell repair parts directly to anyone who wants to buy them AND publish specifications for 3rd-party replacement batteries AND publish instructions on how to replace the battery AND write your software to detect and report incorrect installation or out-of-spec replacement parts, while also actually accepting any repair done correctly with in-spec parts without complaint.

The "issue" is that the current software is essentially saying, "we know everyone in the world who can properly replace an Apple battery, and whoever it was that replaced this battery wasn't one of them". Rather than offload the cost of their brand protection scheme onto the consumers, they could write their word trademark and mfg date to the chip in the battery, read it from the phone to report as part of battery health, and prosecute battery-counterfeiters in civil court, on their own dime, rather than using some bullshit para-DRM scheme.

Your ‘consumer friendly’ solution seems like just the opposite.

Your propose a costly scheme that would require significant ongoing investments in engineering and bureaucracy to maintain in order to support a network of less reliable repair shops policed by a never ending cycle of offensive lawsuits.

Not only would that not protect the brand, but it would harm consumers through increased pricing, and harm the repair shops by targeting them with lawsuits.

How can this possibly be better than the current situation where people are free to repair the device and use whatever batteries they like, and there are no lawsuits - only a message on a screen buried in the settings app!

What's stopping Apple from selling the parts that they manufacture to third parties, though? If anything this is an argument for right to repair laws, not for manufacturers to further restrict how consumers can use their devices. The Massachusetts right to repair laws for vehicles already provided a good framework for such an electronics repair law.

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