Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup
nakedcapitalism.com
nakedcapitalism.com
As a reminder of the broader picture: Apple has a strong anti-repair stance, they have lobbied for this [1], have engaged in broad, deceptive strategies to remove 3rd party repair options, by confiscating legally refurbished hardware under the guise of "counterfeits" [2], attempting to confiscate grey market parts under the guise of "trademark violation" and threatening the 3rd party repair shops [3]. They profit from this continued attack by deceiving customers into expensive unnecessary part replacements, suggesting repair is not possible and generally coercing customers into buying new products instead [4].
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180126/07355539089/apple...
[2] https://boingboing.net/2018/10/20/louis-rossman.html
[3] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3yadk/apple-sued-an-inde...
Personally, I've replaced many components on iPhones through the ages. Often the replacement parts I've ordered have been sub-standard and that was the risk I've accepted as I was purchasing from unknown sellers. Sometimes the parts have been on par with the original components and I've been very pleased with my purchase.
The right to repair should be protected. When I am no longer able to fix my own purchases then I no longer feel I own the device.
This is especially true given Apple present themselves as an environmentally conscious brand. Often people don't have the opportunity to get parts replaced by Apple directly, or they don't have the means. Ensuring there are options for everyone promotes reuse and recycling. Additionally it limits the extent that a given company can build in planned obsolescence.
However. My opinion is that in purchasing a second hand device I want to know which components are from the OEM. This is especially important for components that are not easily validated, i.e. the battery. I can then take the risk of price vs quality at face value.
I get the impression here that people are very vocal about one side or the other, but I feel there is a balance to be made.
People who want to economize on parts and labour damage the brand. They're poor people, or at least people not wealthy enough not to care about these things; they shouldn't be associated with the Apple brand. Apple does not aim at the bottom of the market.
People who want open hardware that they can poke at damage the brand. Apple sells an integrated, hassle-free experience. An open market is chaotic and uncontrolled, and antithetical to the brand promise.
I really dislike the phrasing attached to this story.
It's not a lock: a third party installed battery still works, the phone isn't refusing to start up until you go to an Apple Store and have an authentic Apple(tm) battery installed. Rather, it's a warning in the "battery health" section basically saying "we don't know if your battery is any good, you might need to get it replaced".
That said, I'd prefer a clearer phrasing of their error message. It looks like it's just triggering the generic "your battery may need service" warning, which is more of a scare tactic than I'd like. "You don't have a certified Apple battery" would be completely sufficient.
Given the existence of refurbishment scams, where substandard parts are put into old phones to make them look good briefly, I can understand where Apple is coming from on this point. Someone who buys a second-hand iPhone and finds the battery dies after a month isn't going to be very happy with iPhones.
The last time I got a battery replacement for an Apple product was a few months ago, when I was living in Seattle a mere 30 minutes away from the University Village Apple store. From the time of my first phonecall to schedule the appointment to me walking out of the store with a new battery, three and a half weeks elapsed. I had to go to the store three times, the first time they merely "confirmed" what I had already told them on the phone and said they'd need to order the battery and it would take a week. What a fucking disaster, why didn't they order it when I called? Why did they give me an appointment when they knew they couldn't help me that day? Imagine if I was living an hour or two out of town, that would have been three afternoons of my short live wasted. Unacceptable.
It's shit. Unmitigated shit. With my old thinkpad I had new batteries mailed to me and it took mere seconds for me to swap them. I am never buying another computer from these shitheads. People who continue to support Apple have either gotten lucky, or they're nuts.
Therefore, Apple is only 'vouching' for the battery health of batteries replaced via a confirmed 'chain-of-custody'.
Could the message allow the health to be shown anyway? Sure... but it's not like a message pops up every time you wake your phone.
Doesn't that work against your argument? If you put in the effort to move the chip, the phone will never know you replaced the battery at all.
It's no riskier to trust the chip post-replacement than it is to trust the chip any other day of the year.
Last I checked apple did not make parts available to third party repairers, at least without signing on to some draconian anti-consumer agreements. If they were really interested in protecting consumers from counterfeits then they'd be doing more to make genuine apple parts available and doing less to limit third party repairs.
Don't need to do any analysis or anything. The mere fact that the message doesn't go away is enough to push a lot of people towards getting an authorized repair. If this truly was for consumer protection against bad batteries, they could have implemented a "Check my battery" button which returns the same message instead of having an always-on message.
On my Macbook, I currently get:
- A request to log in to Facetime every time I restart it (I've never used Facetime, and don't intend to, and have lost access to my AppleId)
- A daily recurring notification to update my OS, which again I can't do without my AppleId
- A notification that comes every ~10mins reminding me that I'm low on disk space (like I don't know it)
Literally 12 seconds worth of Google.
FaceTime issue: FaceTime menu > Turn FaceTime Off
Software update without Apple ID:
https://www.macworld.com/article/3269337/how-to-install-maco...
It feels that people just love to complain about and hate on Apple. I get it, it’s trendy. But a good portion of the complaints are either disingenuous or an acute case of FTFM.
If you read the comments there, you will see that this doesn't work for Mojave. I've run those commands on High Sierra (or what the previous version was), but Mojave made them unusable. All related and linked answers also don't work for Mojave.
> FaceTime issue: FaceTime menu > Turn FaceTime Off
Funnily that option is greyed out if you are not logged in, and I guess doesn't do what you think it does.
> Software update without Apple ID
My main problem there is that I don't want to update (because how the fuck do I know that Apple won't brick other features I'm used to), and can't silence the notification for forever.
You shouldn't need an online ID to use a laptop. It makes perfect sense to use it without any sort of manufacturer provided profile.
That message destroys the consumer's trust in 3rd party repair shops. It says battery health issue. Are sure you put in a real Apple battery? Did you even change my battery at all?
Outright locking the battery out would cause backlash and possible legal action. This 'technically works but will nag you forever unless you pay Apple to run a program to clear the message that they refuse to share with 3rd parties' solution is genius. Evil genius.
Imagine the car equivalent of this situation. Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible. There are laws that require carmakers to release repair manuals to 3rd party repairers and honour warranty after 3rd party repairs. Tech companies are shitting on their users because equivalent laws don't exist for electronic goods.
Also, I bet none of the Apple defenders were phrasing the location of the battery health meter as “burying” it when Apple released it as a response to their own battery fiasco (which they liead about for months, if not years, until they were proven to have lied).
On the other hand, let me tell you a personal anecdote. After my wife’s iPhone got stolen we wanted to buy another one for cheaper. We chose to buy it from a big retailer in here. The phone was marked as renewed and under warranty. It cost a bit less as a refurb from Apple would.
When we got it it was immediately apparent that the screen was changed for a non first party one. The phone was thicker than original (a case would not fit) and the colors were shit.
No warnings were displayed on the phone. I have returned it immediately for refund.
Now, if somebody who does not know how an iPhone should look and behave it is quite possible that they would pay a lot of money for a subpar product and then tell about it to people around.
I think Apple should absolutely put in warning lights for any non genuine components or genuine components installed by non authorized repair shops.
But, the message here is off as it does not actually help to describe the problem.
If you don't know exactly how an iPhone should look and are not annoyed by the thickness difference, how is it a problem ? You paid less for a slightly less good product that's good enough for you, and if the product is not good enough for you (like in your case) you returned it and good a refund. That sounds pretty good for me!
In this case I knew that I got a bad product and returned it, but it makes me wonder how many times I got some shoddy fake instead of the genuine thing (e.g.: because of Amazon stocking shenanigans). My reaction to bad products is usually to distrust the seller and the manufacturer brand.
This is also why brands fight fakes, if you can get a visually extremely similar object that is sold as product made by B, but it falls apart after a few months then there is a big chance that you won't buy B anymore even though their products are actually good.
Also in my case the problems were visible. If the problem was with a badly repaired internal component, the phone would have died, I would have brought it to Apple and they would refuse to repair it under warranty because it was voided by some random technician. Had the repair been done badly by an authorized repair shop, they would take the cost of re-repair or exchange on themselves.
It displays the warning to scare the user and make them mistrust the 3rd party repairer. The only way to make that warning go away is to use a secret-sauce Apple programming tool that they withhold from 3rd party repairers and sue anyone that manages to reverse engineer it.
They are not doing this to protect you. They're doing this to make you distrust 3rd party repairers, or to make you avoid the nag warning, and go to their overpriced store instead.
But that’s not the error. The error is the health is unknown.
To be a devil’s advocate: How do you know the health of this first party battery is good? For example, maybe it wasn’t stored properly.
Then it has a smaller capacity than a brand new battery should, but still larger than a heavily used battery. It's something the phone can report on, and android phones do. Apple can't guarantee your replacement battery was 'stored properly' either. All they can do is run their little programming tool to remove the warning regardless.
This scenario is completely outside the realm of 'new genuine Apple battery detected + no Apple warning reset = permanently harass the user with false warning'.
Let's be really clear here. The warning is 'unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine Apple battery'. Which is complete bullshit. The phone is perfectly aware that the battery is genuine because it carries a crypto signed identifier.
I don't need apple to change anything to be happy. I vote with my wallet.
My charger for rechargeable AA (LR6) batteries can do that, recondition batteries to eke out a few more cycles, and also tell me when a battery is finally gone beyond its powers to revive.
And my charger is not a $1000 device that utterly relies on the health of its battery to function, either.
What Apple is doing is slapping an opaque cover over the report screen until someone comes along that has a company-issued "remove report cover" pass. What if someone put alkaline batteries in there, instead of metal hydride? What if they put in AAA batteries instead of AA?
The charger can detect wrong chemistry types, like alkaline and NiCd, by objectively measuring the physical properties. And it can still charge AAAs. They just have a lower capacity. The battery subsystem in the phone could analyze a new battery and report its condition, but that would require Apple to admit to itself that a battery is a 3rd-party replaceable part that will require replacement some time over the projected lifespan of the device.
How do you know? You measure. High-tech batteries have some of that capability built-in, and high-tech devices with charging circuits connected to high-powered general computing processors can certainly run automated tests after their case-intrusion sensors and/or power-interrupt sensors detect events.
You wouldn't believe it, but that's almost exactly how it works with bmws since around 15 years. The unofficially replaced battery won't function properly until "registered /converted/(or even) programmed" [0] at the official bmw service. The difference is that the software to do that is pirated and thus available to the 3rd parties
It's also there for a reason: the charging system needs to be told that the battery was changed and what type of battery it was changed to. Otherwise it charges it the wrong way. Unlike Apple batteries, the car batteries are dumb and can't tell the car about themselves.
The warning light won't come on just because you replaced a battery. It'll come on a few days later if you replaced a battery and didn't tell the system about it so now the battery is performing poorly because it was being charged incorrectly.
3rd party manufacturers, by law, have access to the programming tools required to do this for you. Apple holds the equivalent of these programming tools away from everyone and aggressively sues anyone that manages to obtain them or reverse engineer them.
I guess a better analogy would have been '3rd party repair shops installs genuine BMW battery but is unable to register it because the tools to do so are held hostage'.
https://oppositelock.kinja.com/replacing-bmw-batteries-yes-i...
A better metaphor would be a service warning when you go into the iDrive system, to the "CAR" submenu, scroll to the maintenance icon, go into the submenu and then ask the system to list all possible issues. Then it would show up.
Also a 1/5th of the price is not entirely fair. The difference between Apple and 3rd party shops is half at most. And even that is not a fair comparison, because the non-BMW-authorised repair station will use an OEM-equivalent battery from VARTA or BOSCH. Your iPhone repair shop will use a random battery imported from AliExpress with no know history of it being a safe battery.
What Apple says is exactly correct. Battery replacements never hold charge as well as the original battery (in my case no longer manufactured). And spare batteries are of lesser quality.
They are also very cheap, about $9, so I don't care if I have to charge the phone twice every day, until it dies.
However, knowing the sue-for-anything culture in the USA, I back Apple on this one. The message about the battery is accurate, according to my own experience.
Now, the shenanigans with their special screws and tools, the everything glued inside, and removal of the audio plug, I will always be against.
The whole point is more towards the fact that it actually means:
"We don't know (or don't care) if you have a certified Apple battery or a (crappy) third part one, all we know is that it has been changed by non-Apple-Authorized personnel, so we are giving you this warning message as a lesson"
That's not what the message is. It's really weird that everyone keeps getting this wrong given there's a screenshot of it in the iFixit post.
https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2019/08/07170827/iphon...
That very next paragraph, which you omit in your "quote".
This is just scaremongering. Apple has not, in fact, triggered a "kill switch" or "locked" anyone out of using a 3rd party battery.
All it does is display a message that it's not a genuine Apple part. Deep in the battery settings. That's it.
Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts.
But the message is triggered even if you insert an Apple part. So you would want to know if the phone was blessed by an apple genius when you buy/sell ? It's surprising the lengths people go through to defend these asinine decisions. I don't even care about Apple, but the problem is that everyone will follow suit since the rest of the industry lacks any sort of vision/spine.
>So you would want to know if the phone was blessed by an apple genius when you buy/sell ?
Very much so, I don't want my phone catching fire in my pocket or while charging, or people with little technical knowledge being scammed.
Would you want to know if the home you were buying was wired by a licensed electrician, designed by a licensed engineer, etc?
But the phone is old. That is known. You are buying/selling an old phone which has old parts. Whether the old part was genius blessed or not is of little concern as long as it is a genuine part. It is common knowledge that batteries age and that is implied when you buy an old device. If you are unhappy with that, ask for user replaceable batteries, not more DRM in batteries. I don't get this warped logic at all. Some amount of risk is assumed whenever you buy anything used. That's just life.
How do you know it's a genuine part? Maybe even the seller truly believes it is a genuine battery, but counterfeits getting into a supply chain is common unless very tightly controlled.
No, not really. I'd want it inspected, of course, but that's about it. Same with buying used cars. If the house wiring or my used car fucks ups, I'm safe in the knowledge that I can just hire someone to fix it for a reasonable price, and I can be reasonably confident that they'll do a decent job because the knowledge and the parts to fix it are freely available to anyone.
>designed by a licensed engineer, etc?
Maybe, but then designing a product is different than repairing an already designed product. We also have regulations for that kind of thing, so even if I have no idea who designed the house, I can be fairly confident that it's going to be fine because the house was built in the first place, and as before, I can also have it inspected and repaired if something is wrong.
Nothing of this is new, people have been going through the same shit for a couple of centuries now, we went through it with cars and appliances earlier in the last century. Don't let Apple and other electronic manufactures convince you that they're somehow special or different. It's not arcane magic and these problems are not unsolvable. They're just not willing to solve them in a way that's not user-hostile because they have not real incentive to do so.
Also, a fun fact: an iPhone XR replacement battery is $80USD from iFixit (the only vendor I'd trust) vs $69 for out-of-warranty replacement from Apple themselves, labor included.
Also, good luck finding an Apple store or getting your battery replaced in reasonable time anywhere outside the major cities, and especially anywhere outside the US.
No need! That's why Apple has certified third-party affiliates, including Best Buy in the US [1]. Prices are identical to service from the Apple Store.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/06/apple-partners-with-b...
That's to prevent people from
taking old batteries and
modifying them to appear new.
I think this is lost on the HN audience. There's a lot of people out there being scammed by counterfeit parts, recycled parts, shoddy repair jobs, and straight up cobbled together FrankenPhones. Not to mention the danger in using lithium batteries from unknown provenance.
Batteries are the worst possible offender when it comes to counterfeits. If you’re not getting them straight from the source, it’s basically the wild west. I don’t order them online any more because it’s a 50/50 chance of getting a significantly worse product, even from reputable vendors (ahem amazon)
I think Apple is nudging their consumers towards getting an official replacement and honestly it makes perfect sense why they would do that in light of the market offerings.
Imagine an iPhone with a user replaceable battery. 30% of customers are gonna order the replacement from Apple anyway. 20% are going to order a mid high priced good battery from Anker. And 50% are gonna get swindled by an Alibaba drop shipper. The end result: the iPhone winds up behaving like a commodity android phone to the consumer.
We tend to forget that Apple is the company that made the original mass-produced open platform. We forget that Apple's closed ecosystem is a response to the failures of that original experience.
Supporting the wide variety of hardware and software restricted the speed at which they could introduce new hardware and software features while simultaneously increasing their customer support costs and decreasing the perceived reliability of their products.
We forget that abandoning that open ethic is what allowed them to repeatedly capture the most lucrative portion of the consumer market for high technology products.
The error is displayed even if you put in a genuine apple battery.
It's not an excuse for Apples policy to fight "the right to repair" etc. but it's less worse than I thought.
Of course if you own new Apple products you are completely screwed when in need of repairs and no store is in sight.
That's why I still like to use the MBP from 2012 (the one with all the great ports that can be repaired still). They've done a really shitty job in the development of their devices and lost a lot of pro-users like me who won't buy the new series of devices anymore.
When they don't act on this they'll lose a fair amount of customers completely, once their cool old devices aren't usable anymore. It's their decision while governments are too afraid to do the right thing and force all companies to allow people to repair and use resources efficiently.
It should be mandatory in a world that counts it's remaining days because their ancestors just burned through the resources we have without thinking about consequences.
But we'll see if there are enough smart people who are powerful enough to fight this crap. Mother Earth won't care if we'll be here in some centuries and it will recover without us.
> "When a battery gets closer to the end of its lifespan, the amount of charge and the ability to provide power reduces. As a result, a battery may need to be charged more and more frequently and your iPhone might experience unexpected shutdowns."
This is dishonest. Because you put in a battery from a third party, you are making the user believe that it is near the end of its lifespan. I know the language says "may" but then most users are not language lawyers. Any layman is gonna read this as: Oh shit, my battery is almost completely degraded... I need to replace this.
A better thing to do would be to say "This battery is not a genuine battery installed by an authorized technician and may not perform as well"
https://www.ifixit.com/News/apple-is-locking-batteries-to-ip...
That's something they could display without disabling the entire battery monitoring screen though. They could do that for every single part of the phone but instead they remove functionality if you don't do things the apple approved way. If I open two identical iPhones and swap their batteries there shouldn't be any degradation in the phone but Apple has decided there should be and that I can't see the battery info any more under any circumstances unless I go through them.
For those complaining, you’ve never dealt with airplane repairs. If you want a draconian system, try using non-Garmin SD cards in Garmin avionics. A blank Garmin SD card costs $300 and your avionics won’t work without it.
That's also a terrible system. The existence of a worse company doesn't excuse any company that does slightly better.
(At least with Garmin I could see a regulatory liability reason for it, Garmin's equipment is certified with a particular configuration so if we're being blindly legalistic it's not the same equipment with a different card. What's the card used for? To be clear I don't think they should be doing it the Garmin is just the GPS right? Every pilot should be 100% able to fly and navigate without it.)
(1) They deliberately design new proprietary adapters, eschewing already popular and capable standards, in new devices - to sell you more shit
(2) They remove support for existing standards (e.g. headphone jacks) - to sell you more shit
(3) They file lawsuits against third-party repair providers who do a demonstrably better job than first-party repairs - to sell you more shit
(4) They add software checks which attempts to subvert the same third-party repair providers after their lawsuits fail - to sell you more shit
Apple consistently, at every step, serves their bottom line ahead of your interests. Quit letting tribalism blind you, Apple users - this behavior is unacceptable.
They have one proprietary connector across all of their products that they sell, and that’s Lightning. Lightning is seven years old, was launched at a time when the alternative would be the god-awful microUSB connector, and all rumours point towards it being phased out completely for USB-C in the next couple of years.
The hyperbole helps no-one.
Apple has been doing this for longer than I've been alive. I'm happy that they're phasing it out in favor of USB-C - this is a positive step - but their past definitely helps damns them when fanboys come to their defense over right to repair.
FireWire was very much standardised (IEEE 1394), and was co-developed by other companies. It wasn’t some obscure thing that only existed on Apple stuff. They also haven’t shipped a computer with FireWire in about six years I think?
> thunderbolt
Again, Thunderbolt isn’t even a primarily Apple-developed technology, it’s Intel. Plenty of computers ship with Thunderbolt 3 ports today, and a couple of years ago Intel dropped the royalty that used to be required.
> proprietary SSD connectors
Agreed that this one sucks.
> 30-pin connectors for the iPod, ADC, AAUI, Mini-VGA, Mini DVI
Nothing on that list has shipped for years, in some cases decades. The comment I replied to says they do this “in new devices”, but that is just not the case and hasn’t been for a good while now.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending their practices over repair. I strongly disagree with their actions to politically extinguish the types of law that would force them to make it easier for people to repair their stuff.
Firewire was mostly not used because people were content to endure USB, and USB had a larger availability on consumer hardware. Apple gained nothing by spending money to add the port to their computers so I find it hard to buy that they had a secret malevolent purpose in doing so. In this case they rolled the dice on a superior solution and it didn’t pay off.
> They remove support for existing standards (e.g. headphone
> jacks) - to sell you more shit
Moving away from Apple means significantly lower development costs, and more time on universal platforms.
I'm not sure why someone would buy an Apple product outside the Fashion statement, but they have set the industry back from a software POV.
I don't agree that they should be doing the battery authentication thing, replacing your battery is pretty easy and simple; but you have to look at this from Apple's standpoint:
Yes, Louis Rossmann runs a repair shop that is better than the Genius bar in every way and, should he join Apple, all of their repairability issues would disappear overnight. The issue is that many (most likely a majority) of local computer repair shops that get asked "can you fix this battery error on my iPhone" aren't on par with Louis Rossmann and will make mistakes such as improper installation, not re-sealing the phone for water resistance, using non-genuine batteries, etc. Apple could, by all means, make the process easier, cheaper, and more idiot-proof, but that would require engineering efforts. The best course of action, both for making money from repairs and not losing money to engineering and possible product changes ("don't sacrifice form for function", at least under Jony Ive), is to get the software to verify that Apple had complete control over the replacement battery from factory to phone.
As for third party repair, it isn't Apples fault if a third party repairs a phone incorrectly. What does this argument even mean? If your busy fixes your car wrong you don't sue the car manufacturer. If you go to a repair shop and they mess up you don't sue the manufacturer. So why would it be any different for phones or any electronic?
The "Rossmann" method of device repair might be useful for short term disaster recovery, consumer asset loss mitigation and data recovery, but how reliable are his repairs long term? We never know. How scalable is this method of repair across thousand of cities? Probably very poor.
Rossmann probably has no idea what percentage of his repairs fail within 12 months. Whereas Apple probably has a very good idea how (im)practical it would be to deploy this approach at global scale, and how reliable bodge repairs are compared to simply fitting a new board straight from the factory.
We could probably guesstimate repair failures by looking at industry averages. He could also guesstimate from returning customers. This is how you get an idea of repair failure rates in the first place.
And no, you can't repair at global scale. But why would you need to? There's a reason Toyota doesn't repair every single one of their cars. Or more apt to the conversation: there's a reason Toyota doesn't require you go to a Toyota dealership to get an oil change. It doesn't make sense to. The scale would be ridiculous. There's no reason that electronics needs to be more convoluted than repairing a car. There's no reason a simple fix like a battery swap needs to be more complicated than changing your oil.
Oil changes—Apple devices don't need equivalent routine hardware maintenance.
Warranty repairs/recalls—Whether Toyota or Apple, the manufacturer is obliged to perform (or pay a third party to perform) the rectification.
Smash repairs—Neither Apple nor Toyota is responsible for impact damage that wasn't caused by manufacturer negligence. In both cases you'd go to a third party repair shop to mitigate asset loss.
So the alternative is to listen to Apple's advice and buy a new device just because they think the device cannot be repaired?
It's not even their fault if authorised shops repairs it wrong. I got a failing key after a battery replacement, but it's after warranty, so they won't touch it. (how will you prove it's from the replacement?)
If you're talking about MacBooks, there's currently a pretty expansive keyboard replacement program going on for many models since 2015, which naturally includes ones which are now out of warranty.
So, they may have told you that before, but there's decent odds they'll have changed their tune now.
Details: https://support.apple.com/keyboard-service-program-for-mac-n...
It's 100% not their fault if someone else gets it wrong, it's true. But modern phones are complicated devices -- if you get your battery replaced poorly, and a month later your phone dies because the case was resealed incorrectly which compromised the water resistance and something got damaged as a result, is the consumer likely to think "oh, I bet that was a poor third party repair" or "ugh, iPhones suck, they're so unreliable"?
That said, I don't think this battery change is particularly tied to the personal repair issue. I think this is a shot at the resale / refurb market. Companies buying up old phones, "refreshing" them with crappy components, and selling them on to customers who don't realize that the phone is going to need a battery replacement in three months. In that case the customer didn't have the information available to tell that they'd been sold something shoddy, whereas now they can check the battery health and see this new warning.
Specifically: Apple isn’t requiring authorized repairs. It’s displaying a warning fairly deep in the Settings app if your phone has received unauthorized repairs. That’s the consumer benefit I spoke of — being able to check for that.
I’d be very opposed if Apple was actually implementing a “lock”. You should be free to get your device repaired wherever you want.
I’d also like it if Apple adjusted this warning a bit. It’s currently the generic “your battery may need service” message. A more specific message detailing the not-an-authorized-repair situation would be more apt. Still, for now it works — if you’re getting your phone repaired yourself then the shop can warn you about it so you won’t be misled, and if you’re buying a used phone then you can know it’s not-mint.
It may be that the "third party" program missed at the time the particular feature (AFAIK it is all revolving about reverse engineering the "original" and that later releases had it.
And another "trend" in the car world is that of only selling as spare "non-serviceable assemblies", and regularly some smart guy manages to find out that the assembly is actually serviceable and that replacing (say) a small o-ring or gasket and/or with a couple solderings an used assembly can be reconditioned and work again for years at a fraction of the cost.
A good example is the "navigating wheel" on many BMW's, dealers will tell you that it is a €300-400 job to replace it, whilst 99% of the time is half an hour top including disassembling it, soldering a couple broken tin joints and re-assembling it.
$60-100 for a battery replacement today, or... $20 (a month) for a shiny new phone.
> Anyone that watches his channel knows that Apple
> purposefully makes things hard to repair.
Not the most trustworthy person anyway.
> Apple could, by all means, make the process easier, cheaper, and more idiot-proof, but that would require engineering efforts.
This is a bit silly. Not only are they already spending lots of money on (purposefully) engineering in repair-hostile way, they also have very high markup on their hardware. Let's not feel bad for poor Apple in this case.
It's just like with the criticisms of working conditions at the Chinese/Foxconn iPhone factories. The same factories make Xboxes, Playstations and thousands of other devices that we all buy without such consideration.
But because Apple is an effective punching bag, they bear the brunt of the industry's collective sins.
But it's still pretty clear that Apple should get a lot of flak because they are frequently the first one to market with anti-repair features, they're pioneers in pushing design features that make repair harder, they sell products at a premium price but their first party support is often pretty bad and expensive and they have a lot of mind-share and they use that mind-share to push the "electronics are hard to repair" myth.
When it comes to bad repairability, Apple leads the way and the rest of the manufacturers follow after seeing what Apple can get away with. In general this is true for a lot of user-hostile design. On the flip-side, their position as leader does allow them to push some aspects of the industry forward, but they haven't been doing much of that lately, and when they do it's usually flawed in some way (their early push for USB-C comes to mind).
So I don't think its unfair for Apple to be the punching bag in this case. They put themselves in that position by grabbing so much mind-share and positioning themselves as leaders to be emulated by their competitors.
Isn't the drop in repairability of electronics being pushed more by the shrinking of components than by the assumption of corporate greed?
Why are competitors removing their headphone jacks?
Why are competitors copying Apple's "anti-features" as you'd describe them? Are you sure it's because they actually hate repairability? Are you sure their competitors covet the relative unrepairability of Apple devices?
There are far more variables at play here than we're ever likely to be able to canvas in short online comments.
There are two ways competitors are incentivized to copy Apple, the first one is because of Apple's mind-share and "fashionable" status, they might be convinced that by copying some of the features they will be able to ride on coattails of Apple's success to get some success of their own. Combined with the fact that purchasing decisions are not entirely rational and there's a lot of emotion involved, Apple and other large corporations are in a position to convince people to accept compromises that have larger effects (sacrifice repairability for slimness, sacrifice freedom for "security", sacrifice gas mileage for a bigger, more comfortable SUV, etc.). The second way is that Apple, by virtue of their mind-share and position as leader, can get away with changes that other companies would want to make but couldn't. If Apple hadn't removed the headphone jack from their iPhones, there's no way Samsung or Google would be able to get away with removing the headphone jack from their flagship phones, even if all three companies want to remove the headphone jack equally, but once Apple moves the overton window, the competitors can jump onboard with the change and implement it into their own product line. Apple has earned themselves enough of a reputation and enough of a fanatical userbase that they're able to get away with these changes because by-and-large their bad changes were balanced out by their good changes, the question is whether this reputation will last for the current Apple.
>Isn't the drop in repairability of electronics being pushed more by the shrinking of components than by the assumption of corporate greed?
Absolutely not. Shrinking components have made it possible to make more integrated ICs, but those were never user serviceable, but replacing a monolithic IC with a spare part, even with unfriendly packages like BGA, is not impossible to do for a decently equipped repair shop, and the cost of that equipment is going to likely be less than whatever car mechanics or small machine shops spend on their equipment.
For what it's worth, I don't think Apple or any other company are sitting in their board rooms wringing their hands and coming up with dastardly plans to fuck over the third-party repair shop. Third-party repair is simply not a priority for them, thus when the time comes to cut costs or to optimize the design for sleekness or profit, repairability goes out the window first. Contrast that with more professional equipment where servicing is an important consideration and you'll see design optimization producing different results.
Competitors secretly really want to implement user-hostile features but Apple must jump first so they can follow like lemmings?
None of what you wrote makes any sense to me.
And it's not like they're entirely the same cheap OEM plastic crap with a different logo silkscreened on the front. Apple's investments in mobile CPU design. Apple's laptop chassis engineering. These aren't products that are ever going to compete in the budget space.
Meanwhile if you think Samsung and Microsoft and Google and Xiaomi don't praise their own designs with exactly the same level of fervour, you haven't been paying attention. The only difference is that people tend to take Apple seriously when they speak about it.
Also, if I'm in the PC environment, I can get a different repairable PC. If I'm in Mac environment... ?
Samsung makes the most number of handsets. That's why they should be called out first.
Apple likes their products to look pretty. That's why they should be called out first.
Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. That's why they should be called out first.
Xiaomi are evil Chinese copycats. That's why they should be called out first.
We could do this all day.
"There are other companies just as bad" is whataboutism, not informative.
As someone who specifically polices whataboutism in a fairly large online community, I plead for you to not dilute the importance of that word. Asserting a double standard is not whataboutism.
It would have been whataboutism if I was saying "Stop criticising Apple because Company X is just as bad!" Rather I'm suggesting we be more aware of inconsistencies in dishing out criticism where it is warranted.
Apple didn't invent unrepairable electronics and they're not even the best at it—they just so happened to combine their weak efforts with aggressive miniturisation, giving the appearance of being more repair-hostile than they really are. Meanwhile Nintendo's use of the tri-wing predates Apple's pentalobe by decades. And the latest iPhones get a repairability score of 6 out of 10 by iFixit.
To be clear Apple is repair-hostile, but it's because of their non-existent parts supply chain—not because of "purposefully repair-hostile" engineering.
Fact is, if Apple can fix their devices, then so can a third party without much problem, it's not that hard and most of it doesn't really take any skilled labor. Apple would be better served by releasing repair manuals and selling parts (like car manufacturers have been doing) if they're afraid of having their reputation ruined by third party repairmen. That, of course, is not their concern, a third party repairman ruining someone iPhone in no way affects Apple's reputation, and it's better for Apple's business since it helps their propaganda efforts against third-party repair. Apple and other electronics manufacturers of course are not going to spend any effort supporting third-party repair until they're forced to by legislation.
For what it's worth, I think the right to repair side needs to do a better job of delivering their message. While focusing dispelling the notion that electronics repair is hard is pretty important to undo decades of propaganda on the matter, currently the environment is the hot button issue, and throwing away repairable objects isn't all that great, particularly if it's an easy fix like changing a battery. Repair needs to be included explicitly into the 3 R's somehow, either by making it into 4 R's (Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle, for example) or by including Repair into the umbrella of Reduce.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-apples-war-on...
Apple sells official batteries to 3rd party retailers, with holograms, and maybe even an online lookup which tracks sales, etc. (you don’t need the latter but it’s an idea that would not be half as expensive as all the other “fraud prevention” measures Apple puts in which conveniently makes it far more difficult to repair Apple devices).
Seriously, the vast majority of fraud concerns would disappear if Apple sold official replacement parts.
With cars there is a key difference: car service people usually are required to complete a multi-year long education with proper certifications (at least in Germany), and they get proper service manuals, genuine tools, spare parts and utilities from the manufacturers (as a result of the right to repair laws mentioned in the article), and third party replacement parts have to be certified as well (at least in Europe).
With phone repair shops, you have no guarantee that the person doing the repair is actually skilled, or that the repair parts are genuine/certified in any way. The right-to-repair laws have to be extended to force manufacturers to provide genuine spare parts, the sooner the better. Lithium battery fires are a real and scary threat.
The main body of car repair customers have a choice ranging from non-dealership shops to cousin Vinnie with the range of quality and cost that goes with it. It's up to the customer.
Batteries degrade and need replacement at some point. What Apple is trying to do here is fusing the tyres to the rims and claiming it's necessary and specialist work.
> Lithium battery fires are a real and scary threat.
As are cars crashes, but somehow having third party repair options hasn't had much of an impact on that.
> As are cars crashes, but somehow having third party repair options hasn't had much of an impact on that.
Yes, because technicians are certified and trained, and because safety relevant parts are (no matter if first party or after market!) certified and tested. The relevant list in Germany is at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvzo_2012/__22a.html.
Of course, sometimes there are problems with car parts (e.g. the airbag mass recall), but counterfeit/uncertified parts generally don't end up in cars - vs. in the mobile/electronic industry where this is more routine than absolute exception.
From what I understand, phone batteries are far more energy dense (lithium ion) than car batteries (lead acid still?), and you carry them in your pocket. Maybe EV car batteries packs are more comparable?
Remember when samsung phones were catching fire all over just a couple years ago? Wasn't that due to some weird assembly/manufacturing issue where the batteries were being "pinched" due to tolerances?
And I'd bet more people have been burned (or for that matter been killed) in car accidents than phone accidents.
The the problem is folks inexperienced with repairing devices like yourself have been convinced by apple that "many (most likely the majority) ... will make mistakes".
That's like saying every 3rd party auto repair shop should be shut down in favor of dealer mechanic shops. When in reality, the corporate greed policy based on making money - not repair electronics or cars - are often the driving decision makers in repair work. That is to say, they actually do worse work at authorized shops. A lack of competition tends to do that.
This is my point at the end, a fair amount of repair shops do care about the phone, the customer, and doing things right, but there are probably a good amount that don't care and will cut as many corners as possible to increase profit.
Mine lasted just 4 months and I was advised to invest in a silicone cover for it. Which is absurd for a $1500 laptop. And they made it sound like it was just a minor issue - "oh everything works great except the keyboard". As if a laptop without a keyboard isn't practically useless.
My wife's Macbook Air developed an issue last week after installing the latest OS update. The computer would just freeze randomly making it impossible to use. Apple Support said that it was a known issue with the update. A known issue that was still released?!
I moved to Apple because I was frustrated with Windows. But even the $400 Windows I've owned in the past gave me at least 2 years with their keyboards. And Windows has been painfully slow and error prone, but no update has ever crippled my laptop as the last macOS update did my wife's Macbook Air.
If you're going to charge me a massive premium for a product, at least make sure that it works.
Sorry for ranting here, but these two issues happened within a week of each other and I've just been angry and disappointed
You obviously haven't heard of botched Windows updates.
But that's besides the point: Apple's hardware and software are closed. Apple knows exactly what hardware the software had to deal with.
Plus, Apple charges a massive premium over Windows (especially in my local market).
Louis Rossmann is the best, but I’ve never really encountered a reason to care about Right to Repair...
However, I should say that the right to repair a device like a tractor is something I very much support. But that's a $100k+ piece of equipment that someone's livelihood depends on and should last in excess of 10yrs.
Apple devices and phone toys... please...
The issue with apple devices is that they're intended to be discarded and replaced, not that they're "unable to be repaired". Have you seen how poorly most people treat their phones and computers? There's a reason Apple doesn't engineer products to last that long - because a majority of their customers will manage to break them anyway and inevitably will buy a new one because they want to be "cool" like all their other friends (an societal and consumerist trend I honestly take more of an issue with).
I understand your point, but I hope this has helped you understand my point of view a bit better :)
The Right to Repair is MUCH more than your right to fix your broken electronic as a hobbyist. It is largely about large companies participating in anti-competitiveness. The frequent example given is with John Deer tractors. Lots of John Deer equipment has lock downs and require authorization to do anything but the most basic repairs. This is a big change for your average farmer who is frequently repairing their own equipment (it is essentially a requirement to be a mechanic to be a farmer). They frankly don't even have access to authorized repair shops within hundreds of miles. This is why Apple sends lawyers out to fight court cases in small towns in Nebraska and Arkansas. But this kind of behavior is not limited to Apple and John Deer, it is highly prolific and affects things that are in the background.
You should care about the right to repair not because you want to fix your own stuff. You should care because it is about large companies abusing their power and acting in anti-competitive ways. This is about anti-trust.