Whether a phone or watch generally is one of those sorts of products though is certainly something to debate.
I feel like you've never had your car repaired before...
This is exactly something we're fine with protecting and encouraging. The manufacturer of the defective part is at fault, and depending on circumstances the repair person, not the company who originally built the device. Go ahead and try to get Chevy to sell you a brake master cylinder for a 1970 C10, your only options are after market parts manufacturers and that's fine, we've dealt with this for literally as long as there has been n > 1 blacksmiths in a town.
Someone buying a refurbished powerbank, for example, may end up lighting something on fire because it was repaired incorrectly.
Yes it'd maybe be on the manufacturer of a replacement regulator if an insulin pump was 3rd-party repaired and failed, but would it maybe be safer to say that the device should be modified or repaired only within its certified supply chain?
There's CE and UL listings for communications and electrical devices to in part protect consumers against poor manufacturing leading to irradiated or electrocuted people.
Could we agree that there's a difference between a bushing and a microcontroller?
Original batteries aren't some magical spec devices that other batteries can't substitute. Most of them are made by the same few manufacturers and it is trivial to find a replacement with similar specs.
Silently? Unless they're passing off a refurbished iPhone as a new one, replacing parts as necessary is exactly what refurbishment means!
As a buyer I might be interested to know if they used only genuine Apple parts, but I'm happy that the market can take care of that and the only legal intervention should be if there was a deliberate misrepresentation. It's perfectly fine for a repairer to use third party parts without having to specifically call it out. This has been done in every other market since the beginning of time, so this would not be misleading anyone.
Refurbished products should always tell you who refurbished them, and you can draw conclusions about the supplies from there. Ideally, they'd also tell you what was replaced, but it can be difficult to track that with the item.
However, I do know - in general - component manufacturers are notorious for cutting corners to save a few cents, doing additional factory runs after hours, altering chemistry, faking specs, etc. It's a shady business climate that needs constant QC.
Also a fair amount of what you pay for is a known chain of custody from component manufacturer to your device. From what I can tell for many components there isn't a clear feedback loop to end customers, as parts travel through several intermediaries, which means its less likely bad quality will lead to repercussions to the component manufacturer. It goes all the way to the repair place, who's typically doing a one-off order for a customer rather than having an ongoing customer relationship, and who may never see a failure 6 months down the line.
As far as batteries, and this may be a hypothetical as I do not know about who's manufacturing what and at what quality, but there's also legitimate safety concerns which is why a higher than typical level of scrutiny is required.
These are all conditions that could lead to potentially higher failure rates. How much higher is debatable, it may be only a percent or two, and for many folks a small additional risk may be worth saving some cash for.
Personally? For older devices I wouldn't care. A newer device, I would.
For competition however, I maintain that the consumer should have the ability to choose to do business with a repairer with no supply relationship with the manufacturer who claims to be able to do better. As long as the consumer isn't being misled, the consumer should be entitled to choose to take that risk.
Back in the day, high-end electronics (particularly audio equipment) had full-blown schematics, for repair. While reflow re-soldering BGA devices is way out of reach for the average non-technical home users today, with a steady hand, and the right tools, replacing an iPhone battery is only slightly more complicated than changing a tire.
Remember engineers love anything that loosens constraints. Making things easy to repair is a pretty challenging constraint to juggle with all the other constraints like manufacturability, chassis design, thermals, etc.
They say they don't make profit on repairs. I've no particular reason to not believe this. They could design products to be easier to repair and thus cost less to repair, but the fundamental rationale always points back to controlling brand risk, because a drop in customer satisfaction by even 1% is worth billions.
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/11/20/are-apple-repairs-profita...