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Comment by paulgerhardt | Hacker News Reader

Living in Shenzhen, it’s shocking how easy it is to go out and repair stuff. Living in Palo Alto, it’s frustrating how hard it is.

I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, introducing repairability laws won’t solve the problem.

I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station rather than swapping out some dims if it means my laptop is half as thick and twice as rugged. I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.

My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).

My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet (WeChat/Taobao) or find someone to do the repair for me for $40 on the Chinese street markets (Huaqiangnan in Shenzhen). When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+

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The reason it can be done in China is because those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, software, etc) to be able to do so.

This situation is both good and bad. Stolen parts are good, in the sense that this grey market at least allows consumers to repair devices cost-effectively. It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.

Repairability laws would actually help here. You would get the same repair shops in the US if Apple was forced to provide schematics & parts at a reasonable cost, with no risk of counterfeits or bad parts.

This is a big deal, and the reason there's so much opposition to right to repair, even beyond Apple. If R2R was a stupid, niche, geeky idea that doesn't bother anyone it would quietly get passed and that would be it, but the reason people are bothered by it and oppose it is because device manufacturers (whether computers or cars or farm equipment) actually make a lot of money off the status-quo.

It's a signal when humans will do something against the law - and generally it seems to be a fair response to excessive control or at minimum a counterweight to the actions of a selfish for-profit or industry. Piracy comes to mind as well: if content becomes too expensive, requiring monthly subscriptions to too many places or then unreasonable cost to buy a specific film or series - then more people will pirate, and more reasonable people willing to pay will start to pirate - the more friction and unfairness in the balance of everything, the more piracy. The ability to pirate or repair by third-party both I believe are necessary to keep organizations in check.

Edit to add: makes me think of Bitcoin too, people certainly have reason to be unhappy with local-global financial systems which have heavy-matured regulatory capture and overall corruption whether it's printing excessive money or being deceptive to foreign players so it's an uneven playing field.

You're right. When there's massive non-compliance with the law, there's something wrong with the law.

For example, Prohibition, the war on drugs, gambling prohibitions, etc.

I can think of societies with massive tax evasion, from all economic classes of people and where bribes are normal. Is there something wrong with laws requiring tax payments and banning bribes?

Yes, because the law (and the systems supporting the law) can easily be evaded - there is something massively wrong.

I'd be concerned about laws so onerous that a police state is needed to get compliance.

Sure, when people aren't getting reasonable ROI from that tax money - e.g. it's invested poorly and not invested in a way that's improving enough of their own community.

Imagine if paying tax was voluntary - how relatively quickly communities of people who valued and understood the value of that pooling and who voted in competent politicians to manage their community would thrive/grow vs. the free-for-all and deterioration of infrastructure in areas where people opted not to pay; mind you private businesses may provide better services and people using them is them voting for their existence (voluntary payment) - though arguably initially before enough wealth was generated it would have been impossible to borrow the $100s of billions needed to start massive infrastructure projects; from my understanding there's a bit of this, along with more or less corrupting, in Democratic vs. Republican leaning states.

Re: bribes - I'd argue that amount of people wouldn't fit within the definition of following the spirit of the mechanism - you need a foundation with integrity to start for it to be an honest signal; or it's the reverse, the anti, bribery a sign of a lack of integrity and accountability in the system.

Take a look at economist C. Northcote Parkinson's books. He points out that when tax rates are 10%, people happily pay their taxes as their duty to live in society. People who cheat get ostracized. Various things start going awry at 20% and 30%, and at 40% tax evasion becomes the national pastime. People regard as fools people who don't evade taxes.

Think about the people who are running away from California due to their confiscatory taxes, and then California goes after them claiming they still are residents. Think about the people in government who openly want to dismantle the wealthy - like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

What do you think will happen?

That’s a separate issue. I was talking about countries that lack the tribal trust between its members such that it is presumed it’s every man or sub tribe for themselves.

This lack of trust is an unquantifiable cost in the progress of that society, one that the US was blessed to not be burdened with, and to which I credit the strength of the nation.

But that’s beside the point, which is I don’t think a simple statement like “if everyone breaks the law then the law is bad” is valid.

By volume, the chips on the open market aren’t stolen and most aren’t counterfeit. Most are legitimate and a fair amount of the suspiciously cheap parts are binned or older revisions. The scale of the chip marketplace is more akin to sum of the agricultural output of California’s Central Valley - not your weekend farmers market. No one is messing around with stolen parts in these kind of quantities.

The reason companies are kicking and screaming about right to repair is because reverse logistics (how you deal broken/returned goods) is already a huge cost center and the legislation as proposed would make it more so. No one is making massive profit off repair parts - they’re offsetting massive losses.

I don't mean chips per-se, I mean complete assemblies like iPhone displays. As far as I know, there's no "legitimate" source for those, it's all either outright stolen, counterfeit or bad/rejected parts.

> because reverse logistics (how you deal broken/returned goods) is already a huge cost center and the legislation as proposed would make it more so

How would right to repair affect that? And if it wasn't profit-motivated how do you explain the extreme efforts some manufacturers do to prevent people from repairing their own devices (like iPhone cameras being associated with the logic board and not being usable in any other phone of the same model)?

They could also be recycled from units with other damaged parts, which is also "legitimate", whatever that means (although I'm sure Apple et.al. don't want that.)

In much the same way that salvage yards are a source of car parts, yet companies like Tesla are trying to stop that.

Not sure if it's the case for Apple, but for other phones, there's definitely plenty of parts recycling happening.

I replaced my broken Galaxy S4 screen when in Shenzhen in 2015, and bought a replacement screen for Galaxy S3 for my wife (to have a spare I could use to perform the repair myself back home). My repair was dirt-cheap - I paid something like $10 to get a whole new screen assembly and a new back camera (I broke mine), the whole repair done in front of me in under 5 minutes. The extra screen for my wife was much more expensive - ~$50, IIRC. The difference is, with my phone, they kept the broken parts. They presumably replaced the broken glass in it at their own pace, and put it back on the market.

I also saw plenty of work being done on phone components, as well as people unloading and sorting through big bags of broken phones. There's lots of e-waste recycling going on there.

> I mean complete assemblies like iPhone displays. As far as I know, there's no "legitimate" source for those

So how are legitimate high street shops in the west doing it? You can’t convince me every town in the UK has a criminal operation working in the open doing screen replacements?

apple authorized stores and retailers can buy modules or send them to apple

They clearly aren't sending them to Apple, because they do it while you wait.

And they don't claim to be authorised in any way. I would have thought if they were they'd make a big deal of that.

https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=iphone+repla...

the only way you'd get the plod even vaguely interested would be if these arrived in boxes that claimed they were genuine parts, and even then...

My buddy buys broken Iphones/screens and sells them to China where all the underlying parts are stripped and used for repairing Iphones. This is legitamite not shady at all.

Ships hundreds at a time. A lof of the parts used for repair in China are coming from US/EU broken phones.

> it's all either outright stolen, counterfeit or bad/rejected parts

The other very common possibility is that it's what's called a "ghost shift" where the factory runs a whole production run on a possibly overnight work shift, creates a batch of product for sale to third parties, and then resumes their legit-for-transfer-to-apple production run the next morning. Happens with all sorts of electronics manufacturing in mainland china.

This does not necessarily mean that the ghost shift products go through absolutely the same level of QC that the main production run gets, but I wouldn't call them counterfeit.

"ghost shift" production with the trademarks is counterfeit, but isn't without the trademarks. Regardless of marking it's still likely unauthorized use of intellectual property.

I mentally make a distinction between "counterfeit" products which are actually authentic and good quality, unlikely to hurt the consumer, but arguably cause some harm to apple's IP, and "counterfeit" products which are actually poor quality clones made by inferior production lines. It's unfortunate that the same term is used for both.

Presumably a high volume and skilled third party repair shop and its purchasing people will be a crucial role in buying and distinguishing between the two types of hardware.

The term counterfeit is here being used by some people to mean 'genuine parts sold off-license', which is much more like a bootleg copy[1]. That is, it's the same item sold off-license.

To some extent words mean what people who use them intend to mean, but in my opinion we shouldn't be calling parts from the same production line counterfeit, because the word implies forgery.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleg_recording

2. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/counterfeit

Edit: changed a word for clarity.

> To some extent words mean what people who use them intend to mean, but in my opinion we shouldn't be calling parts from the same production line counterfeit, because the word implies forgery.[2]

If they had a particular QC standard marking, but had not been manufactured in accordance with that level of QC, that would be forgery, right?

If they bear the trademark of a company that demands certain QC standards, but were produced without those checks, it seems like the same thing in a way.

I think you're intentional straining to disagree with me.

You don't have to do that.

You're probably partly right some of the time, and my perspective probably has some value perhaps maybe.

I'm straining to rationalise my own position tbh. I'm not going out of my way to disagree with you, this kind of practice feels viscerally counterfeit-like to me and I'm trying to work through why I think that.

That's a way more honest response than I expected.

I respect that a lot.

In the absence of a legal after market or licensed / genuine / third party parts ecosystem, this is, or should be, the expected natural response: off license / bootleg / counterfeit parts ecosystem.

In my opinion, then, the fault lies with Apple, and / or the absence of a regulated market for those parts and the necessary documentation.

People will find a way to source what they want. How you approach or deal with those problems is probably a political / ideological thing.

That seems like an orthogonal question. Maybe Apple has set up their system in a way that (intentionally or not) encourages or necessitates counterfeiting. But those parts may still be counterfeit in the ways that matter to the end user (e.g. not necessarily as safe as they appear to be certified to be).

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it should be a legal requirement that all OEMs allow 3rd parties to manufacture these parts to provide as replacements.

Saving the planet is far more important than protecting the profits for replacement parts. Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to sell complete phones but selling screens is good.

Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to sell complete phones but selling screens is good.

For an interesting contrast, look at the automotive industry, where (with the exception of perhaps some newer companies/models, like Tesla et.al.) there is a thriving aftermarket which is so complete that for certain models of cars, you can likely build an entire powertrain and even rolling chassis using zero original parts. Entire engine blocks, internals, transmissions, axles, suspension, brakes, even frame rails, can be bought from the aftermarket. Of course a lot of these parts are enhanced and marked with different manufacturer's names, but the OEMs themselves have in general not minded and sometimes even encouraged the aftermarket.

Right to repair would actually ease this burden: Apple manufactures very few components on its devices. Apple prevents its suppliers from selling to third parties (which wouldn’t necessarily be a repair shop but someone like digikey or mouser) of some pretty basic components that do not contain any real secret sauce (we are talking about things like voltage regulators here)

The auto industry has widespread part available for decades with no ill effects.

> The auto industry has widespread part available for decades with no ill effects.

That depends on who you ask. Car dealerships probably think they have suffered great ill effects from the existence of independent repair shops.

I suspect trying to garner sympathy from people for dealerships is going to be a hard sell

I agree. And I'm comparing car dealerships to Apple :)

It's really unforunate, since repair is a good value in terms of reducing externalities like e-waste and natural resource use, not to mention a potential way to develop electronics skills in our workforce with low-barrier-to-entry jobs.

> It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft

Nobody stole parts from Apple's warehouses.

So "essentially", it is not theft. Unless "essentially" means "by some outlandish, ridiculous, anti-popular and pro-corporate international legal fiction".

I presume he is talking about phones stolen from consumers that have been parted out.

Nope I mean theft from the official factory. Given the working conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if the workers were smuggling out parts or were doing a whole "night run" for the secondary market (at higher prices than what Apple pays) in addition to the normal run.

Ghost shifts are getting rarer and rarer in the days of 24/7, nonstop manufacturing lines.

>the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.

The real thing is already broken if you're at the point of buying these parts. The entire object is already e-waste until you add new parts.

E-waste turned into functional object is a good thing even if it's achieved with used/rejected/counterfeit parts.

Well the worry is that you spend more money on a part that turns out to be unusable, so you end up with no device and less money.

That seems like a basic consumer protection issue that's mostly already solved in the developed world. When I get my car serviced, it's understood that I will hold the mechanic responsible for everything so they don't even bother trying to put sketchy parts in my car.

yet Prius catalytic convertors are apparently a big market, so much so that it is a regularly stolen item. so someone is buying these parts to install when a car is serviced.

[1] https://www.inquirer.com/business/toyota-prius-catalytic-con...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/thieves-target-toyota-p...!

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/feb/01/catalytic-conv...

> The thieves make about £300 to £500 from every converter stolen, fenced through scrap metal dealers, with car manufacturers warning that a gap in the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013 enables dodgy dealers to buy them without checks required on where they came from.

They're not making money by installing the converters into Priuses.

They are making money by selling the platinum inside.

Catalytic converters are filled with valuable metals (platinum, palladium, among others). They're torn apart and the expensive metals are resold. The cat isn't being put on other peoples cars.

The only bad part is some of these parts are stolen from users. Because the main board on an iPhone is account locked, crime groups will strip the phone down for parts and sell these on eBay to people looking to fix their phones.

This is why I think Apple should account lock all parts on the iPhone and tell the user this but if the original owner unlinks the phone, the parts will work again.

Crime groups stealing iPhones? What planet do you live on?

Apple is the number one creator of e-waste in 2021.

Why else would we still have phone theft and how do these preowned parts end up on eBay? Less skilled people steal them and then list them on eBay as “account locked iPhone” Then more skilled people strip them for parts and will sell just the camera, battery, etc.

Some counterfeit parts can be worse than waste, they can be dangerous. Like batteries that catch fire and glass that shatters into sharp fragments.

It can also happens to legitimate products (ex: Galaxy Note 7), but these can be traced and recalls can be issued.

>Some counterfeit parts can be worse than waste, they can be dangerous. Like batteries that catch fire and glass that shatters into sharp fragments.

The real issue is not the part, it's the company doing the service. Legitimate service centers will source parts that are high quality - just like any other industry. People still repair cars (including brakes) on their own - to give you one example.

> those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, software, etc) to be able to do so. This situation is both good and bad. Stolen parts are good

I really doubt that many of those genuine repair parts for iphones and macbooks are stolen, in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying. Apple doesn't manufacture most of these things, particularly the ICs and screens, and relies on a whole ecosystem of vendors and subcontractors.

If a third party is paying a reasonably agreed upon market price to a factory to buy extra factory run of stock (example: DRAM ICs, or touchscreens), that's not theft.

You would think that those factories would engage Chinese law enforcement if a significant percentage of their output was literally being stolen without payment, since that sort of thing affects their bottom line and is clearly a crime in their mainland china location.

For people interested in this general topic (parent poster here mentioned living in Shenzhen), go read through all the historical content of Bunnie Huang's blog...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huang_(hacker)

It's not theft. But still it's most likely a contract violation of the contract between the production company and Apple. Apple would never in a million years allow any of their suppliers to sell Apple specific parts to the aftermarket.

> It's not theft. But still it's most likely a contract violation of the contract between the production company and Apple. Apple would never in a million years allow any of their suppliers to sell Apple specific parts to the aftermarket.

Then it only concerns those parties and it's literally not our business to worry about.

It is our business to worry about. Such gross violation would be stamped out hard in the US and EU. This is one of the reasons it's hard/expensive to finds parts if you are not in Shenzhen. There should be laws that disallow exclusivity of parts.

I think you missed my point. I was saying the violation isn't our business and by its nature it is in no way comparable to theft or other crimes. i.e. private parties have a dispute that they need to settle privately. It's not on us to police whether they stick to their contracts.

Whether that type of contract is allowed by the government/law in the first place is an entirely different discussion about commerce and regulation; I wasn't opining on that.

What kind of theft, and from whom?

My understanding is that a person with decision making power at these factories are negotiating with third party repair shops, agreeing on a price, and selling authentic Apple badged components or Apple schematics to them. In that sense, it is not theft.

My understanding is that this is in absolute violation of Apple's license agreements and contracts with these factories. Those factories do not have a de jure legal right to sell those parts. In that sense, it is intellectual property theft.

If and when these factories put those components on a palette, put that palette into a container, and put that container onto a ship, and that ship sails to a Western country with intellectual property protections, Apple has reported the shipments to customs authorities and gotten them seized as counterfeit parts, despite the fact that they were manufactured as part of the same batches as parts that became devices that were sold in Apple stores. Apple's problem is that China doesn't give a shit about any objections Apple might have to two CCP sanctioned Chinese businesses doing (illegal) business with each other.

It shouldn't be intellectual property theft- Apple ought to be obliged to make these components and schematics available at fair prices to shops like Rossman's. But that's the way it ought to be- in the mean time, it is theft, and those parts are stolen. Hopefully we'll be able to get the laws fixed someday.

Theft is the wrong word here.

No IP violation is a theft unless it involves "a person intentionally takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use".

It's a violation of copyright, trademark, trade secrets, counterfeiting or patent, but it is not theft. The usage of the verbiage "theft" started in the late eighties to early nineties as part of a campaign to make intellectual property violation sound more severe than it actually is.

The key difference is that, by depriving another person of their property, you are preventing them from using it, where in intellectual property violations, you are merely gaining use without denying use to the creator.

>No IP violation is a theft unless it involves "a person intentionally takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use".

How does selling physical parts that were manufactured for someone else in violation of a contract not fall under this definition? Is the seller paying for the manufacture of these parts, or is Apple?

> Is the seller paying for the manufacture of these parts, or is Apple.

I don't know the actual situation, but let's say for the sake of argument;

- Apple pays $1M to make 1M chips, with the contract that forbids making these parts to sell third parties.

- A Shenzhen shop pays $15K to make 10K of the same parts, the manufacturer breaches the contract, violates Apple's IP and makes extra parts for the shop. None of this involves "theft" in any meaningful sense of the world.

So all of the senses of theft that do apply, which have been in use for millenia, are not "meaningful" because they do not meet the cause of your morality.

Of course when Prometheus "stole" the fire from Mount Olympus he did not deny Zeus anything, but it was called theft. The fire that he brought to athens was the intellectual property of the Gods.

You may also find people murdered by words, yet no charges for murder.

I think you are both right: I think the act of stealing is the act of taking something (an idea, an object) without permission from someone else. It doesn't matter how much this "something" costs to make in time, money or effort. In that sense, taking designs without permission and creating electronic parts is theft. However, having said this, I don't believe theft is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a good thing (to a certain point) that the government steals your money (takes it without permission) as taxation. I also believe that where there is a limited supply - either by design or the nature of the thing - the owner of this supply should be coerced into doing what is not only good for themselves but also for the whole of society. I might be voicing an unpopular opinion here, but in my eyes you don't have the right as a home owner to leave your house empty when there is a shortage of housing. Squatting should be legal in such circumstances. This forces homeowners to keep rent affordable. I also believe that apple keeps these parts off the market to make more profits in a way that is not beneficial for the environment and society as a whole. This makes it a moral imperative to steal these parts and make them available for the general public.

And if Apple sends private data from my iPhone to government or 3rd party, it’s not technically not theft.

If the design of the chips is created abd owned by apple, using that same design to manufacture chips for someone else, is theft of design. Apple spend a lot of time and money creating that design.

The amount of time it takes to make anything is not relevant to the question of whether something can be stolen or not. Parent poster is being pedantic, probably for the sake of making an old point about IP piracy, but let's keep things grounded.

This sort of scenario is a clear breach of contract, regardless of laws surrounding IP. Apple seems substantially unable or unwilling to retaliate for breach of contract against their own Chinese manufacturing partners. This is a substantial loss of control that sooner or later will come home to roost - because if this can happen to the richest company on the planet, it likely happens to anybody who manufactures anything in China. Simply put, China is the Far West when it comes to civil disputes; "we" ignore this state of things because the margins are still good enough to go there anyway. It's like running a supermarket in a bad part of town: as long as the profit it makes is higher than losses from vandalism and theft, it will stay open. At some point this might stop being the case.

IP theft easily satisfies the quoted definition in your first paragraph. That’s why you had to add an additional “key difference” in your last paragraph.

That “key difference” is what got invented in the early 2000s as part of a concerted effort to justify IP theft. It was never part of the definition of theft before, and indeed it makes no sense; if you steal a Snickers bar from a store, you have not deprived them of the use of the Snickers bar because they never intended to use it themselves. What you have really deprived them of is the opportunity to sell it. So does stealing IP.

Stealing a part made in a shop isn't stealing IP. Stealing schematics and methods would be, but not finished products.

And it's not stealing in the strictest sense. it was sold.

The manufacturer of the chip made an extra 10k of product to sell on the side, which is a breach of contract.

But no theft occurred because the manufacturer is supposed to have the schematics.

Legally a rather annoying, wordy space to live in for sure.

How is this not stealing ... Its like i gave you money/raw materials to do something for me. you skim off it and sell it off it is stealing. May not be a legally valid term, but it is stealing.

> Stealing a part made in a shop isn't stealing IP. Stealing schematics and methods would be, but not finished products.

Actually, all of that is stealing physical, not intellectual property. Intellectual property is not the right to physical possession, so even to the extent that it can be said to be “stolen” (violation of IP rights are more like trespass than theft) taking physical objects in which it is in one form or another embodied into one’s possession isn’t it.

> My understanding is that this is in absolute violation of Apple's license agreements and contracts with these factories. Those factories do not have a de-jure legal right to sell those parts. In that sense, it is intellectual property theft.

I am not sure breach of contract/license agreements is IP theft. I bet IP theft has a very specific legal definition that draws a fine line between theft and breach of contract. Apple can of course try to bring these factories to court to seek damages.

>in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying.

Pay is involved, and its Apple authorized recyclers who are selling parts on the black market breaching Apple contract stating everything needs to go into Shredder and get pulverized into dust.

Here is just one example "Apple sues GEEP for not shredding reusable iPhones" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

So not just making repairs as hard as possible but paying people to shred perfectly serviceable hardware to prevent that! Wow, that's beyond evil, for so many reasons!

>I really doubt that many of those genuine repair parts for iphones and macbooks are stolen, in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying. Apple doesn't manufacture most of these things, particularly the ICs and screens, and relies on a whole ecosystem of vendors and subcontractors.

Theft is much broader than that. When apple receives devices that it cannot repair anymore it will just recycle the materials and throw the rest away, there are employees that will take out functioning chips or broken circuit boards and throw them in a publicly accessible garbage container only to come back at night to take the parts out of the trash to resell them.

> If a third party is paying a reasonably agreed upon market price to a factory to buy extra factory run of stock (example: DRAM ICs, or touchscreens), that's not theft.

In the case this is a misunderstanding of the US perspective, and not a deliberate misinterpretation, the context taken here by Apple is based on US intellectual property law.

In that context, this would be a criminal offense and would very likely be pursued in court by Apple, leading to punitive damages, loss of contract, or both (e.g., the GEEP lawsuit). Third-shift manufacturing [0] is seen as a serious issue by many large corporations who have their production based in China for this reason.

If the schematics or other intellectual property were transferred to a third party (e.g. another factory) for production, then this would be IP theft, if the use of the word `theft` specifically is the crux of your objection.

I'm not saying the current situation is "right" or "correct", just clarifying the terminology so everyone is on the same page semantically.

[0]: https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1825...

They're mostly extracted from broken screen phones that are otherwise perfectly working.

They're not stolen. But carry on pushing apples narrative that they own everything even after its sold.

This smells like anti-Chinese FUD IYAM.

There are plenty of differing qualities of parts, but they're not all official while some are the same.

If R2R were a thing in the US and parts were commonly-available, there wouldn't be a need for white-, gray-, and black- marketplaces. Sure, there could be lower-quality ones when someone wants to do it cheaper, like there are right now. The problem is the giant corporation locking-up the schematics, the tools, the guides, and the parts to be able to repair their shit at a sane cost and reasonable effort.

There is of course a market of Apple devices stolen for parts, but majority of spare parts are coming from used donor devices, obtained at discount, I believe big shops may also buy new ones solely for parts

> It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.

People are not stealing macbooks and sending them to chop shops... they steal them and try to flog them so unsuspecting consumers. What grey market parts really mean is dead macbooks and phones that Apple would prefer to see shredded rather than used for spares.

RE counterfeits: I don't know how to seriously answer this, beyond saying: stop being so fucking precious about Apple electronics, no other computer manufacturer has this problem but Apple has to be fully vertically integrated - and the argument for quality has been thrown out of the window, deeo down everyone knows why Apple want this level of control over device life cycle, it's the same as their App store.

Everything get's recycled, all old phones get stripped to the smallest components possible and resold to repair shops.

>The reason it can be done in China is because those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, software, etc) to be able to do so.

Or they use parts from doner phones/devices.

>It's also bad, because besides it essentially being theft, the grey market opens the door to bad actors who pass off used/defective/rejected/counterfeit parts as the real thing.

If they actually stole the parts they'd be in jail in no time.

What they do is merely copyright infringe - if that.

Right to Repair isn’t demanding manufacturers make all memory socketed: but if a RAM chip goes bad they are asking that a new one can be purchased legally and soldered in place. Right now, there are many 40-cent components in laptops a repair shop cannot purchase from component manufacturers because Apple, or Asus or whenever told them not to sell it to 3rd parties. Or proprietary firmware flashing tools, or what have you. None of this impacts the physical form factor of a machine.

And some parts are can't even be swapped from one genuine device to another - home buttons used to be like that. But in newer iPhones that applies for other components too. IIRC some of them can be reprogrammed somehow but it is additional difficulty not nornally seen in other brands.

> I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station rather than swapping out some dims if it means my laptop is half as thick and twice as rugged

The right to repair laws Louis Rossmann advocates for do not require manufacturers to change their designs to make repairs easier. Apple would still be allowed to solder memory on their devices without any repercussions.

> I’m also just as happy dropping my phone off at a corner shop to replace the glass (while preserving the same electronics) using an industrial laminating machine.

Louis Rossmann owns and operates the kind of "corner shop" you're referring to. He certainly isn't demanding everyone repairs their own devices. He's just advocating for the ability for owners and third parties to repair devices without interference from manufacturers.

> When I go to a corner store in the US the “solution” to swap the whole sub-assembly (glass+electronics) not just glass in case of a screen repair for $100+

That's because US shops cannot legally acquire parts and schematics necessary to perform component-level repair. Technicians in Chinese street markets aren't worried about legal retaliation from US-based companies. Right to repair would ensure owners and third parties could legally acquire the parts and schematics for repairs. They don't even need the manufacturer to provide the parts and schematics; they just need to be protected from legal retaliation.

> I am perfectly happy upgrading the memory on my MacBook Air with a reflow air station

Probably 0.01% of Apple product owners in North America also own a hot air reflow station and have the skills/practice to use it safely on a very densely populated laptop or phone motherboard.

I would also wager that if you were to look at the pay scale for skilled electronics repair people capable of safely doing so with little risk of killing the board, the market rate for a person running a hot air reflow station to do that work, in a big city in north america (chicago, SF, seattle, NY, etc) might be $200/hour. By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.

One of the things that seems to be much more common in mainland China is that random small phone/laptop repair shops have the technical capability in house to do this sort of work. In the USA the same shops' technical abilities are limited to what can be done with some tweezers, a set of precision screwdrivers, prying tools/spudgers, etc.

Note that I am not excusing apple's terrible repair parts availability or pricing, or other practices which make it difficult for a trained third party to acquire and install legit parts.

> By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.

Louis Rossmann proves that such a business does work and is profitable while remaining significantly cheaper for customers (otherwise he wouldn't get any business).

I think this works by volume of customers in the NYC metro, but might not be viable for a repair shop in a smaller city. I would be very interested to see if a similar specialist could financially support the salaries of a few full time techs in a much smaller metro on the scale of, for example, Spokane WA.

But in this case the market would balance itself; this isn't an argument against the right to repair. If there's indeed no market for this then nothing will change, but it doesn't mean parts/schematics shouldn't be available in case people do want to repair devices.

In the article Louis says he wants to leave NYC, because the rent is exorbitant and over half of his work is mailed in anyway.

Yea but you also have to take into account that he's internet famous. Probably the most well known person in the computer repair industry says his shop with 16 people is taking in between 1 and 2 million a year.

So that's somewhere between 62.5k and 125k per employee annually in revenue. He's doing well enough but its not exactly a money printing machine and you would assume a person at the top of his industry is doing significantly better than anyone else could.

I do think its quite possible to make a living doing this in most places, but there's easier ways for people with that level of technical skills to make more money so it remains to be seen how many will choose to do it.

That being said I'm 100% supportive of right to repair and I'm a fan of Louis's content.

I really don't get what your point is here.

The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing.

And the fact that these repairers will charge per repair rather than a flat fee for partial replacements of entire boards like OEMs do means they can be cost effective while profitable.

Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.

Between the 40 cent cost of the component and labor, there's a lot of meat left for individual repairers left to make money.

>The geographical location of the repairer does not matter because shipping is a thing.

I wasn't suggesting it did matter in regards to his mail-in business. Someone else mentioned that living in a large city makes it easier to maintain a high volume of work locally.

>Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.

This is true. My point was that when a large computer repair shop run by arguably the most famous person in the electronics repair industry is only attracting enough work to have an annual revenue of 1-2 million a year, it could be entirely possible that a regular, non-famous person in a smaller electronics business might struggle to stay busy enough to earn enough of a living, even if certain repairs like the one you described are very profitable on their own.

I mean these businesses already exist and make enough money to support people.

Most places I've lived had a shop or two where someone would repair things like logic boards for cheap, using grey market parts.

You don't need 1-2 million a year to keep the lights on, there's people doing this stuff in their garages.

>>Apple will charge you $475 to replace a motherboard rather that has a blow 40 cent capacitor on a MBP.

That is not the only consideration either, data recovery is as well, since most of the time that $475 also means your device is wiped and all data lost, an independent shop could even charge someone that same $475 but retain the data and it would be worth it to the customer.

I don't think he's really at the top of his industry, financially/size-wise speaking, he's just more prominent on the internet. There's huge repair companies, he's still "just" a small business owner

That's a good point there are probably corporate electronics repair companies out there that have a much larger operation. Perhaps the guys that PC manufacturers contract warranty repair work to. However, I still think its fair to assume that when you take small businesses into account a guy that's as well known and liked as much as Louis is going to be getting way more business than he would if he wasn't famous.

He has stated many times that the majority of his board repair business is Mail in, not local. In fact because of this he stated in a recent video to be considering leaving NYC because of the high costs but since he employee's have strong ties to the area is may not be an option

>I would be very interested to see if a similar specialist could financially support the salaries of a few full time techs in a much smaller metro on the scale of, for example, Spokane WA.

You can have a B2B business model where local stores replace phones for customers and then mail the broken phones in bulk to a repair center.

>>Note that I am not excusing apple's terrible repair parts availability or pricing

Actually that is exactly what you are doing, and you know that is what you are doing or you would not have needed to add the equivocation

Not at all - pointing out that very few people have the technical capability to do some of these repairs (PCB level work that is anything more complicated than replacing outright an entire module) is a fact.

I actually have a high degreee of distaste for apple phones, their app store walled garden ecosystem, et cetera. The last iphone I owned was an original iphone 2G I purchased new for some absurd price in 2007. I own a Macbook Air because it's a good thin, light terminal that I can use to remotely control my other stuff, and I was fully aware of the fact that the RAM and SSD are soldered onto the all-in-one motherboard when I bought it. The odds of having a laptop motherboard failure are low enough that I chose to roll the dice. Everything else of mine is x86-64 whitebox that I built myself.

> I would also wager that if you were to look at the pay scale for skilled electronics repair people capable of safely doing so with little risk of killing the board, the market rate for a person running a hot air reflow station to do that work, in a big city in north america (chicago, SF, seattle, NY, etc) might be $200/hour. By the time you were to pay for the repair service and the parts it might not be economical.

You are really overestimating the value of those skills. You don't need a college degree to run a hot air reflow station. It's a valuable skill but I'd be shocked if it was worth even a quarter of your estimate, even in NYC.

Even if running a hot air reflow station were a supremely difficult skill which required decades to master, the market value of a skill like that depends on the employee's ability to demand better compensation from competing employers. How many repair shops even have equipment like that? It's a very specific skill set, particular to an industry which is struggling due to lack of right to repair protections.

I remember in the 80s, devices would all come with the complete schematics right there in the box. I remember poring over them after buying something, I thought it was fascinating. Like my TV, computer etc. Everything.

This should really be brought back, even though component-level fixing is not nearly as easy as it was back then.

I recently bought a cheap Chinese electric cooker just for fun. The instruction "manual" was a flimsy piece of paper. Yet it still contained schematics, as simple as it was.

In the 1960s DIY TV repair was such a big thing that there were self-service kiosks in supermarkets that sold vacuum tubes and included a tube tester.

When your TV stopped working, you took the back panel off with the TV turned on and looked to see which tube was not glowing. You would then turn the TV off, pull that tube from its socket, take it down to the supermarket, stick it into the correct socket on the kiosk, and press the "test" button. A meter or lights on the kiosk would tell you if the tube was dead.

If it was, you looked up the tube in a book that was attached to the kiosk. The book would list the part number of an equivalent tube sold at the kiosk. You'd grab the right tube from the racks of tubes in the kiosk, go pay for it at the checkout stand, take it home, put it on the socket, and 99% of the time that fixed your TV.

If that didn't you might take the rest of the tubes in and test them just in case the problem was a tube failure other than a burned out filament.

Only if that didn't do it did you call the TV repair shop.

Wow, I would so not do that without rubber gloves or something. I've always been pretty hesitant working on CRTs knowing the voltages present in there (and they could linger for a long time due to charged capacitors).

Was the failure mode of tubes always such that it would stop glowing? I'm surprised they always failed in that way. I suppose the main issue would be that the heater filament would burn out and stop emitting electrons. Just like the filament in a light bulb.

When I was young tubes were already becoming uncommon. If a device still used them it was only for some high-power stuff like an amp final. Though of course the CRT itself lingered much longer.

Vacuum tubes have other failure modes besides the filament burning out, but the filament burning out was by far the most common.

A tube might have a filament life of many thousands of hours, but a TV might have a dozen or so tubes so the odds were highest for filament burnout when your TV suddenly stopped working.

I've watched my fair share of Strange Parts [1].

The reason why you can get any device fixed is the availability of parts, yes. But also all of the highly specialized tools available combined with the skill of people in there.

Even if someone in the US could get the exact same parts, they wouldn't be as able to fix the devices due to the lack of devices and necessary skills. This is also the reason why most electronics are made there, it's a staggering concentration of skilled electronics workers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw

Strange Parts is marvelous.

    My problem is I can only get the chips and schematics I need to effect the repair on the Chinese Internet

Exactly. And we need legislation to make it happen. In India, I remember someone started a multi-brand service centre for cars. The automobile industry ganged up on him and refused to supply original parts to him. He had to go to the courts, and the courts ruled for him and in favour of consumer rights and made it very clear that the automobile industry had to supply parts to any mechanic shop that asked for it.

We now need a similar legislation for every other industry too.

Would hope such legislation articulates exactly what parts of a "phone" would need to be made available. There are hundreds of parts in an iPhone. It's unreasonable to expect that Apple or any vendor have the resources to make sure every single part, large and small, is available to 3rd party repair shops.

It is not about making them available. It is about not not making them available. Right now if you email a factory that has the parts they will say they are not allowed to sell them to you for any price even if they have them because Apple/etc said so. It is about removing that gag.

I worry that believing the jobs are not coming back is a self-fulfilling prophecy – one with dangerous consequences of locking its believers into perpetual dependence on supply from places that act essentially as sin externalization depots.

If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering). Or if not one of those, then some other untried thing.

Edit: as sibling comments mention, if in fact the main limitation is not labor prices but exclusive-supply agreements for certain consumable parts, then this seems easily within the scope of Antitrust to address.

> If $2/hr vs $10/hr is indeed the thing preventing repair being economical , that seems like it can be fixed with a mixture of incentives, apprenticeship contracts, and elevating the social status of "vocational education" (the name exists IMO only to serve as status-lowering).

That incentive is the $x per hour. And the low $x per hour relative to quality of life is what causes the status lowering. Status is not lowered by a couple words. A doctor spends a ton of time in “vocational education”.

I think you've misunderstood what I meant; I mean incentives for businesses to pay their people more (or to offer something like apprenticeships).

As for status not being lowered by words, we'll have to agree to disagree. No one in practice (in the US) calls medical school "vocational school" precisely because it is a phrase associated with lower status work in the trades.

Yes, people use vocational school to refer to schooling that requires less time, cost, and generally has lower barriers to entry. This results in a higher supply relative to demand, resulting in lower prices for the labor, and that is the causative factor for lower “status”.

You can change the name from vocational school to Nobel school or whatever, but as long as people are not earning high wages, it is not going to change any perceptions of “status”.

>My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).

They do - they just do it upstream of you. The people you want to swap the parts can't get them, or if they do the parts are expensive, or don't pass the security checks of your device and now there's reduced functionality.

The lack of repairability laws affects you but its up stream of you directly.

louis rossman, the man from the article, does do component level board repair. A lot of right to repair is about being able to obtain these parts to enable this type of repair, without having to go through dodgy channels

The repair cost isn't dominated by the cost of parts, but operation cost such as labour and rent.

If your concern are the $100+ for repair, then it will be the same regardless Apple provide the parts or not. Not to mention knowing Apple, they will definitely sell you an iPhone battery for $20+. Earning the same Gross Margin as their product.

I don't know what to say about that. HP wanted to charge me the price of a new laptop motherboard for a forgotten BIOS password(around £650). A guy, in the phone repair shop on the high street replaced the BIOS chips for £112 and my laptop runs like a champ. It's a pretty big difference for a laptop worth around £1500.

Part of that could be the ratio of part cost to labor cost.

I do agree that there's no culture of appreciating schematics around Palo Alto.

Not since Jim Williams died. :(

Repair shops won't touch Apple. It's something people should know before they buy an iPhone.

>>My problem today is not that repairability laws impede my progress here (they certainly don’t exist in China either).

While repairability laws do not exist in China, Anti-repairability laws also do not exist in China.

In the US we have layers upon layers of regulations to the impede or outright prevent repairs on electronics and other devices.

I am not sure if "Right to repair" is the correct path, or if removing these anti-repairability laws would be a better path.

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