Apple announces Self Service Repair

The reason I think that, is that Apple devices have always been repairable! By Apple. No one needed to “buy a new phone a year early because the battery died” if they were willing to hand their phone and $99 to Apple. I got the battery repaired in 2 different iPhones and it worked great (and was less expensive and wasteful than a whole new phone). I also got the screen repaired on one of those phones.

So look at what is new here. It’s not “an iPhone can be repaired.” What is new is that Apple will help me do the repair myself.

Doesn't mean its wasn't spurred by right-to-repair movement. Its not like Apple was blindsided by it.

> But now, when the revenue growth is coming from services instead of hardware, it doesn't pay to piss off customers by making them buy a new phone a year early because the battery died.

I don't agree. Apples model has always been to produce sleek hardware, with every new release causing lines in front of physical stores. Nothing has changed since then. Furthermore, the repair through Apple services was always somehwhat of a money grab, with occurrences of pricey repairs and not-needed services.

It be interesting to see what the pricing on these kits are. Since Apple has been rolling out hardware with id, that prevents it from working with non authorized hardware, it almost seems like its trying to put the 3d party repair shops out of business, and this is just filling the void while fulfilling right-to-repair requirements.

It's likely they have many pro-consumer and anti-consumer initiatives in the works at any given time. Public opinion can still impact whether those initiatives get accelerated or delayed.

edit to add: Security focus and end-to-end control are what the Apple ecosystem is built on. If the results of the trial with Epic go poorly for them, they still have all these features that make their ecosystem a good choice for paranoid/security conscious enterprises. If they get enough of those on the platform, then they have lots of companies depending on that security to back them up when Apple highlights their walled garden approach as a feature.

Apple knows it has been skirting the line and likely has many programs in place to deploy if and when the time is right.

I know how companies of this size work. When they have regulatory/pr/legal risk, they can move really fast for their size. Don’t know if that’s the case here, but given it only covers subset of parts of few latest models, limited to USA initially, and will likely take a few years to properly expand, it could totally be rushed in timeline of under a year.

Apple prepared self repair already a long time ago, just in case they would lose money because of legislation ( because it would hurt sales of it becomes law = a business risk)

Upcoming legislation in Europe and UK. On 17th of June it was filed in Congress and voila.

There it is.

Eg similar. Office on Mac/Android was the exact same thing. Released under the current CEO, but created under Ballmer.

Or doesn't understand new regulatory threats from Right-To-Repair, which already has at least one state that is moving to legalize full R2R (MA).

I agree with the rest though, that this can just be a new revenue stream for them.

I don't think so. Repairability is already something they have to consider because their stores conduct repairs. They ship tools and replacement parts to stores and to thousands of Authorized Service Providers already. And they already make manuals, tutorial videos, and repair guides available.

They also provide all the tools and repair resources (including software) to large companies and institutions - which is why universities can repair students' MacBooks on campus, and why companies can have an internal IT help desk that can perform repairs.

Adapting this for self-service is just a question of sorting out the legalities around warranty and liability - but their terms and conditions are so broad that it couldn't have been too difficult. And it's not too time-consuming for them to film a new tutorial video for display, battery, and camera replacements aimed at DIYers - perhaps their existing videos are already sufficient for this.

This is absolutely in response to antitrust and environmental criticism.

Not sure how accurate it is but there was definitely pressure on Apple to make changes.

They can perfectly build the program and keep it on hold/maintenance internally, and when the threat of legal action/bad brand image arrives, launch it.

> ... Leahy declined to say whether the timing of the announcement was influenced by shareholder pressure." Activist shareholders believe that it was. “The timing is definitely no coincidence,” says Annalisa Tarizzo, an advocate with Green Century, the mutual fund company that filed the right-to-repair resolution with Apple in September. As a result of today’s announcement, Green Century is withdrawing its resolution, which asked Apple to “reverse its anti repair practices” and evaluate the benefits of making parts and tools more available to consumers.

> ... something Apple has long argued is too dangerous for individuals to do.

Source:The shareholder fight that forced Apple’s hand on repair rights - ‘The timing is definitely no coincidence,’ says shareholder group - https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787336/apple-right-to-...

How can it be more repairability when the hardware itself is unrepairable by an average individual who could repair most other electronics?

This seems more like an attempt to shoot down 'parts whitelist' criticisms while telling 'You aren't technically capable to repair our devices' to anyone asking for more user repairable devices.

They don't need to task thousands of people for this, just a small internal team. It's no different than a highly focused startup, except with the resources and connections of the parent company to ensure they don't fail.

And as far as this announcement goes, there's very little tangible changes. It's mostly saying that even more things will eventually be announced in the future.

My mother worked as a photo-editor for a textbook publishing company many years ago and it was ridiculous how many meetings went into making sure they balanced the distribution of people that appeared in the books.

I had viscerally negative reactions to those as a child. Nothing ever foreshadowed "this is not going to be fun" quite like those shirts & ties. Nor was it clear why one would need to juggle the world to open a text document. (Maybe it was all just a premonition about the malware that is CC.)

This is true for all things, which is why art and styles constantly change, and constantly repeat. Whatever they picked, that you would have been happy with, would have meet the same fate, and a younger you would have the same perspective of it as you do now.

It’s crazy to me that Reddit would be willing to go to that extreme to get people to download their app.

Will be interesting to see if they roll support backwards or only provide the ability to fix from current devices onwards.

Wait until you see the price of parts. I am betting iPhone battery will be $30 to $50. i.e You save ~$20 compared to doing it at Apple Store.

Generally speaking Apple charge their repair parts at cost + their normal margin. Not saying this is bad, but people may have different perspective once they see it.

That's like five people. The real enthusiasm is amongst people waiting for their m1 macbook pros to be delivered.

I ask because it seems like those are two different customers.

The issue of hivemind thinking in forums is that it projects a uniform idea of what customers value while ignoring the obvious demographics. Apple gets a lot of scorn on here because their products suit an audience which differs quite a bit from the typical HN commenter.

If using this forum as an example, everyone wants a fully editable device, and wants every vendor to make such devices - but actually not buy from said vendors because they’re evil. I find this idea of people wanting to control the design of devices they’ll never buy to be such an interesting concept - that’s also why I don’t see the Framework buyer ever being allured to Apple’s laptops.

Following on from this I fully expect this move from Apple to be seen here as anything but a good thing: such as tokenism, part of a grand evil scheme, or similar conspiracy-level plan. This is in spite of a high-level view of Apple steadily expanding repair options over the last decade. Not to get philosophical, but it does have a Friedrich Nietzsche feel to it all: that apple’s actions don’t matter, they’ll always be construed into being a scheme.

https://twitter.com/rossmannsupply

So where do 99% of people go to get their phone repaired? The same places they were going before: Apple's overpriced and shitty repair shops, or independent repair shops that don't have access to genuine parts because Apple refuses to sell to them (and prevents suppliers from selling parts to anyone but them).

This announcement does nothing in the grand scheme of things, even if it is a marginal improvement over the previous situation. What I think is important to notice about this situation is that the only thing that caused Apple to take this (extremely tiny) pro-consumer and pro-environment step was regulatory pressure. They would not have done this on their own if it wasn't for the pressure put on by people like Louis Rossman.

The logical conclusion of course is that if we want Apple to stop destroying the planet and exploiting consumers while doing it, then we need to apply more pressure. Apple is going to do shit unless we force them to. (this can also be seen with their App store monopoly, where they reduced the fee a while back only after the pressure from lawmakers and Epic's lawsuit).

These aren't dealbreakers for the end-user though, and in a lot of cases the problem with authorized repair isn't the cost but availability or having to ship your device off. Being able to do the repair yourself (even if still paying a markup on the part) is still a welcome improvement.

"Tools and manuals" would most likely include tools or solutions to legitimately override any linking of parts to its original phone, so you can finally replace screens or Touch ID/Face ID sensors.

Parts are available - yes. Screens, modules, etc. Tools are available - sure. Pentalobe screwdrivers, etc. Manuals are available - yes they are. You call their quality sub-par, but none of that is a lie.

Component-level repair is probably prohibited by AASPs because it'd have very variable quality outcomes compared to module swaps, and they're putting their name to the quality of the repair.

I totally get that Apple is constantly under seige from scammers, knockoffs, etc. Not my problem.

Further, setting up official spares channel would likely resolve 90% of fraud by fullfilling a definite need. No diff than acceptible streaming moots most demand for pirating.

Lastly, I'm fine with self repair requiring an official factory reset, or whatever, for stuff dependent on the secure enclave. Like rebinding FaceID to a new camera/display assembly. A fair tradeoff between security and convenience. So I can repair my phone now, suffer with entering PIN, and then make a quick stop at a Genius Bar later, at my leisure, to reenable FaceID. With so many third parties trying to pwn Apple gear, I totally grok this precaution.

Except the M1 Air did improve battery repairs, and the M1X Pro. Apple Watch Series 6 has fewer finicky seals. The only move in the wrong direction has been locking parts, and it looks like this is the fix right here?

It's sure weird the quality of the of comment you can get away with if you're bashing something unpopular around here...

Those kinds of repairs are incredibly difficult (I've done some myself). There are very few people I would trust to do it right, and it's hard to know which repair shop to trust. If Apple put out manuals and components for those kinds of repairs, I can imagine the number of botched repairs skyrocketing, and the resale value of the phones diminishing significantly.

I think there's a balance to strike: you want easy repairs to keep phones going for a long time, but you also want people buying used phones to not worry about getting a frankensteined phone that will last 2 weeks before dying. Only by having high trust in the second hand market do you actually get phones that get used for years and years rather than staying in a drawer or getting trashed when people buy new ones.

I would even support having ID-tags on all components and having them bound to the phone, as long as anyone can buy original replaceable components from Apple at a fair price, and that anyone can do the binding procedure themselves.. including moving components from one phone to another. You should be able to see the history of all the components in the phone, so you have some idea if a third party repair shop just moved an ID chip from an old original battery to a new unoriginal one, or used a really old original battery.

I've experienced several times that screens and batteries you get at third party repair shops die/break much faster than the ones that come with the phone. Why is that? Is it really better to use brand new electronics that will be trash in a few months, just to extend the life a bit?

If you're going to replace the battery and screen, you better be damn sure that the phones lasts 2-3 years or more, because you're buying brand new parts, constituting a large fraction of the rare and expensive materials used by the phone.. so it's not that much better than just buying an entirely new phone where all components could easily last 5 years if you treat them well.

If an original Apple screen cannot be purchased on the open market, how do you know it's marked up?

This was my take as well. They might now something about an upcoming bill that everyone else will learn in 6-8 months :-)

It may depend on the territory and the specific AASP but this isn’t universally true. This is understating what AASPs have access to and the types of repairs they can carry out.

Not to unduly support Apple though - they are admittedly very restrictive on all this.

"Look here, we do repairs and such! No laws needed! We regulate ourself just fine!"

I have found iPhones to be the most repairable compared to the other smartphone brands I've repaired. Macbooks are a different story, but I see Macs and Macbooks as a different type of product compared to a PC which is modular by nature since the first IBM PC clone.

Some non-Apple parts for iPhones are terrible, so it's nice to have the option of genuine parts though it's not going to be useful if it's very expensive.

They're knuckling under in the most Apple way they can

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/corporate-art-sty...

It genuinely inspires a sense of dread within me. Like my skin is melting and my internal organs are bubbling and dislodging because I’ve drunk acid.

This is good news for at least being able to order legitimate "consumable" parts such as batteries which are difficult (or dangerous) to obtain unofficially, or easily-broken parts such as screens.

Asking manufacturers to stock and sell the individual ICs they use to build products is completely untenable. The number of people who can actually execute such repairs is vanishingly small.

The reason the independent repair shops would want availability of the raw materials is so they can capture the profit of doing intensive manual repairs instead of swapping out a main board in a few minutes.

I have all of the equipment to rework dense PCBAs with small SMT components, and I’d still rather buy a replacement main board in most cases than do a hand rework operation myself. Machine assembly and factory validation is best.

Unless I missed something, there is no talk of lowering the price by the cost of labor for, e.g., a $270 screen replacement. So my assumption is that you get to do an amateur screen replacement for the same price while also assuming the risk and liability of messing something up.

I even wonder if this is a kind of counter-punch against the right to repair movement so Apple, et al., can claim, "see, we allow repairs"; while it really just serves to take the wind out of the sails of the right to repair movement in the halls of Congress and the bureaucratic demons in DC.

That said, anime-style doesn't look realistically human either, but I find it more pleasing than this, which seems to be the exact opposite in proportioning (tiny heads, huge bodies).

Will Apple allow a mom and pop (not apple-authorized/certified) repair shop to buy these parts in bulk to offer repair service?

Yes. Apple will loan you a special machine to pair screens, TouchID fingerprint sensors, and other things to logic boards. The machine is never your property, but theirs.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

Maybe that's why some parts haven't changed in several decades. IMHO that's a good thing.

Second of all, if a 10-year-old computer crashes and burns, its user loses some data. If a 10-year-old car crashes and burns, it *crashes and burns*. Its owners' and other people's lives are at risk.

Suggesting that computers (and related devices) should be subject to the same kinds of regulations doesn't have much of a solid foundation without the same dangers.

This is how their "Independent Repair Program" works (or used to work, I dont keep current).

Yes, it is subject to parts availability, but they’ve managed to repair quite old iMacs for me in the past.

They could also provide a software tool to do so or even have the target's device firmware re-link the part at first boot (potentially checking the serial number of the source device to prevent iCloud-locked phones being used for parts).

So what is the hardware backdoor you are referring to?

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.