They only sell parts for phones that are probably still under warranty or Apple Care+ coverage. They don't sell parts for any models that actually need reliable sources for parts.
Clearly being done very reluctantly. May be beneficial to those with a habit of dropping phones and smashing their screen, but the real problem is the slightly older phones becoming e-waste due to a degraded battery or parts like buttons wearing out.
(But we've got bigger worries with degraded batteries leading to e-waste, with Chevrolet discontinuing support for a 5yr-old EV (Chevy Spark) setting an example that others seem likely to follow. No battery replacements for your EV! Buy a new one! We're heading for a world where so-called 'green' EVs are barely repairable and thrown on the scrapheap as soon as the battery degrades)
There's plenty of Leaf battery replacement services and parts as far as I can tell. The original Leaf is quite old now in EV-years.
With the exception that the car doesn't throw error codes and disable the power windows if I use a third-party brake pad.
We've accepted a world of throwaway phones/tablets (with a life of maybe 2-5 years). We can't afford to accept that with EVs.
I expect EVs which sell well will have robust 3rd party parts available for the kinds of parts that >95% of owners will ever need to replace, just like today. The EV industry is still extremely young, there will be much money to be made with 3rd party parts and repairs on EVs even if the automakers don't want it to be. I firmly believe that the market will find a way for the popular models.
...and that need replacing every couple years not because they don't work but because we have been disallowed from replacing parts, thus generating e-waste made up of rare earths and toxic metals and at great cost to people.
For the consumer level tractors which are manufactured in a volume which is more similar to automobiles, there appears to be plenty of parts in the market to fix them. Even the consumer level tractor parts with John Deere labels on them seem to just be rebranded cheap commodity parts much of the time.
The Spark is one EV from one manufacturer, introduced ten years ago, and it sold a few thousand units over a couple years. Chevy sells more Bolts in two months than the entire several year long Spark production.
The reason they're no longer selling battery packs is because there was insufficient demand for them. The car sold like shit. It is not "an example others seem likely to follow" like you claim.
Chevy included, given they're warrantying failed Bolt EV batteries and giving them 8 year warranties. Five year old bolts are getting eight-year-warrantied batteries. Weird you didn't cite that.
People have been bleating about "battery-pocalypse" - batteries clogging landfills, failing batteries "totaling" cars, blah blah - since the Prius came out twenty years ago. Still hasn't happened. If you have a Prius and the battery pack throws an error code, there are plenty of businesses offering rebuild services, looks like it's about $1k. They recycle whatever cells are still good, and bad cells are sent out to be recycled for their raw materials.
You either intentionally zeroed in on extreme outside case to push your anti-EV agenda, or you don't know much about hybrids/PHEVs/EVs and you're outside your lane while pushing an anti-EV agenda.
Which is it?
EVs do have real issues limiting mass adoption, though. Even if I could afford a nice one, I couldn't charge it at home (living in an apartment, can't really dangle a power cable down 3 floors).
And as I'm a very-low-mileage driver at the moment, able to WFH, keeping my boring Ford Focus running for a few more years is probably much better for the environment than replacing the entire car.
Did you mean a few hundred thousand units? Wiki says there were 24,459 Chevrolet Sparks sold in the USA last year, plus a similar number of international sales. Total US sales were roughly 285,000 units[0], so that would fit with “a few hundred thousand”.
This article from when it was discontinued says the entire production run was 7400 units.
https://www.thedrive.com/article/7269/chevrolet-ends-spark-e...
This solution is perfect for the PR and avoiding future right to repair lawsuits.
Doing barely enough is what I assume they're going for.
I understood right to repair to be that people want access to parts, tools, and information on how to repair their things. This seems to be the beginning of exactly that. I'm clearly misunderstanding some side of this.
I think this is just a PR piece designed to slow down right to repair legislation efforts that will be left to rot as soon as that objective is achieved, or the experience being so terrible that it's unusable to begin with. In fact, in my case it's already unusable - I keep spares for commonly broken parts for my phone (screen, case, battery & all the seals needed to reassemble) so that I can quickly repair it in a couple hours if I break it. This program would make it impossible as I'd need to ship the old parts back which means I can only order them when I actually need to do the repair and then wait for shipping - it turns a "I have a couple hours this evening, let me fix my phone so it doesn't look like shit" into a thing I have to explicitly schedule.
As of now not only is the selection of parts laughable (where can I buy a genuine new housing or mainboard, or proprietary mainboard components that Apple explicitly prohibits their vendors from selling to the public?) but there's extra BS such as the "system configuration" which has to be done via Apple Support instead of releasing the software or the protocol (so open-source tools can be built) in the open or even making devices be able to perform the configuration directly (new part detected -> a new option appears in Settings to do the initial config).
This is what Apple is doing. Setting a bus stop up next to an open field which will inevitably create data proving their narrative.
A genuine attempt would certainly utilize their own branding. Creating a clear intent to bridge the trust their customers have gained for their brand to this service. Additionally, they would at least attempt to sell parts a lower cost since their own repair service is just a few dollars more.
I think it is fairly clear what their intentions are with this service based on how they are incentivizing it's use.
It may turn out that this program is good, in which case the correct path forward is to codify it into law. Apple should have a seat at the table when deciding terms. However, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES should they be allowed to dictate terms, because they have abused that privilege time and time again. Otherwise, the moment the press looks away, they'll bring back the killer asterisks. They've done it before and they'll do it again if we let them.
I feel like the repair issue is manufactured outrage for a problem that doesn't actually exist. Seems like drama is all the rage these days...
Me neither, which is why I want the right to repair to be a thing, so I can get parts just like the third-party I wouldn't use and do the repair myself instead.
> Secondly after owning an iPhone for over a decade not once have I needed a repair.
Beyond actual repair there are consumable parts such as batteries which need replacement after a year or so.
> I feel like the repair issue is manufactured outrage for a problem that doesn't actually exist
It may not exist for you, but does it hurt you or make your situation worse in any way if the repair issue were solved? If not, then why is it a bad thing if some other people (for whom repair is an actual problem) benefit from it?
One of my gripes is that the replacement batteries are not as good as OEM, even when I buy from iFixit. So, I guess I’ll spend $80 and waste the better part of a day (which is the worst part), even though I’ve replaced several iPhone batteries and have all the tools.
Did you unironically re-phrase the politician's syllogism as a positive?
I would imagine they don't know what demand for this will be like, and parts for older devices are probably not in production at this point - so they probably don't have inventory to support a lot more than what they expected to service through their traditional processes.
------------
While not self-service, I'll note they've expanded service lifespans on the Mac side for repair in recent years. They'd previously guaranteed service would be available for 5 years (from end of new production of the model - which could be a while later than you purchased yours. The mid-2012 13" MBP is still less than 5 years from end of production.), but it was a hard cutoff after that. 5 years and 1 month? Nothing.
Now it's up to 7 years if the parts are available (10 years for batteries on some models), and anecdotally we've had a few repaired in that age range without issue.
That direction suggests to me that in the long run you're likely to see similar things on their "self-service repair" side.
Also, if they had them, chances are you would find the parts too expensive. They would either have to keep a production line running for low quantities of products, build a new one specialized for small production runs, or stock parts for years.
Both have significant costs.
For example, let’s suppose they decide to stock parts, and plan perfectly, so that all parts can be sold over a period of 10 years. On average, that’s five years between spending money on producing the part and getting money back on selling it. That likely warrants at least a 25% price increase.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a business for offering electronic parts in the long-term (old timer cars are a different case, as many parts can be made almost by hand, and customers are willing to pay good money for them)
I think that's OK, but I think it's immoral to lock down a device to the point where it prevents third parties from producing these parts if they need to.