Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1.1-Ounce Battery
theverge.com
theverge.com
Really disappointed in The Verge on this article. Could have been a cool piece about the specific tech that Apple provides, but instead it’s framed so disingenuously that I come away not feeling particularly good about right to repair in general. It no longer sounds to me like people trying to get access to their own devices. It sounds like people taking potshots at BigCo because big co bad.
By the way. The tools this guy used are common, dead-common in China. Go to any repair mall in Shenzhen and you’ll see hundreds of these.
Does he actually want to repair his phone? It doesn’t seem like it.
The author complains that after renting the tools and buying the battery, it’s more expensive than having Apple do it. So? Is Apple supposed to ship $1200 in tools to you for free without a hold (incentivizing theft), or sell parts for cheaper than they sell them to their own stores (the prices are the same as to their stores and service providers)? Repairing anything is expensive if you don’t have the tools or don’t want to buy the tools and reuse them.
iFixIt should (frankly) denounce the article as it will almost certainly be used by Apple in a future court case to argue that Right To Repair activists are “extreme.”
When it comes to Apple devices, the "tools" that DIY repairmen want are the schematics, software to provision new parts (ideally there wouldn't be a need for this to begin with) and proprietary parts that can't be bought elsewhere.
When it comes to opening the phones, there's nothing particularly complex about this and third-parties have figured it out already, all the way down to the proprietary screwdrivers.
Apple is totally going to use this in a future court case to argue Right to Repair people will never be satisfied unless the tools fit in a pocket, had free shipping and returns, the part is 50% off, and there are no credit card holds on the tools. (The authors comparison to how car rentals don’t require a full value hold is absurd because a thing called Car Rental Insurance exists.) The author wouldn’t be happy with anything else.
There’s an alternative, though: head to Home Depot and buy and adjustable torque screwdriver for $60. It’ll have the same 10% tolerance rating. It won’t be ESD-safe—but does it really need to be for a one-off home repair? You could find something even cheaper on AliExpress, I’m sure.
Curiously, this program seems like a great deal for repair shops: for a bit over a thousand dollars, they can get the same tooling that Apple’s own stores use. It makes no sense for a consumer to buy or rent these tools from Apple, but a repair shop? $1,200 is a bargain to say you’re using the exact same tooling as Apple.
Which AFAICT is what Right to Repair is about anyway.
Again: cue the "Apple provided me with second-class tools that are NOT the ones they used in store and I broke my iPhone" story.
Manufacturers can't possibly satisfy "right to repair" if every single person gets to decide how they want to do the repair, how much compromise they're prepared to take in terms of likely outcome and so on.
They don't have to provide tools, just like car manufacturers don't provide tools when you buy parts.
This repair programme is purely a PR move to maliciously (attempt) to comply with Right to Repair and try to prevent actual regulation all while putting the spotlight on how complicated, dangerous and time-consuming repair to discourage people from ever trying it.
Yes, I did. I summarized my thoughts on it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31458161
I still stand by my opinion that this is malicious compliance to prevent formal Right To Repair legislation - not necessarily about the tooling (indeed, optionally providing tooling is a good move) but the fact that besides the problems mentioned in the linked comment, the actual selection of parts is minimal, hopefully for the time being.
I can’t find the requirement to rent this set of tools on that site (disclaimer: I can’t fully emulate a sale, as the site asks for an IMEI, and I don’t have a device for which they sell parts)
So, from my browsing, renting the tools seems optional.
... which they do! It's $69.00 for the iPhone 13 mini battery or $70.99 for the kit which also includes a replacement display adhesive and a set of spare security screws. In both cases, you can get $24.15 credit when you return your old battery.
You don't have to get the toolkit; you can put together your own tools and do whatever crazy shit you want with a hairdryer or whatever.
Are you seriously saying that Apple's decision to both sell and rent (on what I'm pretty sure must be a loss-making basis) the tools that they themselves use for the repairs is ... malicious?
Is that what you are saying? Can you walk me through your logic because it's escaping me.
Objectively, it is a risky process to do without the right tools based on feedback from people who have actually done it on a regular basis; ref. the poster upthread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31457776
It's unnecessarily annoying and admin-heavy. Compare that to just buying a handful of batteries and keeping them "just in case" so you can then do the repair in your own time as needed. I currently do that but have to use grey-market parts as Apple won't sell them to me without the aforementioned restrictions.
Returning cores for a price rebate is a totally standard industry practice. You apparently get 18 days to initiate the return and Apple gives you a free return label.
> Returning cores for a price rebate is a totally standard industry practice.
Depends for what. A worn down (or outright destroyed, if you screwed up and couldn't get it out intact) battery has zero value beyond its raw materials, which are much less than the cost of shipping it back (the eco-friendly option here is to drop it off at a local recycler which will collect and ship them in bulk).
Oh, I’m not complaining about the tools. If they didn’t have an ass-backwards policy that could be construed as preventing you from using the tools on anything other than an approved Apple product, I’d have a rental kit shipped to me and just pay the security deposit. Sure, I could buy the tools outright, but then I wouldn’t get the cool cases, and the policy still seems to imply the tools are only to be used for Apple products.
Again, this is great for repair shops. These are great tools at reasonable prices that are meant to last. But y’know what would be even better? Making a battery that you can replace with a fingernail.
The adhesive they use to bind the screen to the body has gotten consistently tougher over the years, to the point where there really isn't a reliable way for someone to do it correctly on their first try without specialized tech like this. You WILL underestimate the amount of heat required and either crack your screen or break your tool when trying to pry them apart. It's incredibly frustrating and delicate work if you're just using a heat gun and a screwdriver.
If they shipped him a "warming sock" and some kludgers like iFixit used to do, I'm sure a quarter of the people who attempt the repair would end up breaking their device and the whole program would be a failure.
Unless they ditch the adhesive and return to the iPhone 4/4S design of a back-cover which slides off easily, I actually think the 70lbs of equipment might be their best path forward.
Personally, my perspective on this is that it's a lot like the kind of complaining that gets a lot of play in the motoring press about the disappearance of the manual transmission (like Car and Driver's "Save the Manuals" thing). Lots of people will claim they would like the choice, but virtually no-one actually buys them when they're available on mainstream models.
Probably not, considering the very high cost of entry in the target market, it is unlikely to be offset by the marginal amount of additional money people are ready to invest into such devices. Markets don't produce goods out of nothing. Especially if that person specifically wants an iphone for whatever (objective or subjective) reason, the market cannot deliver that.
This isn’t a case of “market doesn’t want it”, this is a case of Apple don’t want to offer that choice because they make money off of the repairs.
Apple is on record saying they lose money on repair services. Or do you think they're just lying about that too?
There is a sliver of the market who would rather replace their own battery on a 30 month old phone.
There is a gigantic wedge of the market who looks forward to their battery dying so they can get the swankiest new phone for just $39/month.
Screen replacements are more expensive, but the worst is actually damage that's neither the screen nor the battery - for example just a scratch on the housing or a cracked back glass are actually the most expensive options (even though said housing on eBay is around 20 bucks).
Similarly, water damage can usually be fixed by just cleaning the board and replacing a few mainboard components - that's something Apple will outright not do (good luck if you have valuable data on the device), and yet there's clearly a business there as both Louis Rossmann and Jessa Jones (from iPad Rehab) have been able to build profitable businesses on it.
Apple could probably sell the devices at a loss and still make money overall on App Store commissions.
Not all the costs are denominated in dollars.
You want a small phone with little wasted volume and waterproofness, you're using adhesive everywhere. There's not room for O-ring seals and flanges and fittings.
My phone being small makes it more practical.
My phone being waterproof makes it less likely to need repair.
IP67, 1m 30 minutes (AKA don't really immerse this-- even if you drop it in a puddle it may not be OK).
iPhone 13 Mini: 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65mm -- 64.6 cm^3 -- 72 cm^2 screen, volume to screen area ratio 0.9 cm.
IP68, maximum depth 6m 30 minutes (AKA brief immersion in depths of less than a couple meters is OK).
There's a reason why all these adhesives are used everywhere.
IP67 is enough for me, and I will happily trade .3mm of thickness for a removable battery.
Not that we should assume that IP68 has to be sacrificed. There aren't a lot of comparison points on that specific attribute. A Galaxy Xcover Pro is bulky but that's because it's much more ruggedized in general.
There are bezels on the top and bottom because older phones were less volume efficient than they are today-- something that is enabled by the use of adhesive.
> IP67 is enough for me, and I will happily trade .3mm of thickness for a removable battery.
OK, but, I believe the penalty would be significantly more than .3mm, and most people won't.
Adhesive on the front of the phone, where the screen is, is just fine as far as battery removability is concerned. Are you sure that's a real factor in this comparison?
> I believe the penalty would be significantly more than .3mm
Well I'm trying to use the example you gave...
> and most people won't.
Citation needed. I've never seen anyone mention sub-millimeter differences in choosing one phone over another.
Adhesive all over the place helps remove volume. So does using annoying connector types, and putting together the parts of the phone in crazy jenga-like assemblies.
The reason why phones are less serviceable today is because they are packed tight. This packed-tight characteristic is harder to manufacture, but much harder to service. The reason why it is there is because the designers of the phone think it is necessary to make a phone that is desirable to the market.
> Well I'm trying to use the example you gave...
OK, so look at total volume vs. screen area, because I think this is really actually the important metric. In less volume, we got basically the same volume of battery and a bigger screen. The metric swung by 20%.
> Citation needed. I've never seen anyone mention sub-millimeter differences in choosing one phone over another.
Phones with replaceable batteries didn't do very well versus their competition, which is a pretty good hint that the ease of replacing batteries was not the primary buying factor. Phone size-- both thinness and total volume-- and screen size-- are unquestionably important buying factors.
Cars, appliances, tech, it’s all the same and some people are happy with replacing everything every couple years on obsolescence schedules, but some people hate it and want good quality stuff that works and lasts for a fair price.
This seems to be happening in Europe as well where historically over 80% of cars have been sold with manual transmissions.
…other than truck drivers!
maniacal laughter as the clutch is released into 18th gear
If you want a crossover I think the only new one that still has a manual is the Crosstrek.
For some cars are a hobby, but for many people they’re most another tool in our lives.
If I commuted to an office every day I’d get an auto (actually these days an EV), but working in the bush/backroads? Manual
As it is I don’t deal with traffic so a manual is a more fun “tool” to drive.
Hard to find this in any current cars, especially affordable ones.
If you want a high-end-ish car with a manual in the US, there’s the Golf R.
When the choice is between a CVT or automatic that has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the upper RPM ranges (because how else are you gonna get acceptable performance out of a tiny engine) and a clutch pedal many people choose the clutch pedal.
It takes a special kind of insanity to argue in favor of displacement taxes. The environment doesn't care how wide your pistons are or how far they move. It cares about the fuel burned. If you wanna tax the externality tax fuel.
>of a badly engineered gas guzzler
Because Toyota and Mercedes are so good at it? Ha.
If there's one thing the Americans are very good at it's getting big engines to consume less fuel than you'd expect from their size.
Regardless, your typical sedans, hatches and crossovers are available on both sides of the pond and gets the same fuel economy on both sides because fuel economy is dominated by the weight of the vehicle and aerodynamics.
> but you can just look at the displacement of F1 cars to know you are arguing in bad faith.
What's the operating RPM of an F1 engine? You're the one arguing in bad faith here.
Imagine you're cruising down the road ad 1200rpm (because fuel economy) and you want to step on it for whatever reason. With a CVT you get to sit there waiting while it slowly revs its way there. With an automatic you get to sit there a second and a half waiting while the computer decides that yes, you do actually mean to be flooring it and then shifts for you. With a manual you shifted before you even stomped the skinny pedal. Smaller displacement engines with less low end grunt exacerbate this hence the European preference for the 3rd pedal.
That said I agree that taxing fuel over car taxes would likely be a good thing, however I think there is also the view of taxing car ownership because they take up space in particular in cities.
After you've applied all the tricks to get a big engine minimize fuel consumption as it cruises down the road the fuel economy basically reflects the operator's propensity to use the skinny pedal. Of course, if you have the power you use the power so that does help the small engine. Look at all the small turbo engines they're putting in trucks and vans these days. They don't put down substantially better fuel economy numbers than the bigger NA engines in the same platforms.
Contrast with manufacturers who haven't learned to apply "all the tricks" yet, their big engines still drink fuel like it's 2019. Look at the fuel economy of Toyota's 4-6L v8s and compare to GMs 4-6L v8s in similiar vehicles.
> Also just looking at how many European and Japanese cars are sold in the US vs the other way around is pretty telling.
I hate to piss on your "euope good murka bad" circle jerk but when you go up the org chart you'll find that plenty of stuff that gets sold globally comes from GM and FCA (I'm sorry, Stellantis, lol sounds like a blood pressure drug) and is just badged as appropriate per locale. Both the big guys and the smaller OEMs do their best to sell boring sedans, crossovers, minivans and midsize SUVs globally though specific models from specific brands or configurations (e.g. can't buy a city van with a manual in USA) will get withheld from specific markets due to stiff competition (e.g. hard to sell an Explorer in Germany) or consumer preference (few wagons in USA). Each region also gets some stuff that is specific to it. In Europe they have their tiny commuter cars. 'Murka gets big SUVs and pickups. Australia gets a bunch of big sedans and big sedans that identify as pickups. South America gets the "greatest hits" from whatever the last generation of vehicles was. Equatorial Asia gets all manner of basic cars and SUVs that are made extra-inexpensive for that market.
CVT are by definition using the best RPM possible from the engine for maximum power and efficiency.
Modern automatics are also quite fast.
Anyways the future is electric without gears.
I agree about electric, but I expect 2/3 speed gearboxes for the same reason your drill had multiple speeds.
[1] according to this book i read in highschool, it was called Candide
You aren't disagreeing with me. The claim is that we live in the best world possible, not the best world imaginable. The compromises you mention are necessary due to the underlying reality of resource scarcity. We may act to change our environment in many ways but can not violate the laws of the universe.
"If better was possible, it would already exist" can be filed under Capitalism Fantasy because it ignores all confounding factors. It also fails to explain why curremt consumer products are getting worse (for the consumer, but more profitable for the producer e.g. TVs, washing machines, fridges)
This article ... https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2015/07/save-manuals-give-... ... is from 2015, but says that the M4 couple was 83:17 in favor of the automatic gearbox; and I doubt things have gotten better since then.
Automatic gearboxes (whether torque converters, CVT or dual-clutch) have just gotten much better to the point where they're better for both performance and fuel economy.
Manual transmissions are much, much harder to integrate with any kind of hybrid system, stop-start system, power-off coasting etc. which help with fuel economy too.
Not necessarily disagreeing, but just wanted to say that it certainly is possible. I rented a manual Renault (don't remember the model) a couple of years ago and was surprised how it had a stop-start system power off when coasting system.
But you are right in that as cars electrify manuals will be less and less common. Not to mention emission regulations are pushing manufacturers to only produce autos
Manuals are still better in some rare situations imho like off-roading where just not having to worry about trans temps is a win
This is a conscious business decision to not accomodate.
Wanna know how I know? (Besides experience in tech)
Sewing machines.
Millions of ladies with sewing machines out there, and harried husbands/partners/neighborhood mechanics/machinists out there that fix the bloody things. Yet, as a fixer thereof, you'll find the older machines are jealously guarded and highly sought after for reliability, stability through heavy loads, and servicibility.
And yet... All you have is plastic pieces of crap that warp and miss stitches under load, increasing usage of integrated circuit boards and plastic gearing.
A corporation will not optimize for the utility to end user and QoSL (Quality of Service Life). They will optimize for future sales and cheaper production. Literally converging on the worst product people will still pay for.
Stop making platitudes that "Oh the economy would accommodate you if only there were more of you!"
It is grade A, concentrated, unadulterated, Bull. Fucking. Shit. The business world will wring every last cent they can out of the buyer, while spending the absolute minimum required to "solve" the problem they set out to fix, and arguably, don't.
I am Quality Inspector number effing 7. I get into knock down, drag out brawls with management on the crap they expect me to put my seal of approval on for the sake of being there to be sneered at by the by the end user.
Enough is e-frigging-nough.
Since you brought up automotive. Same damn thing. Can you get cars with open-source, well documented software running on the ECM and BCM? No. Is CANBUS free and open? Nope. Are engine compartments built for anything else than the ability to be assembled by automaton? Nope.
Farm tractors and Ag equipment. Same bloody thing. This is all according to plan, because it's the default, and capital decides what the most profitable default is going to be.
We talk about this adhesive as if it's easily replaced with some screws, but I wonder if that's really true anymore. I can imagine that as devices and their tolerances get smaller that simply screwing something together might actually make the device a lot more delicate. Do you know if this is the case here?
I recently replaced my gf's iPhone screen and all I really needed was a hairdryer to heat up the adhesive, a suction cup to pull it off, and a screwdriver. I guess with these tools it'd be safer, but it worked well regardless.
So would a rubber o-ring.
It might be the standard, but it's not exactly the best experience either.
(I am a certified scuba diver.)
HP hoses and o-rings also can and do fail, and, once again, divers are trained to look for signs like the rubber bubbling. There is also not really a difference between the o-rings used in HP and LP hoses and equipment outside the size, and I gave examples of LP hoses failing.
These all require regular maintenance and replacement, and, once again, divers are trained and should be checking their equipment regularly.
But that's all beside the point, which is that your claim is that "[o-rings] are extraordinarily reliable". Except they are not, they require replacing all the time. They may be industry standard, but they are fall from infallible.
Yes. Every couple of years. After being subjected to a lot of pressure cycling.
If you do nothing but take it into the shower or a swimming pool the o-rings will last longer than the batteries.
There is a direct disagreement between what a consumer wants in their device and making it easy to repair, especially since most people don't expect to repair the device they are buying.
A phone with ip67 rating, a microsd card slot, headphone jack and removable battery?
Yea I am calling nonsense on this being an engineering limitation.
I decided after my S4 Active battery died and I broke the screen trying to replace it that I wouldn't buy a phone without a removable battery. Not easy to find anymore. I did have to sacrifice Qi charging. But the xCover phones have pogo pin charging docks that suited my nightstand charging needs.
They exist not for IP rating, but to make the device appear to not have any screws. Both for aesthetic reasons and to keep people out reasons.
Using screwdrivers to pry will very likely crack the screen and if that's the only tool available, one ought to wait on repairs the right tools are available. Using a screwdriver would otherwise introduce scratches / chips in the areas you'd insert / slide it through. One has to use a material that's softer than the contact material and non-abrasive. It also requires a lot of patience, but it pays off. I don't really know if that's knowledge someone can get in under 30 minutes of internet research, but if it is, I don't expect that onus to fall on a manufacturer.
A large display, fast processor/GPU, and wireless are all battery hungry components. These require a large battery to not only supply enough amperage but have enough capacity to last more than a few minutes. Batteries heat up when charging and when discharging. Things that heat up need to expand. The electronic components also heat up with usage further complicating the thermals. Vents and fans are untenable in something held in one hand or put in a pocket. The total envelope of the phone is constrained by human hands and pockets.
The modern "sealed" smartphone design exists because it satisfies those constraints. Non-removable batteries can have much thinner outer packaging than removable ones. They don't need to resist drops and punctures and still get underwriting certification. Glued components don't tend to wiggle themselves loose after years of thermal exercise. Glue with more seamless casings increase water resistance and overall durability. Glue also allows for smaller contact surfaces than are possible with screws giving more volume to internal components.
A phone that is easy to disassemble will be much less durable than one that's sealed. In the common case where internal access is never required, the durable phone will be superior to the easy to disassemble one. User serviceable batteries need thicker more durable envelopes which means lower power density than fixed batteries.
Most consumers do not want the easily repaired phone. It's going to require a lot of performance and ergonomic trade offs over the sealed flagship phones. Even if people went for repairable phones en masse it's not like they would stay out of landfills.
Even if screws over glue halved the effort to replace a broken screen the component cost wouldn't change. So a repair might be a few tens percent cheaper to perform. Even passing the savings on to a customer, it's still likely someone with a broken screen or whatever phone-ending damage would just buy a new phone.
That's not clear. "Larger display" is easy and obvious from a marketing standpoint. But it's not clear that buyers are benefiting from them.
I can, in fact, point to the Galaxy Tab S8 as an example. My wife wanted AMOLED for the display, but that forces the 12.4" display (or bigger) which my wife didn't really want.
Manufacturers like Samsung and Apple are delivering what is convenient for the manufacturers--what the consumer actually wants is a second level consideration.
Apple and Samsung manufacture hundreds of millions of devices per quarter. They have to optimize for the manufacture of devices. They couldn't achieve their production volume without some manufacturing-friendly concessions. It is extremely difficult to manufacture hundreds of millions of complex things.
There's 31.5m seconds in a year. If it took one second to build an iPhone, Apple could only manufacture 31.5m of them. To meet the demand for hundreds of millions in a year Apple needs to build half a dozen per second. So shaving a half second off manufacturing time by using glue instead of screws is not just a consumer durability win but simply enables their production at the necessary rates.
But to suggest that manufacturing needs override consumer demands is just silly. There's no need to produce hundreds of millions of devices without consumer demand. I don't see how you can suggest Apple and Samsung produce only convenient to manufacture phones when both are offering incredibly complex devices. If they were only interested in devices that were convenient to manufacture they'd but the BOM by a third, source only the shittiest quality screens with huge defect rates, and allow the sloppiest fit and finish while still shipping something that didn't immediately fall apart or explode.
Both companies (and many other manufacturers) are shipping tens of millions of extremely high precision manufacture and high complexity devices festooned with gewgaws and features. There's nothing easy about their manufacture. They're selling features first and then figuring out how to manufacture them at scale.
The advanced sealing techniques are used for real benefits like water resistance and reduced size, which are a much bigger priority for the average consumer than being able to replace batteries at home.
It shouldn’t be so complicated. If it makes the phone one mm thicker but you can swap the battery easily without requiring all this equipment, why aren’t we there yet?
I can (with a bit of a stretch) understand why they would not accept just any OEM part, but making extra difficult to even use an Apple bruine battery with the rest of the Apple hardware, that’s also very unnecessarily self repair hostile.
You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right? And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools?
Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. The fact that people are rushing to criticize the move suggests more that people like to find reasons to complain about everything.
It’s surreal to read HN threads where people are floating ideas about making laws to prevent companies from designing better hardware products just because they want to replace batteries with a screwdriver. I guarantee if you put a screwdriver-repairable phone and a modern iPhone in front of average consumers, 99% or more would choose the modern iPhone without a second question. The obsession with easy battery replacement seems limited to a very narrow set of people while the rest of the population has moved on to appreciate the benefits of modern sealed phones such as impressive resistance to water damage.
The Fairphone 2 is a lot smaller and lighter than the FP3, though. My boss has a FP2 and my FP3 is really quite a monster compared to his.
Regarding buying one: Only us Europeans can actually do that since it's not available anywhere else.
Every small mall I can think of had a kiosk that would do it in an hour while you shopped. (Eastern MA, US.)
I’m just a consumer and have replaced 3 iPhone batteries myself and am doing a 4th later today.
You can design devices that are easy to repair and still waterproof and sleek.
This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.
It sounds straightforward but actually isn't. In a perfect world with unlimited resources and no dangers of pollution etc it would undoubtedly be a clear yes, but in reality the consequences of all sides have to be evaluated to decide this.
I pointed out that the conundrum of repairability vs. quality is made up, or at least dramatically overstated.
There is currently only one company that I know of that focused on repairability in their phones (Fairphone) and they have a hard time competing on other factors due to the fact that they are tiny.
Now your are going to say that them being tiny means nobody wants repairability. Then I'm going to say that people do, but it's just one aspect and that the phone is lacking in others. Then you are going say that this means you can't build good repairable phones. To which I will say that you can but nobody but one small company is trying. At which point we will be stick in an endless loop.
Truth is, if Apple really wanted the could design their phones in such a way that you could open the back with a couple of screws go replace the battery, but they have no motivation to do so and instead prioritize other aspects. 99% of the industry does the same.
I don’t really buy that apple’s engineers are incompetent, rather they are making a bunch of design decisions and trade offs that make their phones more appealing for consumers to want to buy. Yes, they could make other trade offs.
These trade offs are far sampler than what they want people to believe. Apple has the budget and the talent to do it. They don't because they don't want to. //edit: also screws are not the only option, see Pixel 6 which doesn't have screws but still makes it easier to open up the phone.
That's fine and that's their right, but we should call it what it is, and not act like a screw is something impossible to design.
> This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.
It seems like your first comment was claiming that Apple could easily solve these issues without trade off.
If Apple wanted to they could make an iPhone that people love and has all the features they want and be much easier to repair then the current version.
Literally the choice of glue can make a huge difference for ease of repair with no impact on the design.
If you believe calls to conscience and market forces alone are insufficient for issues like eWaste then regulation like right to repair is a tool to consider as a society.
[citation needed]
I believe Apple didn't set out to make it difficult to repair, it was just a side effect of not caring one way or the other and optimizing for the other aspects.
Personally I buy products that are more repairable even when they're slightly less waterproof or sleek than what Apple offers. But I recognize that the vast majority of consumers do not share my preferences and Apple's products seem to do a fine job of catering to that market segment.
(That's not to say that there aren't valid reasons we might want to force companies to make products repairable just like we already force them to make products safe, just that if we do there will be design tradeoffs involved.)
Apple's efforts with DRM and using IP law to restrict parts supply seem to clearly indicaye a desire and intent to limit the ability to self-repair. While there are legitimate trade-offs to make, it seems obvious to that Apple has made choices that unnecessarily reduced repairability.
So, yes, Apple should absolutely allow repair shops to source genuine components for products they no longer support. Blocking this is uncontrovertably anti-consumer behavior that boosts Apple's profits while hurting their users and creating more e-waste.
Why has fucking nobody ever built this fantasy product, then? Because NOBODY has. We've had to listen to 15 years of this whining and NOBODY to date seems to be able to do this supposedly-trivially-easy thing you are talking about.
Also e.g. the Pixel 6 has an element in the display assembly that makes the repair easier + a glue that melts well.
Older iPhones were also easier to open, but their glue gets seems to get more aggressive each year.
The whole access via glued display construction can be fairly easy to work with when the display assembly is done right and they use a glue that melts well.
And sure, the even easier access design around screws is harder to do, but also possible. See the iPhone 6, which used screws and a much weaker glue.
Ah, yes. That's the way it's always been done, let's not rock the boat, shall we?
>And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools?
Wouldn't it be nice if the official mfg'er was a bit more helpful for some subsets of it's customers, though?
>Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves.
Praise Apple, how generous of them! Their profits have really been struggling and they didn't have to take this loss, but they did. Stellar folk.
Apple is no saint. Right to repair became popular and it's getting law.
If it's at a loss, it's a consequence because they made repair hard.
In this case, let the law prevent a certain outcome.
Let the market figure out how to cope.
It is ridiculous, consumer hostile, and wasteful.
Batteries are consumable, they should not be a reason to throw the phone away once they stopped working.
You don’t throw your house away when the garbage bag is full or when the tap starts leaking. These are things you’re expected to replace and it can easily be done with simple tools.
Phones shouldn’t be any different when it comes to their parts, especially consumable ones.
But saying that, we do tend to build houses with materials like bricks which are designed to last hundreds of years, and this is not necessarily how it's done elsewhere. We tend to renovate rather that demolish and rebuild. Our home for example is 110 years old, and is in a street of similar age houses. There are some missing ones down a neighbouring street, but I believe these were destroyed by bombing in WW2.
The metaphorical tires are not welded on; you can keep an old phone going with a new battery.
But just like tires, if you insist on doing the work yourself, you’re going to need some special equipment.
The metaphorical tires are DRM'd on by a company that has been actively trying to prevent third party repair shops from being able to work on your car.
The doubt of Apple's intentions here is not happening in a vacuum, but against their consistent and ongoing efforts to make self-repair unnecessarily difficult.
"Unnecessarily" difficult? Whatever. What you really mean is that Apple has been optimizing for durability, water-resistance, and smaller size, and people like you don't like those choices, so you are having a tantrum. Those choices, of necessity, mean that repairs are going to be a bit of a pain.
a) the use of DRM to prevent repairs
b) the physical challenge of working on complex things
c) planned obsolescence via consumables
The big problem with Apple and many companies is a), and I support efforts to make that illegal.
Problem b) is unavoidable for complex things. And there are design trade-offs that deliver benefits for costs, for example thin waterproof smartphones have hard-to-replace batteries. I’m not a fan of trying to use the law to force one set of design decisions on everyone.
Problem c) is an issue for some Apple products like EarPods. But not for iPhones, as I point out above.
Now, you can't always legally separate which tradeoffs are which, but I do think there is real value to finding ways to incentivize companies that make durable, repairable products. Those products produce a lot of value for society but manufactures can have a hard time recouping much of that value in the sale price, leading to bad incentives.
A bike pump and a tire shop aren't provided with the car. Hell, most don't come with jacks or a wrench either. Some won't even include a spare tire/wheel nowadays.
In my case, replacing my iPhone battery required no tools at all after I paid the Apple shop to mount the new battery in the phone.
That is not a constant of the universe, and is entirely dependent on the design. A long time ago, I had a Palm Treo 650. The removable back cover didn't require any tools to remove, after which the battery could be popped out. I could carry spare batteries with me and swap them out as needed.
Does this change the design constraints? Yes. But pretending that it's outright impossible ignores the decisions that were made during design.
Tires have obvious engineering constraints that presumably led to the current approach. Maybe a bit of path dependence as well. It's completely incomparable.
This is what happened with cell phones.
Also Apple is not "consumer hostile", come on. That's a ridiculous accusation.
Actually replacing the tire on a wheel has practical engineering constraints that leave it best suited for shops. Even changing bicycle tires is non trivial and the performance and durability demands there are negligible in comparison.
All your complaints are addressed in the light of that simple and well-known fact.
A lot of us ignore these people and happy produce websites that use jQuery and have 10MB of JavaScript and have iPhones that are hard to self repair, and live very happy and fulfilling lives.
Before the appearance of the iPhone, regular cellphones had always been consumer-friendly enough so that no maker would ever consider not having an instantly user-replacable battery.
Any further migration toward the anti-reuse/anti-recycling approach so strongly embraced in digital tech by companies like Microsoft would have been immediately rejected.
A battery without user access would be recognized as disposable electronics by design.
People knew that something like that would be a stupid phone, certainly not a smart one.
What made a smart phone smart at the time was its PC-compatibiliy, with regular removable user storage like memory sticks which you can pull out of the phone and plug into your PC to read & write directly. So there was functionally no limit to the internal storage to begin with. And advanced free PC software to owners so they could interface to the phone through its often-unique USB cable or alternatively by Bluetooth, or even earlier IR.
The phone couldn't actually be used as a hotspot itself, but it would get one PC on the internet and the PC could do the rest.
And that was everywhere you could get a simple cell signal, before data plans existed and for years while less-smart phones dependent on data plans were still waiting for the data roll-out nationwide to reach their neck of the woods.
It's not - it's Apple's way of scaring people away from repair.
These tools most likely make it more convenient if you have to open hundreds of phones per day, but for a one-off repair you can get away with a hair dryer and cheap iFixit tools just fine.
Shade tree mechanics find a workaround in both cases. If you make a mistake with the shade tree tools, it’s on you, not the manufacturer, which feels fair enough to me.
Because a non-replaceable battery is a great marketing tool. Dying battery (every three years or sooner) is a powerful force making a customer consider their options including buying a new phone. This alone makes companies design their products deliberately introducing friction to the repair process (even if it their own repair process). Marketing allure is just too tempting to pass by.
This is exactly why we need laws to prevent this kind of behavior. It’s against the greedy nature of companies and their desire to externalize social costs, the only way to stop this is by making it illegal.
Nobody markets the difficulty of repair, they market waterproof phones, that survive being dropped in the sink or toilet or pool, or whatever.
When it comes time to buy a new battery, and the option is a $70 replacement service or 10x that for a new phone, will a $45 manual repair with a screwdriver really drive more people to replace the battery instead of buy a new phone?
The idea that these processes are all driven to make people buy new phones instead of replacing batteries doesn't make much sense to me. The numbers don't really show that.
And when we consider the value of being able to drop a phone in water and not have to replace it, that's pretty damn high and probably saves a ton of phones early compared to the people that were willing to do a $45 battery replacement but not a $70 replacement and instead opt for a new phone entirely.
- Go to an Apple Store and have them replace it for you. - Go to a third party repair store at your own risk - Do it yourself in the official Apple recommended way
I'm not sure what people want. It used to be easier until the iPhone 6S, starting from the iPhone 7 in 2017 Apple started gluing the screens to make them waterproof. That's the complicating part. I'm pretty sure 99% of the customers would rather have the phone to be waterproof then easier to repair.
Apple can't win here it seems.
If I had a full-time repair operation going, I'd probably get those tools too. But for a single repair, I can open one with a hair dryer and 20 bucks of iFixit tools faster than it takes to unpack all that kit.
As they should.
If Apple had instead shipped batteries with instructions for pure DIY repair, we’d be reading an article about “I tried to replace my iPhone battery but I destroyed my iPhone in the process”
And if Apple redesigned the iPhone to be bigger so it could have a separate battery compartment with screw and a big old gasket so users could swap batteries, we’d be reading an article titled “Apple ruins new iPhone design for a feature you don’t need”
Apple did a great thing with this program. That fact that journalists and HN commenters are getting worked up into a frenzy to complain about it is disappointing.
It’s also telling they many people here haven’t worked on car repairs in detail. It’s standard practice for manufacturers to cite specific manufacturer tools as required in the repair manual and want you to pay hundreds or thousands to buy them. And it’s standard practice for DIYers to improvise around it (at their own risk) or purchase cheaper aftermarket custom tools. It would be great news if they offered subsidized tool rental programs like Apple for the repairs.
This whole article and the rage around it is beyond silly.
Is that happening with cars? Because you can trivially walk up to any dealership and buy brake parts.
> It’s standard practice for manufacturers to cite specific manufacturer tools
Normal, cross-manufacturer tools (aka wrenches, sockets, etc) will get you 90% of the way there, and kludgy, one-off hacks with what you have on hand will usually get you the last 10%.
The main problem with regards to Apple and the right to repair is parts availability and intentional restrictions against repair such as part serialization where it still needs Apple to be in the loop to "pair" the part to the new device. Nobody was complaining about the lack of a specific machine to open their iPhone - that problem has been solved already long ago.
What is your point here? You can just buy the parts trivially from Apple too.
As a consumer, why not just order the battery when your battery is down to 80-85% health and it’s about to be convenient to spend a half-hour of quality time with your phone? As repair shop, Apple has already undercut your price to use official supply chain parts, so you’re likely already using the <6RANDOMCAPITALS> branded batteries and the $100 bootleg part programmer.
In my case self-repair is more about convenience than money. Bootleg parts/tools are still a better experience for me than shipping a phone to Apple for repair or making appointments to the Apple Store and then reinstalling the software on the new phone (twice, if you have to do it on a spare device to use in the interim).
Regarding batteries specifically, I agree, Apple's prices are unbeatable. In my case, my main use-case for self-repair is screens - the batteries are just a bonus because if I'm already in the phone I may as well put a new battery in there. The pricing on screens (including the "core charge") is much higher and makes self-repair more attractive.
From the article.
You can buy batteries for Apple phones and DIY the install, too.
This article is the equivalent of someone who doesn’t know anything about cars trying to replace their head gasket and then being shocked that it requires tools to do it and there’s an official procedure with manufacturer recommended adhesives and tools to do it.
If journalists started writing “I tried to rebuild my engine” articles they’d read more or less like this iPhone article.
Modern engineering is complex. Crucifying a company for offering to rent custom tools to work on products is insane. This is a great move by Apple. At this point, the criticisms seem to be more about finding anything to complain about than being productive.
You said it yourself - there are plenty of off-brand options that are far more affordable and easier to obtain that would result in the same fix. So it's insane to me Apple would charge a $1200 deposit and ship shit in pelican cases. They're being willfully obtuse, and it's obvious.
Hypothetical. Also they could simply provide the option.
They already don't take any responsibility anyway.
If someone wants to get it done with a high chance of success they already take it to an Apple store, or ship it to Apple.
> This whole article and the rage around it is beyond silly.
Yes and no. The article is mostly just tongue in cheek, trying to capitalize on the cheap shock value of the 79 pounds of tools... but the point it implicitly makes is that "right to repair" is not about tools, it's about repairability, design, serviceability, etc. (Which I think is a bit dumb, because most people don't want this, they want cheap phones every few years. What would be much much much better is to price in the externalities of that. Which would give a fighting chance to a vendor that competes on low externality by serviceability.)
(Also interesting that it doesn't appear that Lenovo even sells the battery [though several 3rd party suppliers do]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/d/compatibilityfinder?accessory... )
If Apple backs itself into a corner, it doesn't get to complain about having no longer having reasonable options remaining.
But anyway, I didn’t hear Apple ‘complaining about having no longer having reasonable options remaining’. I heard you complaining about Apple providing the tools and parts required to repair their phones.
If ‘almost every manufacturer’ is in some kind of conspiracy of manufactured obsolescence, that implies there are ones that are not. So go buy one of their phones. But chances are they are heavy, bulky and not waterproof.
So if the solution the problem isn't scalable, is it really a solution?
And if Apple, a company renowned for their uncanny ability to identify novel, game-changing solutions to problems produces this as their 'solution' can you honestly say that they gave it their all on this one?
Apple can't win here if they don't try.
They basically pander to people who want to think they know about tech but aren’t in tech and likely couldn’t make it in tech. Feels like a bunch of bitterness and copium. I just ignore them now but miss their old good tech coverage.
For better or worse, Apple clearly didn't design the iPhone with consumer repairability in mind. We can debate to what degree this is intentional evil vs. design/cost necessity, but at least its cool that they're shipping their repair workbench as bulk as it may be.
They got two suitcases of top of the line tools for iPhone repair. Make use of it
Apple doesn’t take shortcuts on their hardware. They have a design/experience expectation. Flimsy tools, eyeballing alignment, cheap 3rd party replacement parts. These are all things that significantly increase the likely of degraded quality/experience after a layperson’s self repair.
I think there’s a healthy medium somewhere, but for now, apple expects home repair to done at the same level of service they would do. I’d rather error on the side of quality and robustness myself.
They could by providing open access to parts and tools to independent shops
The "Self Repair" seems to be designed to still be purposely hostile to repair while still "allowing" repair so they can claim they are satisfying the "letter of the law" when it comes to Right to Repair legalization that is going to be passed in many jurisdictions, they are getting out ahead of this right now.
Instead of just allowing a Repair shop to order up 10 Screens, and 10 batteries, owners have to register their repair, then "activate" the repair with Apple, all while using these expensive and time consuming tools that most people will simply not want to do.
IMO this is not Apple changing their tune on repairability, this is Apple being passive aggressive in the face of Right to Repair
They can, very easily. Just don't be hostile to your users when designing the phone. Look at Nokia circa 2005.
Meanwhile I recently pulled all my old smartphones from a storage bin and the rear cover pops right off, revealing a battery which comes out with no effort. There’s even an affordance for your finger nail to catch the edge of the rectangular cell. Obviously newer phones are waterproof and arguably more durable, but Apple has gone so far towards a factory sealed design as to require absurd equipment to do a proper job.
What this all makes me wonder is: what would this all be like if Apple had never dismissed user replaceable batteries? If they had just as many years of engineering behind a removable back cover as they do with high resolution screens and custom processors? How many billions have they spent on this and that improvement, and what would the phone look like today if some of that had gone to making a phone not destined for the landfill?
To me, the size and cost of their DIY repair kit is a monument to how far from repair Apple has strayed. Fortunately I suspect that if they stick with user serviceable batteries, the process will be a whole lot simpler once they’ve really put some engineering effort in to it.
That suggests to me that readily replaceable batteries isn't anywhere near the entire story in terms of keeping phones out the landfill (or in your case, a storage bin).
Increasingly, the world has gotten away from "sell thing to owner to own" to "sell hook for revenue extraction from User". part of which has also increasingly been "be the unofficial or unnoticed arm of power by keeping inconvenient things hard to acquire as determined by the parties in power". Say... industrial equipment without backdoors.
Until I can load my own firmware/microcode, it ain't mine yet. I'd love to have a cobbled together group of heterogenous computing devices just for the novelty.
You don’t have to program or fix stuff yourself. But you should be able to hire your local shop to do it for you at reasonable expense and to keep your old, but good, stuff running as long as you like.
While flip phones are disposable are their price point, that’s not true for hardware like smart phones or beyond. We need better, sustainable solutions.
Contrast this to car batteries where the form factor is specified within certain limits.
This is, unfortunately, a point where the law probably has to step in and say "battery replacements must be available for 20 years" which would make it unpalatable to be a snowflake anymore. At that point, the suppliers would get together and agree on a "standard" battery form factor.
I guess it shows this hole to the public, but Apple's know this the whole time. They scale out in-store iPhone repair to 500 stores around the world where they have low-paid retail workers performing the repairs.
The right-to-repair people have just lost contact with reality. This is the way people want it to work. It is a great product experience.
As phone features plateau we should strive to make them last longer and avoid unnecessarily consuming tons of new material every year. (IIRC a single iphone consumes like 0.5 tons of materials to go from the ground to the pocket.)
The fact that they've become a luxury brand is a compounding factor you cannot dismiss. You're comparing apples to oranges.
That isn't a property intrinsic to removable-battery phones; An Apple phone with a removable battery would be the best in terms of software and battery longevity, both of which are factors which serve to prolong the life of the phone.
It speaks right to how landfill mining is likely to be a thing in a less distant future than many of us are likely to expect.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-...
Hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but tracking devices dont work so well if the person being tracked can completely disable them when they wish.
You're confusing (perhaps intentionally) right to repair with the EU's proposal to mandate easily swappable batteries. They are not the same thing.
When they are, there will be plenty of people capable of making it easy. There always are.
In the US, roughly half the population works for less money than it costs them to exist and show up for work! How they view the world is very different than the roughly quarter of the population doing well enough to see these discussions lack relevance to them and how they live and work.
There are shared responsibilities. Nothing gets designed, used and fixed in a vacuum. Ignoring how we fix things insures our design and manufacturing work raises the cost and difficulty of repair and repurpose.
I would have no problem if this was true. But it is not. $49 only for non-Face ID Model. $69 for FaceID, or pretty much all current iPhone lineup except iPhone SE. You also have to wait 30 min to hours depending on store. Not few minutes unless you are the only one doing Battery Swap which is highly unlikely given how they are always fully booked.
Depending on which part of the world you are in, your prospective on the Battery swap pricing differ greatly on a $10 Battery part.
They figured they could get away with removing it, so they did. In exchange the user got… what exactly? Absolutely nothing.
> Once Lithium-Ion batteries that can hold 70% of a charge after 1000 cycles appeared, Apple got rid of the user-swappable batteries.
That's still an absolutely pathetic lifetime compared to the rest of the device.
And that also bears out in practice, anecdotally battery life is by far the #1 reason that people buy new phones, especially in the last few years.
It is absolutely fine in US. When iPhone Battery Replacement parts isn't even a listed item on Amazon but only Replacement Kits. ( Likely due to whatever agreement they had with Apple ) And Labour cost are high. One may even borderline call Apple's pricing cheap in the US. And why Apple could claim in court they made no profits in their after sales repairing services .
If you live within the Valeriepieris circle, have retail access to slightly higher than BOM of battery. Things might look a little different.
Hopefully we will have Battery improvements in the next 10 years so most of these discussions will become non-issues.
I work around this with battery cases. Everytime I do that when there are onlookers, at least one of them want to know all about it.
Demand for this is pretty high, given my experiences doing an equivalent thing where people see it happen.
And there is also the important matter of making sure the device is off and not doing something a user might not want to have done.
Sure, an ad-hoc Faraday Cage is not that much trouble, but many do not understand how or even it being possible.
The experience is great from what I understand.
But there are other ways, and this is not at all about taking options away from people.
Nothing about this is exclusive. That great experience can compete with many others and should.
And it is a big world of repair out there. It all goes well beyond Apple and a few others making things painful.
I've replaced the batteries in multiple first generation iPhone SEs.
I'll never replace a battery again in an iPhone, nor do I ever desire too. The phones have become too hard to open, but in return, Apple offers battery replacement for a reasonable charge and a modern iPhone is nearly water proof, more durable, more compact, and with better battery life than ever.
For a portable device like a phone, I'm happy with the trade-off, and I think the market shows that most consumers are too. The trade-off for a laptop is less clear to me, but nor is replacing the battery in a Macbook as hard as replacing it in an iPhone.
The things that really drive me crazy though are devices that don't need to be sealed that are. Homepods, Sonos speakers, previous generation Apple chargers with hardwired cords, those sorts of things.
I just had to order an entire new Vitamix S-series blade base for $75 that I could repair myself if they’d sell me just the rubber seals and a couple bearings — And I probably don’t even need the bearings from them since they look like standard 8mmx22mmx7mm skate wheel bearings, but who knows, maybe theirs are food safe.
https://www.vitamix.com/us/en_us/shop/s-series-blade-base
($75 is probably even a fair price. It’s just the principle of the matter.)
Anyway, I feel about this article as wfhordie does. It's not just descriptive of the process, which would be fine. It's filled with snark, and doesn't acknowledge the trade-offs in manufacturing a more easy to repair device. Engineering is always trafe-offs. Shame on The Verge.
Definitely a trade-off game with all hardware devices & Apple (and others) are not blameless when it comes to engineering things to be purposefully difficult. However, I think we often underestimate the sheer number of environmental constraints an international hardware retailer with near universal demographic appeal has to account for in designs.
Agree on everything else. The article gets a thumbs down.
For something like a washing machine that costs $750 and has an expected lifetime of 10 years, it's hard decision of when to repair vs when to replace.
Say my washer is already 6 years old, it breaks, and labor + parts to fix it would be $250. I might decide to give up and buy a brand new one instead.
I wish there were more repair cafes that might takebin items like that.
But since we all know revenue is not anymore primarily function of units sold, but services continuously sold on top of those devices. Taking huge commission on every app sold, proprietary/brand stuff like cables (even if they fray worse than 1$ ebay ones), cases, buds, anything.
Apple used to be pioneer of this bad behavior, but now most manufacturers jumped on that wagon since apparently people kept buying their products anyway. I used to just pop back lid on my Samsung S2 to change sim card or add memory card, now with S22 that's a pipe dream.
I wouldn't call it a trade-off. I would call it what it is - customers are not pissed off enough to affect sales in negative way. So let's do it and milk them more. One step/slot/port/3.5mm jack at a time.
Unless you’ve turned off the “sent from my Casio” footer.
If you have to put in a mechanism to easily remove a battery from a phone then how wouldn't that affect literally all of those factors? What sort of properties would this entail and what would be suitably easy to remove? That answer is different depending on the person. Some people perhaps just want the back to slide off, which would probably require a plastic back. You could add a hinged door, but that would certainly add to its thickness and affect the design. You'd also need to have a way to interface the battery to the phone. Phones that had easily replaceable batteries had contacts built into the phone and the battery that were sufficiently large as to make it nearly impossible for someone to fuck up the installation of a new one. This obviously added weight and thickness to the phone.
I'd love to hear how you'd engineer it to be just like a phone without an easily removable battery without affecting the criteria you listed.
Access to the tools for what is likely at-cost shipping prices seems like an above-and-beyond thing to me that the right to repair folks weren't even asking for.
Even if at cost the extreme sophistication and complexity of such tools reinforces the point that these devices aren't really built for repair. They're built for eye appeal first and foremost.
Sure, but it seems like this makes phones thinner and lighter and consumers want that. It "sucks" that Apple gave them that option and they went for it, but I don't consider this to be inherently malicious.
> Even if at cost the extreme sophistication and complexity of such tools reinforces the point that these devices aren't really built for repair. They're built for eye appeal first and foremost.
…these are the tools that Apple uses to repair your phone?
If iphones had to be priced with externalities included (via regulation) I suspect they'd get user replaceable batteries shortly there after.
Or Apple devices are also a tech fashion statement, so their loyal consumers will put up with everything Apple changes. iPhones could show off their sleek design if they weren't designed to need a case. People definitely wanted bigger screens and batteries for years, and Apple was very reluctant until the iPhone 10. I'm sure many iPhone users miss the fingerprint reader, but they won't get it, and they will still buy the next model because the slight and gratuitous design differences make it obvious you're using an old iPhone.
This argument is tired; it doesn't explain why every other manufacturer on the planet has also gone down this route. It's just an argument that helps nerds feel good (those other guys aren't real techies, like me, they only care about fashion).
They make their money selling phones wholesale into retailing supply chains. One of the rules of those supply chains is that the OEM eats the costs of early returns.
So they removed every widget that they possibly could and then glued everything down so that it could not possibly come loose, be dropped, wedged etc. during the warranty period.
Battery doors, headphone jacks, you name it. All gone.
End customers don't seem to care. Phones with swappable batteries, headphone jacks, etc. exist. They don't sell well in high margin markets.
I disagree. I think you're conflating home user repairability with longevity of the device. Just because the user can't repair it at home doesn't mean it goes in the garbage. More realistically a broken phone will be traded in, Apple will repair it, and it will be sold refurbished. Apple phones hold their value very well, and there is a booming second-hand market, even including officially by Apple.
I wouldn't be surprised if the average lifetime of an Apple phone exceeded that of even a "repair friendly" Android phone. I'd love to see data on that either way, but until we have it, you can't say whether the design of Apple phones contributes to landfill culture or not.
My 1980's tech is repairable, and a fair amount of it is still in active, productive use.
These phones and computers can be made more serviceable. Doing that will reduce profits and that is why it is not being done.
And so we have plenty of people who can figure out how to service the tech anyway! I am one of those types of people and have always explored fixing it no matter what.
(I do not do phones, though I have fixed tablets and computers)
There are always some of us with these skills. Humans are pretty great that way. We are considerably more diverse and capable as an species than we may appreciate.
And what happens?
Of course that lowers profit too!
Now we have right to repair as a thing to be settled because some of us are a bit too greedy for others of us to tolerate.
And regarding phones, my preferred phone is falling out of support. It had a headphone jack and performance is right there, sans a faster than 60hz display, which is no bother. Grew up with 60. Love it, but I digress.
I need to be careful with this phone, and that is fine. Keeps me from doing too much crap on it and that helps me be more productive and less tied to the thing. No worries yet.
Now, I have two of these. One has a cracked glass and a battery not long for this world. When I want, I hook it up to keyboard, mouse and display and it works great! Perfectly fine Android PC. I may start building some software for it too.
But, as it is right now, email, remote conferencing, Libre Office, Microsoft if needed, CAD, STL file, bitmap create, edit, Web, and, and...
I forget what the CPU is, but this old, glass cracked phone runs a Snapdragon fast enough to beat some Chromebooks I have gotten hold of.
Definitely worth winning Right To Repair. The up and coming generations are going to face a lot of challenges, and being economically challenged is, sadly, among the set of challenges.
My generation was similar, Gen-X. I grew up in fairly severe poverty. Fortunately, was not my entire childhood, but it was more than half. Made an impact, and the primary one was whether to spend to solve or repair to solve problems, and there is a ton of perfectly great tech laying around today.
It is crazy to be figuring out how we best avoid using it!
My 1980's tech is an Apple 2 computer. I still use it regularly. Mostly games, Nox Archaist released recently being top of the list. (If passers by enjoy "Ultima" style gaming, you can buy this title right off GOG and or Steam and play in emulation.)
But, yes I use it as a spiffy calculator, generating datasets of various kinds, terminal to embedded devices and when I get off my arse and finish my test and measure card, it will be a great bench computer just as it was back then.
Finally, as RMS has said about software freedoms, it is not important that people use those freedoms to the max. Many won't, and that is OK.
This is all about the people who will, or better --who have to for whatever reason.
It just needs to be possible.
I’m sure there are ways but I would probably significantly increase the BOM costs. For example some kind of waterproof battery that connects to a waterproof jack.
That will you the battery but cracked screens and stuff? Those pretty much have to be a pain in the ass to keep the cost, weight and watertight-ness up to spec.
Anyway, Apple has solved a million engineering problems. I bet if they cared as much about user serviceable parts as they do about putting LIDAR in their face scanner, we'd see all kinds of clever solutions. Seriously the idea that Apple, one of the most capable engineering and manufacturing companies to ever have existed, could not elegantly solve this problem is a bit far fetched to me. I think the only reason people cannot conceive of it is that we haven't seen it.
Don't know what you mean by "somewhat thin", but as far as I'm concerned, maybe they could ask Samsung.
My Galaxy S5 had a removable battery door, removable battery, and was water resistant (I'd use it as a GPS on a motorbike, even under heavy rain). It also had a headphone jack, which also didn't seem to be an issue for its water resistance.
It was less than a mm thicker than my iPhone 7 and barely thicker than a 13 mini.
Dimensions from Wikipedia:
GS7 : 142.4 x 69.6 x 7.9 mm
iphone 7 : 138.3 x 67.1 x 7.1 mm
iphone 13 mini : 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65 mm
I prefer the iPhone 7 for the overall smaller size, but I think that's a different issue. I never found the GS7 "thick", just "big", because it was too tall and wide and would sometimes be uncomfortable in my jeans pocket (and I'm a guy).
Another alternative would be to make the devices fail more reasonably when wet. Just drying the thing out could work better than it currently does.
But yes! Your point is valid. We won't get the absolute pinnacle of volume and performance that way.
To that, I say we can surely find a better balance than the mess we have today, and that could start by making damn sure we permit and perhaps encourage as much innovation on the repair / repurpose side of things as we do on design and manufacture.
Having seen that set of tools, others can and should be cost reducing them and or innovating how to do things without them, or with less expensive gear.
Just because they don't prioritize their designs for at home repair, doesn't mean they're anti-repair. Clearly they're not anti-repair if they're voluntarily making their tooling available for repairs.
I can't really blame them for prioritizing design over repairability. At least for now, repairability doesn't sell a lot of phones -- the number of people who want to repair their own phone is so small, and I say that as someone who has repaired a couple iPhones in the past.
I'm not too familiar with the matter but wouldn't other manufacturers' waterproof phones have a similar construction to enable said waterproofness?
Does Apple really want to support right to repair?
Or is this some baked-in-irony workaround that lets them legally _say_ they allow anyone to repair their phones, while offering what is the least consumer centric service I have ever seen from a company of this caliber.
I think you missed the point of the article, which is to show how ridiculous this process is on the whole.
This is an issue with hobbyist electronics projects in the US. The US hobbyist market is still using 1970s packaging technology - 0.10 inch pin spacing, solderless proto boards, and through-hole parts. I designed a hobbyist board that was all surface mount. Smallest parts were 0.5mm pitch. Although a few people built it, I got a lot of complaints. Surface mount is beyond most American hobbyists. Even though 0.10 inch through-hole is obsolete commercially, and modern parts come in surface mount only.
That said, Apple's aesthetic inherently makes things hard to open. Glass on both sides and minimal bezel is what Apple fans pay for. It forces a heat and suction disassembly process, which requires proper tooling to do right.
Sparkfun has tutorials.[1]
There are surface mount practice kits, where you get a little board and a bunch of dud parts to practice on. It's not all that hard, but it takes practice. It takes a while to get skill with tweezers under a microscope. Cheap USB microscopes are very useful. Figure on ruining a few of those cheap practice kits.
It's not rocket science, but to do consistently good assembly you need the right tools and some reasonable hand tool skills.
I had that experience in the heyday of TechShop. Which I felt was embarrassing for Silicon Valley. Not enough people making stuff.
So now you’re demanding Apple ships you a light bundle of small tools that do the same as that 40kg of tools or otherwise it’s just a “token effort”?
Or you want Apple to design a phone that you could safely repair using only a few small tools? That’s fine too. In that case I’ll just sit here waiting for all the bitching from HN about their new repairable iPhone that is prone to water damage, has shit battery life and creaks when you hold it.
it's not like we did not have those already :D
bendgate! antennagate! (you're holding it wrong!) and so on.
it seems what repairability is about is using standard parts (screws, batteries), allowing people to buy parts, and allowing people to use the thing in a less than perfect way (eg. with an aftermarket standard part)
of course it's not just Apple that doesn't want this. nobody who is in the business of selling their own hardware wants this, because it would decrease their sales.
and as other comments pointed out right to repair is not repairability.
This assumes iPhones just happen to be the way they are. The need of this extravagant display is because of how iPhones were engineered in the first place.
They were engineered to be hard to repair, that's the whole point.
Apple and any other company need to stop making products that are hard to repair, they need to be forced to do so otherwise they will most likely never do it willingly.
This doesn’t make sense for two reasons.
(1)Apple is on the hook to repair iPhones under AppleCare+ warranties. This means “engineering for hard to repair” goes against their own interests.
(2) The fellows in Shenzhen, Guangzho, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have no problem repairing all kinds of damage to iPhones for <$20 USD. So if Apple is designing these to be difficult to repair it they are doing a terrible job.
I would argue in their views they did. Apple did the calculation and understand people who actually want to repair their phone are not even a rounding error in their ~1.1B Active iPhone users. Showcasing their Professional Tools to the press, making it sound difficult is precisely how the public could justify the $69 Battery swap. And this article did precisely that.
Right to Repair folks might view this as bad press for Apple. I think Apple's PR knew exactly what they are getting into.
1. The repair kit described here is not mandatory for anyone to rent to be able to buy the parts. You can just buy the parts alone and use whatever tools you want. If you attempt your own repair, you should use the simple ifixit style tools, and understand the higher risk of damage you are taking.
2. The kit described in the article seems very decent for any kind of independent repair shop. They will probably already have pretty much the same setup.
3. Right to repair is about access to documentation and parts. Nobody epects anyone to make it easy for the user to replace 512 pin BGA part. Right to repair does not mean that it should be easy to repair something, just that there shouldn't be artificial obstacles and that there should be supply of documentation and parts.
4. Repairability is still an important topic and with discussing, but it is a separate issue from right to repair. E.g. I think phone makers could make replacing batteries much easier and that it would be a much smaller design compromise than some people like to claim. But that is a different topic from the baseline of right to repair.
To me this seems like Apple has a good basic right to repair offering both for individuals and independent shops. This article is bad for the right to repair movement, because it doesn't understand what it is asking for.
Parts. Documentation. No artificial obstacles.
Is this the case? Is Apple allowing people to just buy the parts separately, or do they make you get the whole kit?
I can't go through the whole order process because I don't have an iPhone IMEI, but to me it looks like you can just buy the parts you need.
That is what's sad. We used to fully own the devices we buy, now look at us.
There are 2 such artificial obstacles in fact. The first is you can only buy parts if you provide a serial number for the device in question, preventing things like repair shops from having a stock of batteries on hand. For self repair, it also complicates the "help a friend out with a replacement" flow.
The second is the software lockout. Even though you provide the serial number at time of ordering, the battery still comes up as being unauthorized after it's first installed and things like face unlock refuse to work, despite the battery playing no role in security. You then need to call a number and go through a process to get that battery remotely authorized.
Both of those extremely artificial limitations are completely bullshit moves on Apple's part.
By designing $1200 deposit, $49 rental & two Pelican suitcases of tools and manuals, while keeping the battery replacement price same at $69 (what you'd normally pay in total at Store), they have entirely disincentivized self-repair without actually breaking any law.
Masterstroke /s
And we think you’re going to hate it too!
It's so petulant.
i know i _can_ repair my own stuff. i've worked soldering irons and have a heat gun and could go into it again if i need to. i just don't want to make the time.
i don't want to spend hours repairing my iDevices. been there, done that. i'm not fucking with impenetrable adhesives and cracking screens and ultra thin wires, especially when i'm doing so at the cost of losing waterproofing, faceID, and warranty (extremely important to me).
(i completely get why apple disables faceID for screen replacements; gotta protect the software supply chain)
i'd much rather drive to my apple store 15 mins away, go to the genius bar and say "iphone broke" and get a new one right there or have it repaired in a few hours.
Since I've never heard of anyone getting back the broken part when getting an in-store repair, it'd be reasonable to compare at the $44.85 price, wouldn't it?
> $49 to rent Apple’s tools for a week, more than wiping out any refund I might get for returning the old used part.
You think Apple is making money on that?
Probably something to the extend of “tools to repair must be found in any general DIY store”.
This argument can be construed by Apple lawyers as exerting unfavorable judicial bias to downgrade/bottleneck technical capabilities, which Apple would have otherwise provided to its customers & claim significant advantage over competition in offering their products.
EU or not, such regulation will be dead fish in water unless smartly crafted.
Does everyone realize how insanely bad this would be for phone progress? If we’re forcing manufacturers to avoid specialty adhesives and tooling, the overall quality and size of phones would be greatly compromised.
I understand a lot of HN commenters will say they don’t care if their phones are twice as big and not waterproof as long as they can replace the battery with a screwdriver from Home Depot, but that’s not even close to typical consumer behavior.
People want small, waterproof phones. Making laws to force companies to compromise everything so 1% of buyers can swap batteries at home instead of paying for official repair service is one of the more out of touch product suggestions I’ve read on HN.
The reality is that the magical solution doesn’t exist and can’t practically exist. There would be major tradeoffs with much of what’s being suggested in this thread, many of which would make the phone undesirable to the people demanding it.
Things like recycling marks, appliance energy efficiency etc are all already regulated.
Regulation fills the gap when freedom of choice & ease of movement isn't actually viable for most people. See also search engine regulations, even though the barrier for using a competing product is much lower than it is for switching smartphone ecosystems
Also in this case you're ignoring the bigger picture of the entire industry is incentivized to be "anti-consumer" and hamper repairs. Right to repair isn't about Apple, it's about everyone. Nobody is going after Apple specifically, they are just the leading example. Samsung, Motorola, etc... are all offenders here as well.
You can argue about specific design/manufacturing decisions but, in the aggregate, but in general there's a huge amount of modern technology that's become much more complex and difficult to repair especially at the individual component level. But most people probably don't actually want to go back to 1980s vintage car phones.
Har, har, the phone would be 0.02mm thicker! Unacceptable!
Seriously? Take any smartphone from 2014 and compare with your current one. They didn't thinned that much.
Hell, I do it for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_13
Dimensions 13: H: 146.7 mm (5.78 in)
W: 71.5 mm (2.81 in)
D: 7.65 mm (0.301 in)
13 Mini:
H: 131.5 mm (5.18 in)
W: 64.2 mm (2.53 in)
D: 7.65 mm (0.301 in)
Dimensions 130.7 mm (5.15 in) H
68.9 mm (2.71 in) W
7.1 mm (0.28 in) D <-- LOL
(MAXX: 8.99 mm (0.354 in) D)
Dimensions G4 Play: 144.4 mm (5.69 in) H
72 mm (2.8 in) W
9.9 mm (0.39 in) D G4, G4 Plus: 153 mm (6.0 in) H
76.6 mm (3.02 in) W
9.8 mm (0.39 in) DThe 73rd cookie banner I've closed today begs to differ.
For how adamant Apple has been about the price of genuine parts for so long I’m starting to think that they actually sell replacement batteries at cost and eat the labor. Because having used 3rd party batteries they’re about half the cost but they degrade is way fewer cycles.
The problem with “right to repair” is that people thought they could hitch what they really wanted — “right to use cheaper 3rd party parts” which is a tougher political sell than “right to cosplay as the underpaid Apple service tech.”
Tools always cost money, a capital investment which ends up being vested in professionals that buy the tools once and then repair many people's gadgets. Right to repair is just as much about empowering independent repair shops as the individual DIYer.
Us DIYers have kind of gotten spoiled with the continually dropping prices of tools and parts combined with the always rising price of labor and overhead. For example, I was just shamelessly quoted $1300 for a rear brake job (wtf?). For that price I could buy all the tools to do the job, premium parts, and still come out favorably compared to engineering rates.
Over 20 years, I’ve done this for a few handfuls of people. How many have switched to DIYing anything more than filling washer fluid and maybe replacing a lamp? One. (Two others have switched to indy mechanics.)
The others keep complaining about their $800-1250 per axle brake jobs and $2500+ service visits at the dealer and how expensive it is to own a car, but keep right on doing it. <shrug />
The funny thing is they also wanted $700 to adjust the valve clearances. This is expensive (it's the stealership after all), but I might have said yes just to have one less thing on my docket. However after the outrageous brake quote put me in the mindset to DIY, I figure I might as well do that myself as well.
Obviously, people have been replacing iPhone batteries without 79 pounds of special tools for a long time. The fact that Apple provides the option to buy their special tools is great, but this author is digging deep for a reason to spin that as a bad thing which is kind of silly.
At this point I don’t even understand what people who are complains about this actually want (other than to complain about Apple?). Do they want Apple to completely redesign every phone to use old school screws and gaskets and other features that double the size of the phone just in case somebody wants to repair it without having to improvise tooling? Or do they want Apple to just not offer the custom tools at all and instead sell the battery with a “Good luck, you’re on your own” mentality?
That's weird.
Apple is also charging $69 for a $5 battery -- their normal repair fee. That's unfair.
Apple set up a bizarre, convoluted process, on which both Apple and the customer lose money.
> Apple is also charging $69 for a $5 battery -- their normal repair fee. That's unfair.
Honestly I don’t see any problems with any of this. A $70 replacement battery option for my $1200 iPhone that I’m owning for 3-4 years seems entirely reasonable. Renting the professional level gear as an option if I want it. For $49 is an unbelievable gesture of goodwill. Are you really demanding that Apple sell batteries for $5?
At this point, I’m not convinced the HN crowd would be happy with any solution any company could offer, aside from making phones twice as big and using screws and offering $5 batteries for these $1200 phones just in case someone needs to replace the battery after 3 years.
Everyone keeps talking about it being a $5 battery, but where can you get the battery for $5? If it costs Apple $5, then you're dreaming if you think Apple is going to ever sell for that. Nobody sells at cost and stays in business.
Also, you're forgetting about it being a $69 kit. It's the $5 battery and $64 dollars of kit.
OEM will cost a little bit more to manufacture -- some of the Fleabay ones are a little bit sketchy -- but not a lot more.
Tear-down sites give similar costs: https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/chuckjones/files/201...
That's my experience from industry as well (not Apple), but that's NDAed.
I think $5 is a fair estimate. I would be shocked if Apple paid more than $10 for the battery. Not surprised, but shocked. That points to a fair retail price in the $10-$30 range, depending on markup, distribution costs, etc.
That was how it generally worked with laptop batteries, anyway — the dirt cheap ones were massive gambles that in the worst case could cause stability issues with the laptop and usually had capacities and cycle counts way under what was advertised. You generally had to go up to prices about halfway between the dirt cheap stuff and OEM to have a chance at getting a decent product, but even then nothing was as reliably solid as OEM.
Also, their manuals assume you have the necessary hardware (makes sense to me, but means Apple won’t help you do repairs without that hardware)
The big wins are that the parts are available to customers and the tooling is available to third-party service providers. Being able to rent the tooling yourself is meant to cover the edge-cases.
I still have my first Android phone. It contains a battery you can pop out after removing the back cover. Replaceable batteries used to be the norm!
Now we need suction cups, hot air stations and professional guides to replace the part, because somehow those billion dollar geniuses chose to make their devices unrepairable.
This programme is mostly greenwashing but it's a step forward some other manufacturers still haven't taken. If Apple actually cared about repairing phones, they'd design better phones.
Sure, gluing the battery into a closed container is a lot easier than developing novel waterproofing methods, but it's not impossible to do so.
... I daresay we're not talking about that level of waterproofing, so circularity of sealing gaskets and case structural integrity shouldn't be as critical.
Although if Apple made an iPhone Deepsea, I have no doubt they'd have buyers at any price point, a vanishingly small percentage of whom would actually submerge it.
But really the distinguishing factor is the ratio between case volume and mechanism volume. If phones had a similar ratio to watches, you could just bolt them shut with a dozen screws.
I guess phones do have the benefit of non-contiguous mechanism requirements, in that you could through bolt the lid into the case if you designed boards and components around the posts.
If someone comes along and creates a device that has those features, like we've seen with the Framework laptop, that's great.
For the people that want that kind of device with that specific set of benefits and trade-offs that's awesome.
Personally not my device though. my usage patterns means it makes more sense for me to take the more integrated solution, and just forego any upgrades all modularity for the life of the product.
Sealing phones isn't needed at all. It's a decision driven by the market makers.
The iPhone 13 Pro Max is 8.46 ounces (240 grams)
The iPhone 13 Pro is 7.19 ounces (204 grams)
The Defy is only 11% heavier than the iPhone 13 Pro, and lighter than the iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Doesn't seem like much of a compromise to me.
I'm not sure I see the problem. Apple is saying that this is the "right" way to do the repair. Alternatively, you can have them do it. You can also, although Apple won't endorse it, take it to a third-party, order a kit from iFixit, or otherwise do it yourself.
Ford will also not endorse doing repairs yourself, using an independent mechanic, using parts from a junkyard, etc. but they don't generally prevent you from doing so.
This repair program is trying really hard to frame it as: “look how risky and complicated it is to fix your own phone! Nobody actually wants to do this!”. Drawing attention away from the obvious alternative where people send their phone to an independent repair shop rather than do the repair themselves (and benefit from competitive pricing rather than Apple exorbitant ones)
As an example, you can’t buy a replacement screen from this program unless you provide a valid IMEI. This means that a repair shop can’t possibly offer same day repairs since they can’t keep any screen in stock.
You could start a business that can cut the required hole, and then sell batteries that fit the hole with the case pre-glued on. (you'd replace a square of the back of the iPhone whenever you replaced the battery)
The reasons behind it are pretty strong. A lot of repair stores use second hand, or fraudulent parts which damage the user experience. So for an owner getting a repair, if they don’t see warnings, they know the repair was done right. And as a buyer, you can tell the phone is using all official parts.
It’s also likely used to ruin the resale value of stolen parts from the factories.
Edit: and preferably let them buy the batteries in bulk, without having to have the phone on hand which just causes unnecessary delays.
The thing is there is very little drm here. There is no complex crypto chip on the battery. The battery just says “my id is 36382” and the phone goes “that’s not the id I expect”. Which makes it impossible for fraudulent parts to replicate since even making the chips respond identically won’t work.
Yes it has some downsides. But I think the trade off is reasonable. If you want to do an unofficial replacement, you still can. Just ignore the notification that shows on boot.
Problem is apple insists that phones can only be touched with extremely specialised tools which ensure every repair is perfect with little room for any human error.
And instead of loosening their requirements for self repair, they have taken the absurd approach here.
Going forward I think I'll just buy phones that have screens that don't die when dropped. I'm OK with a cracked screen, but the display needs to work.
People have been replacing iPhone batteries long before this kit was available as an option.
99% or more of iPhone owners have no desire to replace their own batteries. Suggesting that Apple compromise the design of the iPhone just to cater to the rare customer who wants to swap batteries isn’t a realistic suggestion and I’m kind of baffled that so many HN commenters can’t understand that much.
> If Apple actually cared about repairing phones, they'd design better phones.
They do make excellent phones. No doubt about it. I think the end claim is tad contrived: If you (and millions similar) are willing to let go of IP68 dust & waterproofing, willing to work with cheaper melamine casing, and plastic screens, I am sure Apple will have no argument to back up its high ground of why they need specialist repair tools & services. What you desire is a state of the art smartphone, with gloss, finish & every working bell & whistle. What you demand for is a Nokia 3200 (which incidentally wasn't too behind in evolution).
This protocol exists because the devices are sophisticated. And they ship this hulk with the assumption you are at Level 0. I can only imagine good faith on Apple if they empowered local technicians to handle such repairs instead of this elaborate stunt to prove their point on self-servicing.
Repairability is much different topic from build sophistication. Lets not mix up these two. Apple's approach to prove its point is labored. What we probably eventually want is iOS devices to be easily serviceable by ourselves (if well equipped) or via locally available technicians, instead of entering their marbled ecosystem. Eventually we will reach some middle ground. But it is crucial to understand that self-repair isn't everyone's cup of tea and a corporation cannot keep a supply chain for the 1-5% customers who dabble with this hobby
Assuming these are the tools they actually use, rather than a cumbersome set they invented just to be insufferable, then making the tools available seems like a fair way to (reluctantly) satisfy the right-to-repair demand.
I think a better indication of whether they're really honoring the right to repair is if they keep doing things like inventing new screws that existing tools can't open. Time will tell.
I've had two third party repairs on my iPhones - one was done with a heat-gun and the finish was awful and the screen popped up in one corner at the end and the metal frame was dented from the pry-tool, and the second shop used a proper heat pad and an assembly tool and the finish was like it was a new phone.
Personally I would have been suprised if Apple recommended/advised use of a hairdryer / conventional heat-gun when that's not what they use themselves and clearly not how the iPhones are designed to be reassembled. Also presumably asking amateurs to use a heat-gun on their electronics would come with it's own risks (particularly heat guns + lithium batteries if you aren't careful!).
Like this article includes the following complaint:
> The repair manual not only suggests you need three pages worth of tools but also a jar of sand in case your battery catches fire — one of many not strictly necessary items that don’t come with the kit.
This doesn't sound entirely unreasonable from Apple's perspective - because at their scale they probably should be worried about the risk of people piercing the battery during a repair or using a heatgun near their battery. Also seems weird to throw shade at Apple for sending you too much stuff, but then also note that Apple didn't ship you a bucket of sand, but appreciate that was a kind-of joke.
The point is that they chose to do it that way because it makes them more money, not because their technology is too advanced to let the user easily change their battery. If companies designed their product in a way that you can exchange parts that often break (batteries) and make generally easy then we would at least slow down the growth of the e-waste problem.
But of course it's not our problem because we like to externalize the costs. Here in Europe we ship our electronic waste mostly to Africa where it is a huge health hazard.[0]
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/electronic-was...
The alternative id far worse -- phones that get thrown away after a year or two because they don't get OS updates or they just break.
But tell me, where does it say on the iPhone box that the phone battery only lasts three years, give or take? How is a customer supposed to know what they need to 'handle'?
The battery is effectively a wear-item, where a very finite lifespan is an acceptable trade-off for better initial performance. However, designing the phone this way also makes the service an intended part of phone ownership, not merely a response to damage or accident.
Apple (alongside the other manufacturers, by this point) is double-dipping by designing a phone that effectively requires service and by being the only reasonable provider for that service.
It should be common knowledge by now that lithium batteries start showing performance losses around 700 charge cycles, and definitely by 1,000 charge cycles.
I hope that a mix of regulations and more sustainable Linux phones actually becoming usable as daily drivers will eventually improve the situation..
We didn’t end up in the current situation with Apple innocently improving its technology and the lack of repairability being an unexpected side effect of the advancements. They pretty much always straddled the line of making their own repair job doable while having self repairs as hard as possible.
I really don’t think customer safety was their primary motivation.
Alas, had we all poured out into the streets and demanded companies stick with through-hole components....
It does seem technology (more specifically, manufacturing) are moving beyond the means of a "guy in a garage".
I certainly support right to repair and voted for it in my state (both times as Tesla in particular tried to do an end around) and strongly oppose artificial barriers like DRM. But honestly I find framing this around a less than $100 repair by Apple (or a third party) maybe every 3 or 4 years seems to me like an odd hill to die on.
And as they basically opened that path for every other maker to follow and point at Apple as a justification, we really shouldn’t give them a pass.
We have 3d stacked nm features processors, I would not see the above as an unsolvable problem, nor even a very hard one to be honest.
I miss when products were made for the consumer.
My God this guy is insufferable. You asked for professional tools, you got professional tools. Between this and the How to Build a PC video I'm beginning to wonder if the Verge staff rode the short bus to school.
The most important line in the article:
> I’d never successfully repaired a phone — and my wife has never let me live down the one time I broke her Samsung Galaxy while using a hair dryer to replace the screen.
Every crack and snide remark about Apple’s motivations, both in the article and in this thread, pretend that remark doesn’t describe almost everyone. It’s certainly the most plausible explanation and motivation for every aspect the author ascribes as bad intent by someone trying to help him do a good job when he doesn’t want to do a good job.
It’s not just phone batteries, it’s spark plugs, compressors … nobody knows how to repair anything … and they generally don’t want to. They (a) don’t want to think about it when it works, and then (b) don’t want to have to do anything when it doesn’t.
Apple’s process was built for normals. Their designs make the devices inconceivably reliable relative to the past, and then they take responsibility to deal with those choices at the repair step. Regardless what normals say if you poll them, that’s what normals actually want.
Surely the important thing is that they don't act anti-competitively towards independent repair shops, so they can actually have one of these kits on their desks to replace batteries all day long without being gouged.
Better?
Yikes
Now Apple has been obliged to provide repair tools, and they are simply providing what they probably provide to authorized repair shops, and people are still complaining.
What's wrong with that? It's not a device that's designed to have it's battery replaced by the user anyway, and if you really want to, this is the kit. Simple as that.
It's impossible to make some people happy these days.
Worse than that, the tools that the writer received seemed to be both more difficult to use AND worse at the job than the $25 battery replacement kits you can find on Amazon. It's not like these tools made it a breeze, it's still just as difficult as using a cheap kit. But the cheap kit costs $25 for the battery and reusable tools, while this setup costs $118 and puts a $1200 hold on your card. If a brute like me can repair a phone with a $25 kit, anybody can.
This seems like malicious compliance by Apple. You have the "right to repair" your phone, but at huge cost and risk.
If people were given general instructed about a heatgun and given wedges and such to pry up the screen... It would be a disaster. I don't think you can make sleek flag ship phones the way customers want without making their repair somewhat specialized and requiring specialized precision tools.
Of course the way Apple has done all this doesn't show a real commitment to right-to-repair. Of course they just want people to buy a new device, or at least pay a premium for Apple repair. But what would real commitment to right to repair look like? Probably replacement parts that aren't sold for a profit (I suppose a reasonable markup is fine) but also not requiring genuine parts. A car warranty isn't invalid if you use non manufacturer parts. Apple could publish specs and have a reasonable certification process for parts providers. They could still sell the full toolkits to anyone who wants to buy them so repair shops would have access to purpose-built tools to make their own repairs more reliable. I'm sure there's more they could do too.
They aren't really committed to this, but I think people have to recognize that device repair especially for flagships is no longer reasonably within reach for end user consumers withoitnrelevant experience. The best google-fu in the world isn't going to fill in for a lack of specialized tools and experience when a small mistake means a failed repair and broken phone.
From https://www.selfservicerepair.com/terms-of-use:
> You agree to use the Self Service Repair Products to repair the Repaired Apple Product in a manner consistent with these terms and conditions. Self Service Repair Products are for use in the repair for which they were purchased, and may not be resold or otherwise transferred.
Ah, but maybe they only mean the replacement parts, right? Surely they wouldn’t have such a requirement if you pay $100 for a generic Wera screwdriver.
But no, it includes the tools:
> Self Service Repair Parts” and “Self Service Repair Tools” are collectively referred to as “Self Service Repair Products.”
Is that even legally enforceable? I suspect it’s not. If I buy a generic screwdriver, it’s mine. It doesn’t have DRM, and I will do with it as I please. If I want to use it to repair an Android phone, I will. If I want to sell it on eBay or lend it to my neighbor, who’s going to stop me?
how is that even legal
that's just absurd
The author seems to confuse right to repair with sloppy, microwave-utilizing home repairs using a $20 kit from ebay.
What a badly faithed clickbait article. Expected more from The Verge.
On the one hand this could be malicious compliance.
On the other maybe they still need to design their new phones to be easier to repair and this is a temporary measure?
Either way, newer laws should be worded such that it costs $0,00 to replace a battery with no deposit; all costs for tooling go to the manufacturer. Then it will cost the manufacturer money, which incentivizes them to make it easier to repair.
Doubtful. Yes, they could be easier to repair and it's kind of a pain in the ass, but you can buy all the tools required to fix an iPhone 13/13 Pro battery from iFixIt for less than $100, although the tools are not as advanced as the ones Apple provides.
Also, if Apple benefits from this being a ridiculous process, which they do, there is probably no intention of making this easier. This reminds me of the iPhone battery and slowdown "scandal", there may have been good intentions at first, but then realized that it would benefit them to not tell the user what was going on, encouraging entirely new purchases rather than simple battery replacements.
Apple seems to only take exploitative opportunities when it provides the cover of plausible deniability because then it's difficult to argue. CPU slow-down? We just wanted to make sure people's phones still worked with bad batteries, please ignore the fact that we didn't tell the user the battery was bad. Repairing yourself both twice as expensive and extremely inconvenient? We're just trying to do right by the user's right to repair and provide the tools that we ourselves use, please ignore the fact that we're still charging the exact same price for the battery alone, the cost of the tools only makes sense on our scale by reducing the number of times our Geniuses break phones during repair, and request 100% collateral for our tools before renting. Please don't look at rental car services, it's not the same. Our tools are important and advanced...that's why we need them back in 7 days, no extension.
The outrage is not against these tools. The outrage is against Apple acting like this is a reasonable way to give people the right to repair.
I found what I thought was the problem, I bought the service manual off a third party site, and found a replacement wire harness on eBay. It was a bit of work, but after getting it all finished, I ran the self-diagnostics and calibration, and we’re washing clothes again.
I feel like the article is pretty disingenuous, but never really gets to the point of what right to repair is. It’s being able to get the components you need - not just modules. It’s about flexibility in how you care for your property (including its future). It’s about honesty of what really needs to be fixed/replaced/addressed.
The product, the battery changing process, the whole company, everything feels like it is the 1980s, it feels like a tech dinosaur.
If this is the way that most people think that things should work in 2022, than we are all doomed.
Sorry, but this makes me so sad... It is unbelievable...
I like the idea of more 12 year olds getting a chance to peek at the innards of their tech, using the proper kit so they at least have a chance of not ruining everything.
While I suspect Apple will lose quite a lot of money on this (these toolboxes will end up with most of the tools missing or broken very quickly!), I think from a global economic perspective, the educational value of tens of thousands of people doing this far outweighs those costs.
But I dunno… maybe?
You bet he’s going to be there watching and seeing what’s inside the phone. (It’s not that we’re doing exploratory surgery for fun and just want to see what’s inside. It’s driven by the need to repair his phone, but has a side effect of cool.)
I don't think the battery in question had time to self-discharge: it's a model A2660 introduced with the iPhone 13 in 2021, and the Li-ion self-discharge rate is only several percent per month at full charge, with discharge plateauing at lower voltages.
Using battery cutoff mode reduces the discharge rate especially during shipping/logistics periods, where the battery may be in transit for mouths or sitting on a shelf for a long time.
If the battery Apple shipped was the same OEM part, they probably just ship all of them from the battery factory in cut off mode--no special process for the batteries allocated for these repair kits.
This is like " the" mobile repair market. Entire rows upon rows of literally one man stalls which repair your phone on the fly.
They take mobile repairing to the next level. No need for "sterile environment" that people show, clean rooms and all. They just do it in all the dust and grime and sweat showing our devices are really resistant to a lot.
The point is about Choice. i know if i break my cheap android, i can get it repaired at a cheap price and continue using it or else i had to go to "official" shop and they would quote me 60% of the price of a new device into forcing me to buy a new thing. Thats bad
And now that the devices are available to the public, anyone can use the ideas in them to develop less fancy alternatives.
Maybe it's time to accept that a tiny powerful computer, radio, camera, and display is worth the base price plus $50 for and extended 3 more years of use?
Its the nature of the beast, not a specific problem in this situation.
Many a time I've ordered, perhaps, one socket, from digikey overnight to repair something, and it arrives in a giant box with multiple layers of anti-static packaging and styro peanuts, all a huge ecological waste but someone at corporate got 100% on his "anti-static key performance goal" and nobody from shipping got in trouble for delivering bent pins.
On the other hand you order from an individual in China using Ali-Express and he chucks a microwave synthesizer board in an envelope, no packing material, no anti-static, just a tyvek bag and a prayer, and five weeks later it arrives looking like the dragged it behind the boat the whole way, but amazingly it works fine.
Usually small businesses selling on Amazon are a happy medium of doing stuff reasonably and reliably.
This person wants a phone that's less than 8mm thick, with a high resolution screen, high quality camera, holes for speakers, a hole for a charger, smooth and tight tolerances all the way around, etc., that can mostly be taken under-water. (I regularly forget I have my iPhone in my pocket when I get in the pool and never once put it in a bed of rice.). Then it's surprising that it has to be fixed or disassembled with machinery to ensure that it correctly seals, doesn't break, bend, or warp during disassembly or assembly? Or that maybe it requires some degree of training to develop the confidence to use correctly?
Could Apple design a phone that can be repaired at home with a hair dryer, plastic spudger, gasket kit, and a set of jeweler's screw drivers? Could Apple design a phone with an easily replaceable battery? Could it work with any PoS battery you order off Ali express because the Chinese knock-offs on Amazon are too expensive? Absolutely. It just wouldn't be 7mm this, largely water tight, non-exploding, etc. etc. And wouldn't be supported by the manufacturer for 5+ years. You would have something like my Pine phone. I can do anything I want to my Pine phone and that's what makes it cool. It's just not my "daily driver."
I like my iPhone. After learning how to make some of my own electronic stuff I recognize the engineering that goes into it a little better. I'll continue to use my Xr until Apple stops updating it, which based on their track record, will likely be around 2024. At that point I'll get an iPhone whatever. I'm hoping it's sealed even tighter, better screen, camera, etc. The USB-C would be nice, but not anything that I stress over. In fact, it would be nice if it were even more sealed up by only wireless charging.
I disagree. Officially you can only rent the tools, you can't buy them. Yes there is a $1200 deposit if the tools don't make it back but that doesn't mean that Apple won't come after you if you don't ship them back on purpose.
In the past three years, Apple has nearly doubled the number of service locations with access to Apple genuine parts, tools, and training, including more than 2,800 Independent Repair Providers.
Nope, this "Self-Service Repair" program is explicitly for Apple customers and not repair shops. "For customers with experience in the complexities of repairing electronic devices, we created the Self Service Repair program" You can see tables comparing "Self-Service Repair" to "Independent Repair Providers " and "Apple Authorized Service Providers" in their press releases on this topic. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apples-self-service-r...
Definitely will not be trying to get my hands on these any time soon.
Personally, I do a lot of DIY things and have always preferred to have the best quality tools for the jobs. I own several vehicles, none of which have under 100k miles on the odometer, and I do 95% of maintenance on them all. They range in age from 47 years to 7 years so I need to understand old-school mechanical things and new electronic-controlled things and as a result I look for tools that simplify troubleshooting and parts replacement.
I build with wood and metal too and am familiar with carpentry and cabinet building, stick frame construction, welding and cutting various metals, and finishing the resulting constructions so that they last a long time. All of this requires tools made specifically for the task. I am currently rebuilding a fireplace and hearth and refacing it with slate and basalt so I don't need to stare at all that ugly 70's brick.
I also dink around with everything that fails in an effort to understand what happened and whether it is an easy fix or it is time for a new gizmo. I have repaired our refrigerator, our dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer, and a number of small appliances. My usual method is to disassemble the device and troubleshoot until I find the failure point. I use online videos and manuals, blog and forum posts, etc to keep me moving in the right direction.
I have also replaced the battery, hinges, and screen on a MS Surface device and a couple of telephone screens. For this work I used iFixit as a resource and everything went smoothly as a result.
I still use my Windows Phone because it is a great phone and it still works, though that will end later this year when the 3G networks are removed from service, so I will likely end up with an iPhone.
So far I have not needed to replace an iPhone screen or battery on any of my family devices, but if I end up needing to do this in the future I am pretty sure that I would just go through the process that the author documents since he was able to accomplish the task with no serious issues. That's the actual goal here.
The fact that a user is able to employ exactly the same tools Apple uses without having to buy those tools and the entire procedure is documented with photos and concise descriptions of operations is a huge plus. I don't have time to examine every device or gadget that glitches or fails in an effort to guesstimate what I think needs to happen to make it work correctly.
I think this is a bargain for those of us who are inclined to repair our own devices.
If anything, with this I've learned that companies like Framework have a huge advantage. If that space ever manages to create a 'fixable' phone a-la Framework laptop, it's gonna work on so many levels for so many different people and regulators.
My family of 5 has more than 5 devices, it could make sense to just buy the tools. I'm also the kind of person that likes to do repairs, so others ask me for help too.
Or buy a morphine power back or equivalent. If Apple made an equivalent would that be sufficient?
On another note, legislation with the intent to advance the right to repair needs to be carfully worded like when the devil grants you a wish: You want your phone battery to be user replacable? Yes, wish granted. Oh and also not accessable without a 1200$ deposit and authorization. Enjoy your hell.
Michael Lewis podcast transcript - https://podscribe.app/feeds/https-feedsmegaphonefm-against-t...
NPR article - https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1041872045/education-dept-pla...
I guess there will always be people to argue both sides of this point. However it seems clear that the shipping would mean Apple is losing money on the transaction.
You really think it'd be more controversial if Apple were to ship a standard, iFixIt style replacement toolset like everybody else does rather than two suitcase-sized boxes weighing a combined 80 pounds with a 1200$ deposit and further require a call to their support line to validate the parts in order to change a battery?
That way, Apple has no liability for the actual repair.
But, as others suggest, I think there is actually a dark pattern at work here.
About half as long, I’d estimate.
The problem with your type is the word “Apple”. From there it’s double standards all the way.
Reserving the full price of the equipment on the credit card places these repair out of the hands of the people that need affordable repairs the most. I'm also honestly sure that Apple can design better tooling for consumer repair than this, they've solved more difficult problems.
You buy the battery for the same $69 that an in store replacement costs. You then get a $24 credit when you return the old battery. Apple covers this shipping cost too.
I have the iFixit battery kit from a previous replacement and through work have access to a bench full of tools of this kind of stuff.
People that don't have that can buy the iFixit tools individually. They sell a battery with a minimal set of tools (a $5 adder) but there's doesn't seem to be an option to buy that same minimal set without the battery so you'd need to get a more general purpose set for $25 or $70.
Maybe a friend has the tools. Maybe there's a local Makerspace or library that has an appropriate set of tools.
Doesn't seem bad.
Is there a browser plug-in that filters out snark?
Those who do not will think this is excessive, if not ridiculous.
It's a matter of having the sufficient context. If I was interested in repairing my iPhone this is precisely the toolset I would want to have in front of me. No question about it. This is the kind of tooling you need for process-controlled disassembly and reassembly. Regardless of what you are doing, there's nothing better than using the right tool for the job. It can make a massive difference in outcomes.
I found a video showing their use. As someone who has designed a lot of production tooling over the last thirty years, I appreciate the purpose and design of the tools Apple is shipping. To beat the message to death: The right tool for the job ensures success.
I can understand how this can look from the perspective of those with no experience in manufacturing, yields and reliability. I get it. This is likely precisely the tools Apple uses to repair your phone when they do it. They have to because they need to ensure the repair process delivers reliable products.
Coincidentally, we had an interesting experience this past week. One of my kids dropped his Android phone and cracked the screen. My wife, against my objections, decided to take it to one of those repair shops at the mall. Well, $130 later the phone's speaker didn't work and it would vibrate nonstop when you plugged it into the charger.
I decided to now go there myself with the phone and see what they would do about it. I stood there the entire time and watched this guy take the phone apart again. I never told him that I was an engineer, much less about my experience in manufacturing.
Let's put it this way: If someone in a manufacturing environment handled any kind of a device like this guy did in front of me, they would have been fired instantly. Stupid tools. Horrible process. Laughable, really, he had an ESD mat on the counter and yet he was walking around and not grounded himself. The process was not clean. He really didn't have enough knowledge to know what he was dealing with. He was using latex or nitrile gloves (not ESD gloves) and the tips of the glove index fingers were cut out so he could use his fingertips to grasp stuff. He was touching the boards indiscriminately as he did the work, not even trying to just grab from the edges as a way to mitigate potential ESD damage.
Three disassemble-reassemble cycles later (I stood there and watched the whole thing) he gave up and offered a full refund of the $130. I walked away with a phone with a cracked screen, only that now it wasn't working. It worked fine with a screen having a single crack on it, nothing wrong with it beyond that.
Of course, I went there knowing full-well that I was going to have to buy a new phone. I knew what happened before I even stepped foot in that store, it was likely ESD damage during handling.
Here's the kicker: The brand new phone from Verizon, after discounts, was $180. Better phone, brand new, next-generation and all that.
It all came down to using the wrong tools for the job and not having a clue really. Interestingly enough, while I was there a woman came into the store with a similar problem.
Oh, yeah, he also offered me a previously repaired phone "at a really good deal". Brilliant.
Honestly, that sounds pretty fair/reasonable to me. (It would be outrageous if it had “DRM fail: phone shuts off”. “DRM detects possible non-genuine battery and works but reports battery as possibly non-genuine” is a lot more reasonable, possibly totally reasonable.)