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Comment by turbinerneiter | Hacker News Reader

Completely made up and false conundrum.

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.

This assumption (that there are minimal tradeoffs when optimizing for repairability) has not been my experience in industrial design. Every single product has tradeoffs between size, weight, cost, ruggedness, ease of repair, etc.

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.)

> 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.

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.

Why should Apple allow people to use their trademarks in order to fool people into paying more for “genuine” components. Do you think Louis Rossman was going to tell his customers that, “I know this replacement battery has an Apple logo but I didn’t buy it from Apple.”

I'm not aware of any "fooling" happening, AFAIK, the batteries were genuine batteries and were for products that Apple no longer provided repair services for.

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.

They obviously were not genuine. If they were he would have bought them from Apple.

So if the market already produces that kind of phone (and I assume has good aspects in variables you didn’t mention like reliability, battery life, performance, production costs, etc…) why do we need to force Apple to produce the same? Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants?

> Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants?

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’m actually suspicious that the phone doesn’t really exist, that some compromise was made by Apple or the other vendor to achieve their design goals. Saving people from themselves is reasonable given socialized environmental costs, but given that the battery makes up much of the phone these days (and Apple thankfully requires them to be returned for proper recycling), what we are trying to save are the higher value but less environmentally expensive components (eg screen, semiconductors).

We don't need to force them. Where did I say I want to force them?

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.

Screw choices are really important when it comes to reliability and production costs. Yes, they could make a couple of screws that the user could remove, but those screws also tend to come loose on their own…

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.

I never said they are incompetent.

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.

I was referring to

> 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.

Yes, I think they could. They have the best engineers in the world and incredible amounts of money. The regularly invent new manufacturing techniques to enable their new designs. They often invest heavily in their suppliers to enable them to make the parts they need.

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.

Apple tried to make the MacBook Pro just a few millimeters thinner and gave us the disastrous, almost-universally-loathed butterfly keyboard. I feel like your view that Apple engineers have massive design margins they are choosing not to exploit is just not real.

Maybe your view that a massive design margins are needed is not real.

Literally the choice of glue can make a huge difference for ease of repair with no impact on the design.

This is a general argument against all most forms of environmental or safety regulations.

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.

That wasn’t the point of parent comment. It was that you could have this all without making trade offs.

>You can design devices that are easy to repair and still waterproof and sleek.

[citation needed]

Lol. Yeah, right. "Any" trained industrial designer?

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.

Because they don't want to.

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.

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