The Verge is so bad they have me defending Apple [video]
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Rossmann’s main message: “to complain about something that is an option rather than complain about all of the options that are missing misses the forest for the trees”.
Key points:
1. For certain repairs, Apple’s repair program has “made availiable the exact same OEM parts and tools that they use” via rental. Renting these tools is optional and not required; Rossmann recognizes that while he (and in his opinion, most people) will likely not use these tools, their availability is a non-issue.
2. Sean Hollister’s article in The Verge was highly critical of the entire self-repair process, and called out the weight and price of this completely optional tool rental. Per Rossmann, “part of the problem with tech journalism in general is… focusing on the things that are easy rather than focusing on the things that matter”.
3. Rossmann reminds us that the right-to-repair fight is far from over. Board schematics and individual components are still not available even to authorized repair shops. He argues that these would enable him to more efficiently perform repairs.
4. Rossmann: While the tech press’s complaints are “making the right to repair people look like… fools”, “it is important to [know] that they don’t represent us [normal repair shops and average users]”.
The Verge did exactly what Apple would have like them to do. And you could argue whether that was intentional or not. ( Part of the whole PR play is to shape public discourse )
By showcasing the proper way of doing it, or how it is done when you paid $69 in the Apple Store, the article has correctly set the stage for 99% of Tech readers. ( Non-Tech people never give a damn or wouldn't want to try it themselves anyway ).
The fact that they're subsidizing the tool kits (the $1200 deposit they take is nowhere near the value of all that equipment) also suggests that they wanted regular people to get their hands on these tools (and no doubt talk about it) as opposed to charging the actual market value which - while affordable for a repair shop - would've been way out of reach of a regular user.
After all, this kind of equipment is not new and has been available for ages (comments on another thread about this say that in China every phone repair outlet had similar equipment) if you could justify buying it, and yet we haven't had articles like this on major tech news websites until Apple subsidized it enough and put it in a nice, idiot-friendly package.
That's not a subsidy - in the normal course of business the deposit is returned and no money changes hands.
The deposit is just an insentive to return the goods, it can cover 30% or 300% of the value. The tools might not be returned, and that probably is a crime, but that's not a subsidy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/uuocl3/the_verge_...
To confirm it, here's all the Apple Tools listed for the iPhone 12 Battery Replacement. All costed at $1086.96.
# Apple Tools
$49.00 [7-Day Rental] iPhone 12 Tool Kit (Part RKIT-12) [Rental Information]
$0.65 Back Protective Cover (Part 923-04877)
$0.65 Display Protective Cover (Part 923-04878)
$0.70 Adhesive Cutter (Part 923-01092)
$2.78 Nylon Probe (Black Stick) (Part 922-5065)
$8.00 JCIS Bit (Part 923-0246)
$10.00 Super screw Bit (Part 923-02066)
$12.00 Micro Stix® Bit (Part 923-01290)
$13.33 Torx® Security Bit (Part 923-0247)
$29.50 Display Adhesive Press Plate (Part 923-04911)
$50.00 6.1-inch Repair Tray (Part 923-04908)
$80.00 Torque Driver (Green, 0.45 kgf cm) (Part 923-00105)
$85.00 Torque Driver (Gray, 0.55 kgf cm) (Part 923-00738)
$99.00 Torque Driver (Black, 0.35 kgf cm) Kit (Part 923-0248)
$108.00 6.1-inch Heated Display Pocket (Part 661-19620)
$115.00 Battery Press (Part 923-02657)
$216.00 Display Press (Part 661-08916)
$256.35 Heated Display Removal Fixture (Part 661-17619)And... I don't know, PR move or not, isn't it awesome that regular consumers can rent access to the full kit? I'm not sure who I'd recommend it to, but I'm sure someone is super excited, and good for them!
If I'd written the article at The Verge, I would have ended with something along the lines of:
> For most people, renting Apple's Tool Kit isn't worth the cost or hassle. If you don't have experience repairing electronics, the Apple Store is a safer and easier alternative, and if you do, you probably have your own tools already. It's great to see Apple selling genuine replacement parts to consumers. Just, don't throw out that iFixIt toolkit quite yet!
>The thing you should understand about Apple’s home repair process is that it’s a far cry from traditional DIY if you opt for the kit — which I did, once I saw the repair manual only contains instructions for Apple’s own tools. (You can just buy a battery if you want.)
Everything about this program signals that Apple is grudgingly doing this. It's designed to scare people away from doing the repairs themselves.
The gripe of the right to repair movement isn’t that tech should be made less complex, it is that the access to parts, information and schematics/designs should be made more accessible for repairs — useful if you have the necessary skills required to carry out repairs without OEM tools.
This is coming from someone who does board level repairs on the side.
If I go out and ask everyone I know, if they are happy with the current unrepairable appliances, the amount of people who answer yes is < 10%.
The only people I know who are happy, live in extreme privilidge where they can afford replacing devices annually.
But let us say that both claims you are making are true -> so what? What are the economic and environmental implication of unrepairable equipment?
I find this incredible.
Most people have been throwing away / replacing perfectly repairable appliances since long before mobile phones.
What makes mobile phones different?
(Obligatory Framing: I'm all for RtR. I don't think it's practical to require Apple to dumb down their design or construction to fit what a consumer could accomplish at their basement bench. But if I, or my neighborhood repair shop, is sophisticated enough to perform the work, I do think parts should be available.)
The question seems pointless because it's a combination of asking something that people always want more of (who doesn't want more repairability, at least in the abstract?), and fails to mention the trade-offs (eg. price, thinness, water resistance).
Anyway, is your result from doing simiar diffetent?
iPhones and iPads are very easily good for, at a minimum, three to four years of very heavy use before any battery replacement would be necessary at all.
Your numbers are sourced from a very atypical population, and you are obviously smart enough to know that. My numbers are accurate, as evidenced by, um, people still buying hundreds of millions of iPhones a year and Apple still having the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry. Astronomically high ratings.
As for the environmental implications, that is of course a fair question, but have you taken some time to familiarize yourself with Apple's extraordinary efforts to build robots for the specific purpose of fully disassembling its devices so that materials can then be recycled? You should. You might be impressed.
I rest my case.
> It's designed to scare people away from doing the repairs themselves.
I don't think the program is perfect, but I don't see how missing components scare people away.
You'll find 404 responses when you click on repair manual links; the link to the self service repair is at the bottom of the support page; the self service storefront is very deliberately non-descript and as others have mentioned immediately raises red flags for people trained to look for basic clues about a site's legitimacy. Etc.
The argument will be made that the "App Store" is there to protect you because security/privacy. And the DRM'd components are there to protect you from cheap chinese knockoffs. I think that's fine as long as it's opt-in.
But no, it's not for your protection - it's to control the market and drive the cost of repair higher so you will forced to buy a new phone more often. This is a blatant case of "OK you demanded right-to-repair, so let's show you how to make it as difficult as possible". It's not grudging - it's willful and spiteful.
Lastly, as I already pointed out in a sister comment, the grandparent said the program is designed to scare people away from repairing their phone. I actually don't see how. In fact, providing the tooling makes it more accessible than just providing the parts. I'd love to see everything replaceable, but this is a step in the right direction.
So is the complaint here that in addition to making the parts available to purchase, and a rental program for the “industrial” gear, they should also have developed a parallel set of low-cost tools and procedures for the hobby/personal market?
I think that’s a red-herring. A home hobbyist would be better off going “great, thanks for the parts, I’m off to pay iFixit for some tools. Oh and now give us schematics and parts for when I work out how to do SMD rework”
(And for pro shops, the price quoted for those pelican cases strikes me as an absolute bargain, if they don’t already have tools they like better)
No. It's that this is mostly a diversion that does nothing to address what someone actually needs to reapair a device, which is parts and for the software not to artificially brick the hardware. But it makes everyone else who don't repair things think that Apple is trying to be reasonable and cooperative while they're still not at all.
You, a competent person, will just use a guitar pick and your fingers to do the same job. Or at least you won’t have anyone else to blame if you mess it up when apple offered the tools or the in store service to have it done.
Apple has a tool for putting glass screen protectors on phones, or unplugging the power cable from their monitors. All things normal people can manage just fine with their hands. But the tool costs very little when used regularly at a store and prevents the rare mistakes.
There is a difference in doing something properly, and doing it ”good enough”.
The conclusion of the article is literally:
>The more I think about it, the more I realize Apple’s Self-Service Repair program is the perfect way to make it look like the company supports right-to-repair policies without actually encouraging them at all. Apple can say it’s giving consumers access to everything, even the same tools its technicians use, while scaring them away with high prices, complexity, and the risk of losing a $1,200 deposit. This way, Apple gets credit for walking you through an 80-page repair, instead of building phones where — say — you don’t need to remove the phone’s most delicate components and two different types of security screws just to replace a battery.
> I don’t think Apple expects anyone to seriously take it up on the offer of self-service repair kits. It stacked the deck in favor of taking your phone to an Apple Store, where it can tempt you to buy something new instead. The real victory will come months or years down the road, though. That’s when Apple can tell legislators it tried to give right-to-repair advocates what they wanted — but that consumers overwhelmingly decided Apple knows best.
The whole tone of the article is clearly that it's absurd to rent these tools, and that the option to do so is a red herring.
When that step is skipped, weak or outright incorrect thoughts, ideas, and plans are allowed to propagate and become part of the movement, either in fact or via association.
When you take that step, you might offend someone whose idea was on the weak-to-bullshit spectrum, but you also hone your group’s ideas and help align the broad group of people who previously never had an opinion but are willing to get behind strong, sensible ideas.
The whole time I read It, I couldn’t help thinking “what do you want here? What’s the right thing?”
The product is complex and hard to work on. It would be nice if they were designed to be easier to work on, but they’re waterproof and meant to be drop resistant, etc.
I think it’s great they make these kits available and previously didn’t. That should be lauded. Would we rather Apple not release these handbooks and equipment?
Parts, and not having the thing artificially brick itself.
These tools do no harm other than the indirect and unprovable sort of harm suggested by the article, but they do no good either. They are irrelevant, in that lack of these tools is not what prevents repairing Apple products.
What prevents repairing Apple products is Apple using the US government to seize harvested 2nd hand parts they no longer have any moral right to control at the border by lying and claiming they are counterfeit, forcing component makers to exclusive deals where they are not allowed to sell custom chips to anyone but Apple, and Apple doesn't sell them, and no other manufacturer can make them since they are proprietary without published specs. And artificially bricking devices for no actual techical or security reason.
No one makes Apple do those things, and it costs Apple nothing to simply not do that. Well, nothing they have any right to in the first place.
You pay $$$, you get positive coverage. They're the Yelp of tech news.
It would be a failure to read The Verge, or other Vox Media properties, as journalism.
[0] Apple Shipped Me a 79-Pound iPhone Repair Kit to Fix a 1.1-Ounce Battery. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31456763
I've kept an eye on him for years, and think he's honest, and trustworthy. He does not appear to be a sellout in the slightest.
Becomming a politician doesn't sound like the life he wants, but we need guys like Louis running our country.
(It's not that crazy. A few years ago Zuck thought he had a chance in politics. His yes men put him on tractors in the midwest with a cowboy hat. I even think they had him sucking on a stick of wheat? All I knew is they picked the wrong guy. Zuck was a joke on so many levels though, --even then. How a young man can make so many ugly decisions so quick is beyond me. I guess that's why he's a 1 percenter? Nice fair people don't become wealthy. He was just about his money, and his narcisstic life. Louis seems just honest, and cares about what's fair. He never asked to be the spokesman for Right to Repair. He was just, like I was, irritated over pricy items we can't fix.)
Zucc has 2% of all wealth owned by American Millennials. Singlehandedly. The other 98% is owned by everyone else in his generation.
1 percenter? Yeah technically he's in the 99th percentile, but technically he's in the 50th percentile as well....
Edit: Rossman, a successful business owner and YouTube personality, is clearly a 1 percenter as well. Just to further illustrate what a silly thing that is to say about the Zucc.
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.
[1] which does seem big, but I recall the difference in effectiveness, robustness, and weight of a high end crimper vs some cheap $20 one so I'm guessing Apple did the maths on repair failures to get this type of equipment
He lost an incredible amount of credibility for me when he acted like he was a victim of Big Bad Apple siccing their lawyers on him for "selling parts."
Apple didn't go after him because he was "selling parts", they went after him because he was selling laptop and phone batteries with the Apple logo on them - labels printed to look exactly like the original parts. Something that implies to sellers that the parts meet Apple's standards, was made by an Apple OEM, etc.
A lot of aftermarket replacement batteries are shit. They have higher internal resistance so they don't charge as fast / heat up more when charging, don't have the same capacity, or they degrade faster, or all of the above. One of Apple's big successes with the circa-2013 Macbook Pro was that they used a battery that could survive thousands of cycles and only lose about 80% of its capacity. Far as I know, none of the replacement MBP batteries, save those used by Apple in their replacement program, are anywhere near as long-lasting.
Lot of aftermarket parts in general are pretty shit. Look around on the phone repair web boards and sub-reddits and you'll see talk about different grades of replacement parts. Screens, for example, can range from being terrible (poor graphics quality and poor digitizer performance) to "indistinguishable from OEM." The difference is usually at most $10, but a lot of phone repair places want that extra $10 of profit. They don't necessarily correctly program the replacement displays, they don't necessarily replace the gasket that keeps the phone waterproof, etc.
The mobile phone repair business is a shitshow full of scammers. When you realize how difficult it is to buy a used iPhone that hasn't been butchered by some clown 'refurbisher' or repaired with substandard parts, you start to appreciate why Apple engages in stuff like having screens programmed to match the mainboard.
Mind if I have a source for this?
Presumably you mean only lose 20% of its capacity?
He also have tons of political rants, so it's not only tech
Money. You also can't in practice build a large following strictly from text blogging. Let the algorithm work with you, not against you.
On other hand Verge look it from consumer standpoint. Who might do one of repair every few years. From that view devices should be much simpler and easier to repair by unskilled owners.
Nothing wrong on either side, but I might go with viewpoint that devices should be easily customer repairable without shipping special tools, with massive deposit.
It's no different in other industries. Small and compact requires special tools. You (and I) being willing to compromise on size to have better ability to repair the device doesn't represent the market at all.
These complex engineered systems are going to continue to trend towards costly tools for repair.
In a similar way, ICs are also impossible to repair compared to decades ago when you could lift out a faulty memory chip and replace it.
It's far more important for companies like apple to accept 3rd party replacements and provide access to parts than worry about the speciality tools required unless they're there to be difficult. It certainly doesn't appear to be the case here.
A repair shop would buy these tools, because otherwise they risk damaging the ($1k) phone trying to save a few bucks.
Phones are going to be too complex for reliable home repair. I also don't repair my compressor in the AC, nor do I repair the wingdings in my vacuum cleaner. I just replace the part.
I think the compromise here is fine, they're not plastic welded, they're sealed with adhesive.
This all issue made me think about the SIM tray: the SIM card contacts could also be sealed and recessed between the battery and the motherboard, and you’d go to an Apple Store to change the card whenever you need it.
But you don’t, no one would accept having to get a phone serviced every time a SIM change is needed, even if some people never ever change it after purchase. So it’s designed in a way that you just push a thin bar in it and it pops out, you put your card, push it back, and your phone is still thin and waterproof.
I genuinely think Apple could come up with a similarily elegant solution if they were making way more money by having easy to repair phones than having people give up and buy new phones instead.
I think the Verge look at it from the idiot standpoint -> most consumers will go to a local repair store, and if parts and tools are avaliable then they can get better and cheaper service. The repair store can invest a few grand in proper tools and use them regularly.
I personally don't care one bit about replacing the battery in my cell phone. I don't want to be reliant on one single corporation, but as long as the parts are available to other professionals I can pay, I'm fine.
I do want the waterproofness and compactness that goes with this, particular for my watch which is also a phone for the record, so I consider this to go far beyond what is reasonable as a legal restriction.
In other words, I hope you're not one of those people who thinks Right to Repair gives you a vote as to how companies design their products. That's annoying.
Edit: a vote besides the one you take with your wallet of course! My Precursor might just arrive this week and I'm excited about that (and won't be dipping it in the drink, at least not on purpose).
Welcome to democracy mate, where we vote on any issues we deem worthy.
Among them is regulating how companies design their products, becuase sometimes they combust and burn down our houses, or electrecute and kill us, produce electromagnetic noise that knocks out all radio communication, and at the end of their life they get discarded and poison our groundwater.
Whey you try to make a phone that is water tight, very tiny, tough and as durable as possible, you can't expect it to be easy and safe to open with easy tools. These tools are still cheap enough that you could have them in your local community center or library (here in Finland we have weird stuff in local libraries) where people can do it.
Changing batteries to watertight wrist watches or is also hard.
The average person doesn’t even replace their own watch battery because the stores can do it for them. There is close to no benefit to doing it yourself.
I recently changed my watch batteries and had to use multiple clamps to close it. You can repair an iphone without these tools, you're just taking more of a risk.
Getting in is a professional job. Just not necessarily apple job.
I'm embarrassed for the author. Someday, he'll be embarrassed by this video too.
Yes. It is no different to the Daily Mail as they deliberately have clickbait headlines that bring in outrage and have their brainless commenters regurgitating the same manufactured nonsense by the views of the editor; especially when not all of their articles enable the comments.
Rarely do you get someone calling them out for their inaccurate reporting in the contents of the article. If one highlights an inaccuracy, their army of muppets will scream at you for not having the same views as them or the editor.
They should just stick to tech reviews or buyers guides. Anything on politics, tech news, crypto, law-suits, etc steer clear from it.
they have a preference for microsoft products, if you read them everyday (spoiler: i do), then you'll notice it
Just because they can be critical of Apple's business practices, doesn't mean they hate Apple.