I love how people used to complain that Apple didn’t make their tools available, and now people complain that their tools are too nice. Well duh, did people think that Apple was using hairdryers and guitar picks for warranty work?
"First step by putting a hair dryer to the front face of the phone and turning it up to max. We don't really know what temperature that will be, but hopefully it's enough to loosen the adhesive. Now improvise a tool for lifting the screen off, hopefully you won't cut the ribbon cables underneath while doing that - maybe a guitar pick? Ok then, when reassembling the device try to get the new screen on as evenly as possible. Who knows if you've done it right - but if you did it wrong your phone will definitely bork if you get it wet!"
Like, you can still do all of the above. There's nothing preventing you from doing a phone repair cheaply (and poorly) - but to expect a company to support that officially seems nuts?
It turns out repairing modern consumer electronics at a high quality bar is expensive! And it's equipment intensive!
Admittedly, it made for some great free PR on YouTube. As for addressing the concerns of the right-to-repair community... they would have been better off just uploading board schematics for the M1 Air and calling it a day. Most repair shops would probably feel less offended if they did.
Upon getting the laptop back, I got memory errors occasionally. When those memory errors became more common than coincidence could ascribe, my brother (more mechanically inclined than I) opened it up to check on the fan (maybe it was getting too hot again?) only to find that the memory had been replaced with 3rd party memory (this was the first time the laptop had been taken anywhere to get fixed).
Think back to the decade and more ago and all the fly by night phone and laptop repair places that existed.
I would be surprised if mine was a unique story.
And so, here's the question - how do you prevent a disreputable repair shop from swapping parts? If I hadn't had my brother open it up and look to see if the fans were gunking up again or loose wire or something, would I be blaming Apple for the memory errors on my laptop?
The first is that shoddy repairs or repairs with substandard parts screws the consumer and it does so with Apple's name on it. When someone buys a "New! (refurbished)" device from their favorite online marketplace and it comes with garbage components that break, it is a headache both for Apple when the customer comes to complain, and it's a PR headache for them when people think their phones are crap due to something completely out of their control.
The second is that there are significant security compromises that are facilitated by swapping parts from a stolen or secondhand phone.
The third is that phone theft is a serious issue, and the only way to solve it is to make stolen phones useless. Activation lock helped a good bit, but there was still a significant market for stolen phones to sell as parts. Phone theft was a huge issue in the early 2010s, but has seen significant declines due to this.