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Comment by elsjaako | Hacker News Reader

Louis Rossmann has talked a lot about why he isn't part of the authorized program.

There are two main problems he mentioned, IIRC. (It's been a while, so my memory may be wrong or the situation may have changed).

Firstly, you can no longer do component level repairs. So replacing some capacitors that got waterdamaged is no longer allowed. This is part of the agreement you make with Apple.

Secondly, although you can buy screens and batteries, you can't keep them on stock. You need to get the phone from your customer, then order the parts from apple, then wait for them to arrive, perform the repair, and only then can you finish. If you want to do "While you wait" repairs it's impossible.

It's a bad look to go off on a rant about Apple every time a customer asks a question, so I can understand them being annoyed when someone asks them if they're part of the official program.

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The component level repair issue I get from both sides. Rossmann obviously wants to continue to be able to provide that service, in part because it’s arguably his specialization.

Apple obviously doesn’t want it because even under the best of circumstances it’s difficult to ensure consistency from repair to repair, much less between different technicians or locations. And explaining a customer that while, yes, they did go to an authorized repair shop, but no, that specific repair doesn’t fall under Apple’s warranty or seal of approval, is also a nightmare.

Similarly, for keeping parts on stock I can see both sides of the debate. Shops would like to have stuff in stock to provide the best and fastest service available, Apple on the other hand wants to prevent parts from falling in the wrong hands given the already prolific grey market for their parts.

I know they’ve already loosened up a bit with some shops that have high volume and good track record, letting them have some common stuff on hand (e.g. batteries, screens, etc.), but there’s also the option to let the customer get the part via the self-repair program and bring it to the store to have it placed.

There are two competing interests at play but I think with a bit of compromise in either end a workable solution is possible.

As for shops getting pissed when asked if they’re part of the program, I think your explanation is rather poor. It’s equally, if not more of, a bad look to get pissed everything they’re asked that question. If anything it makes them look sketchy when that doesn’t need to be the outcome.

People are generally just interested in the quality of the components used and want to know if official components are used to gauge that, as well as know if they can go to Apple should problems arise (i.e. if it’ll be covered by Apple’s repair warranty).

The only reason apple doesn't want to allow repairs is so they can sell more new ones. This "consistency from repair to repair" is largely a myth used to fool gullible consumers by playing on the assumption that apple actually has a competent repair wing. They do not, so this line of thinking that it's "third party repairs are a problem" is completely unfounded.

Look at a market where repairs are normal.

Car manufacturers get a reputation based on used vehicles not just new cars. High resale value translates into higher margins because higher trade in value means purchasers have more money for their next car. Similarly people who used to buy used cars will often move up to buying a new car when their economic situation improves, that makes used cars a valuable form of advertising.

In that context Apple likely looks at the used market as quite valuable as long people still consider used iPhones as durable devices worth paying a premium for. They don’t need to sell you 1,000$ phones every year if you’re willing to buy a slightly used phone for 500$ someone else can more easily keep buying the next generation.

Apple's attitude about repair is a HUGE knock on the brand, at this point. There is no justification for it, apart from greed. Even if they are right and the repair isn't great, which does happen of course, a rational person will blame the repairer, not Apple. So for them to make these paternalistic claims is another HUGE knock on the brand - not only are they greedy, they lie to justify their greed. I don't care how good their products are (and the M1 based laptops are damn good) I'm not giving Apple a dime until this changes (and the batteries are no longer glued into everything).

> a rational person will blame the repairer

Why would someone selling a used device disclose that it was repaired for $15 at a flea market?

Apple wants their devices to either work great, or not work at all.

Sounds like it’s not a brand for you, which is fine. Plenty of other people are happy with the value prop, which is also fine.

Then Apple should lease and not sell phones. Once sold it is no longer theirs.

The fact that our industry's security practices demand constant updates is a regulatory failure, not an inevitability.

How do you think the anti-apple peanut gallery would respond to your market strategy?

> a rational person will blame the repairer, not Apple

Assumes facts not in evidence. My experience has been people tend to blame the platform supplier first and foremost.

1990s OEM computer maker loads a bunch of crapware on your PC? You're likely to blame Microsoft Windows.

SimCity doesn't run on Windows 95 because of a bug in SimCity? You're likely to blame Windows 95. Microsoft at least understood that dynamic.

iPhone acting weird? Apple's fault, obviously, no questions asked. It's the default position of consumers.

I agree with your assertion that this is a knock on the Apple brand for a certain subset of their audience. I don't think it matters to the lay user as much as it does to the power user.

While I don't think that your conclusion is 100% wrong, your argument does not support it. The first two examples are actually the way I would bet.

For the first, MS knew what was happening, and worked to make it easier. The computer manufacturers were the MS customers, not us. MS didn't do the actual loading, but they did point to how easy it was to load up, and say "Gee it would be terrible if you did this, this, and this, to load up the machine with profitable junk the user doesn't want.".

For the second, MS had somewhere between zero and negative interest in non-MS software continuing to work. We have sworn statements in court that they actively worked to make sure that 1-2-3 wouldn't run.

Your third is the statement you're trying to prove using the first two.

Again, I don't _completely_ disagree with your third statement. But the first two do _not_ support it.

Because I have known people to buy repaired cars and blame the manufacturer for issues that might be related to the repair, not the repair place. But usually IME when people buy a car out of warranty, that's been repaired a few times, they realize what they're getting into.

For phones there would, at a minimum, be a few years for most people to adjust from "it's an iPhone, no one else even _can_ repair it" to "it's used, who knows what's inside anymore". But I'm willing to bet we'd get there. But it's just a gut feeling.

I occasionally buy and repair used Apple phones and are more comfortable with them than other brands. Even though Apple may discourage it most phone repairers know them and can do repairs, probably more so than an old Huawei whatever it is. I was quite impressed when an iPhone 5 was reduced to a spread of components on the road in a Thai scooter accident and the shop had it back working same day.

I'm not buying anything apple since I know repairability is zero.

Now the laptops have soldered ram and ssd, and the screens are paired to the motherboard. Actually I started using linux for a few years, since macos started spying and sending telemetry about every move you make in the OS.

> This "consistency from repair to repair" is largely a myth used to fool gullible consumers

Components don't always fail in isolation. When they do, they can cause damage up/downstream, like if a cap shorts to ground. It's very hard to detect partial damage. That's what drives module level replacements.

I think you have it completely backwards. Apple aren’t necessarily that concerned with selling the most phones. They want to sell the most expensive phones with the highest margins, and still sell quite a lot.

How do you get people to pay a lot for a phone, and do so fairly often? By making sure they can sell their old phone for a decent prize.

Everything Apple does is in support of this. That implies that they do want you to be able to repair your phone (otherwise you couldn’t sell it), but only if it’s in a way where the buyer of the phone can feel confident that the phone they buy isn’t going to die in a month due to a shoddy repair job. Apple providing OS updates to old phones also supports this (and it also helps them with App Store revenue).

Apple doesn’t care if you sell or continue to use your old phone because in that segment they’re not competing with themselves. They’re competing with cheap android phones.

IMO, Apple does more than anyone to make sure their phones are used as long as possible. Most android brands are far more likely to go in a drawer as it’s not worth the effort to sell it.

It doesn’t mean they couldn’t do better. I think it’ll be a process between Apple, repair shops and regulators to come up with a compromise that benefits consumers even more… including those that buy second hand (possibly repaired) phones.

How can parts be “in the wrong hands”? Whose hands are wrong? Why does Apple get to decide?

“But whose hands can be said to be truly right”, says the chopshop car parts dealer

How can parts ordered directly from Apple also be taken from stolen phones? Surely anyone being able to get parts from Apple reduces demand for those if anything?

Nobody dislikes the apple self-service except rossman, who is paid to not like them. There is no problem with them and that system works well, other than rossman not being able to make money performing installations of genuine parts at the prices apple charges.

People were complaining you can’t use random parts salvaged from dead phones or use non-genuine parts. And yeah, that’s true, because functionally those are indistinguishable from parts chopped from stolen phones.

“Nobody dislikes the apple self-service except rossman”

Yes they do, the self service is a useless PR stunt which is useful to no one. It’s there so Apple can say “look, we support repair” but it’s completely useless to the average person to the point where people are getting laws put in place to force them to make something better

“who is paid to not like them”

What is this conspiracy theory? I guess technically people donate money to his non profit but that doesn’t go to him?

“There is no problem with them”

What about these problems? - It doesn’t help at all with aftermarket parts, only “genuine Apple” ones they have complete control over - You have to order each part individually, so it takes way more time and money than it needs to if they could just stick replacement parts - It’s designed for individuals to repair parts, which very few people do, they need to be able to take things to repair shops (there is an independent repair program but it’s even more useless)

“other than rossman not being able to make money performing installations of genuine parts at the prices apple charges”

If Apple is artificially blocking others from competing fairly with them, then yes, that’s an issue. It’s called being anticompetitive. Despite all the barriers, though, he (and other independent repair shops) can still often do repairs at a much lower price, but because Apple wants to extort more money rather than making their prices competitive they create artificial issues with this

“People were complaining you can’t use random parts salvaged from dead phones or use non-genuine parts. And yeah, that’s true, because functionally those are indistinguishable from parts chopped from stolen phones.”

What about this compromise solution? Each part is still serialised, but the enforcement is done in the part itself rather than the OS. The part will refuse to power on if a key isn’t provided by the phone. An aftermarket part will still work because it doesn’t have this enforcement, and there is an unpairing process that can be used to salvage non-stolen devices that requires the device to be unlocked. When the unpaired part is connected to a phone again it will pair to that device. Of course, Apple won’t do anything like that unless they have to

> Apple on the other hand wants to prevent parts from falling in the wrong hands

What? Why? Are they like nuclear bombs? What happens if an iPhone screen gets into a wrong hand?

Its shocking to me, that in your mind my right to keep my phone repaired is somehow comparable to Apple's right to prevent me from buying (not stealing) a replacement part.

It means the manufacturer retains ownership and control over an item after they sold it. You are giving them a lot of control over your life, many years in the future - they often refuse repair or impose oneirous terms. This creates insentive for them to consider your phone 'their terf' and to create artificial obstacles to repair by third parties.

This does not stop at Apple, it happens to cars, farm equipment, household appliances, et .

This is a total capitulation of right to private property. You are basically going to become a medieval serf, but with mutiple owners.

> What? Why? Are they like nuclear bombs? What happens if an iPhone screen gets into a wrong hand?

Does it matter?

I’m stating as a fact of matter what their interest is in a comment in which I try to describe the interests of both sides of the equation (with reasonable efforts made to be accurate).

You make the mistake of reading that and attributing it as a personal opinion of mine and then proceed to get all worked up and making false equivalencies in a strained effort to make your point.

The fact of the matter is, for better or for worse, that they are free to decide who they want to do business with (pending some legislative changes here and there).

What their reason is for doing business with one, but not with another, is neither here nor there but if i had to venture a guess I’d say it probably has to do with the prolific market of fake Apple devices.

> It’s shocking to me, that in your mind my right to keep my phone repaired is somehow comparable to Apple's right to prevent me from buying (not stealing) a replacement part.

It’s shocking to me that you present the argument in such a way that the only logical conclusion is for you and me to encroach on Apple’s property rights by being able to dictate if and how they sell their property to us.

And what is the basis of this? Apparently according to you, your property rights are so broad, that it includes access to someone else’s property lest you be deemed a medieval serf of all things.

Drama much?

It needn’t be this complicated nor dramatic. When you purchase an iPhone the iPhone (i.e. the physical device and the physical components it contains) become your property.

You can do with that property as you wish, but those property rights decidedly don’t lend you any rights over other components Apple might produce.

To suggest that your purchase somehow grants you any entitlement to components that weren’t part of the initial sale is outright bizarre, regardless of whether you assert that the entitlement exists outright or as an option for purchase.

> it’s difficult to ensure consistency from repair to repair,

Car companies will argue that all third party car mechanic shops should close down because its difficult to ensure consistency.

>Apple obviously doesn’t want it because even under the best of circumstances it’s difficult to ensure consistency from repair to repair, much less between different technicians or locations.

We all understand why Apple wants these things: they are advantageous to Apple. But what I do with my phone after I bought it should not be Apple's concern.

>If anything it makes them look sketchy when that doesn’t need to be the outcome.

You yourself said that the local store is beloved, didn't you? Maybe most customers understand that the store is working within the confines of Apple's rules?

You should just use the Genius Bar. What's your problem with it?

Do you mind clarifying the "grey market" you mentioned? What does that mean?Illegal resellers of spare parts?

Most customer's are not able to go this in-depth into the "parts availability" issue. If you try to tell them, their eyes will just glaze over.

The repair shop will definitely have considered the option. They will have researched the pro's and con's.

You complained about having to deal with the Genius Bar. I think a lot of repair shops will think that if they go into the repair program they will just turn into a worse version of the Genius Bar.

In addition, the repair shop will know what kind of work they do, what kind of work they want to do, and where they get their profits from. You don't.

So 90% of the time when a customer will suggest joining the apple repair program it's someone who doesn't understand the pro's and con's, doesn't understand the shops business case, and won't respond well to a full explanation of why the repair shop doesn't join. And this person is saying "you need to change your business model, this thing I heard about is better".

Imagining myself in that position, I would also get pretty annoyed.

Sometimes at a party or something someone hears about what I do, knows very little about it, and tells me I should do it completely differently. Doesn't happen often, but it's happened. I get pretty annoyed by that.

Call me a starry-eyed optimist but I think consumers are perfectly capable of understanding “you need to order the part off this website and I’ll install it for you”.

This is the tradeoff you make for not having iPhones stolen and stripped for parts. If you allow “blank” parts with no serial, or allow pairing with random serials, then people will steal phones and strip them.

I’m all for allowing “unpairing” of components when a unit is not in the “stolen lockout” state, such that they can be re-paired with other phones, but they do it for a reason, not just restricting repair.

The value delivered to the average customer by reducing theft risk isn’t zero, and actually it’s probably more than consumers gain from the ability to have a third-party shop install a counterfeit battery with half of its advertised capacity.

Apple battery replacements are dirt cheap, arguably actually probably dumping/under cost (this “byo part” thing usually ends up with repairmen whining that if they have to use first-party parts they can’t compete with apples pricing) because apple wants to make a show of greenwashing. So the commercial value of third-party battery repair is quite small. Is it all really actually worth saving 10 bucks?

You may not know exactly which part needs to be replaced, until you go to a shop to diagnose the issue. That would be 2 trips instead of one. And there could be issues with multiple parts. And you can't know about further issues until you fix rhe first one, resulting in a lot of back and forth.

Honestly this is a major spit in the face from apple, there is no reason to not make the parts available for sale.

> You may not know exactly which part needs to be replaced, until you go to a shop to diagnose the issue.

Isn’t one of the major, constant gripes of the repairmen that they can’t do component level repair and so they have to replace assemblies?

That works in the favor of the repair program here. Oh it’s the camera? Well, there’s only one part that it can be - the camera board. Easy to order.

Repairmen don’t like that but apple is never going to sign off on randos drilling and repadding and reballing their products.

Like again, the accusations of bad faith are fundamentally misplaced. The faith is so good that independent repairmen can’t compete with the service rates that apple offers unless they’re using non-genuine parts to do it. It’s not exactly the way repairmen would prefer to do it, but it accomplishes the goals of maintaining product quality, preventing phone theft, and minimizing e-waste, and repairmen don’t really care about #1 or #2 so their solutions don’t solve for that.

People don't like this take, but most of the time Apple's goals are not completely malicious or incoherent. Just like the sideloading thing: there are legitimate user-focused security and permissioning goals there, and people just don't like it when those ideas are taken to their logical conclusion. Letting users bypass permissioning and app review mean those processes might as well not exist, you have to put a non-trivial barrier there (like requiring a developer account). And providing board-level repairs and driving down the cost of assemblies is realistically how products have to be serviced in the modern world. Krisfix drilling and repadding 4090 boards is not typical quality/skill and is not a scalable model for a repair network. This needs to be something that can be done by a person with 1 year of experience in a strip mall store.

Right to repair does not mean that rossman's business model is the only way that can ever be allowed to work. Shipping around a tiny PCB is not a big deal and board level repairs still keep phones out of landfills, even if it doesn't keep rossman in business. There is no inherent right to profit in capitalism, you can't outlaw someone's business model just because it makes yours difficult.

When the phone doesn't charge it could be the battery, it could be the charging port, it could be a fried resistor on the board or something else.

> You complained about having to deal with the Genius Bar.

I think you might be confusing me with someone else, I don’t recall complaining about the Genius Bar?

> So 90% of the time when a customer will suggest joining the apple repair program it's someone who doesn't understand the pro's and con's […]

Who’s talking about customers making suggestions? We’re talking about customers asking if they are or aren’t an authorized repair shop that’s in the program.

Customers have plenty of legitimate reasons to ask this question, and shops that get pissed when they are being asked this question will quickly lose the trust of their customers.

I can understand why shops get pissed when they’re being asked the question, because best case scenario they see the writing on the wall and know they’re about to lose a prospective customer and “worst” case scenario they are about to be confronted with the reality that someone might in fact not agree with their beliefs that a non-official part is as good as an Apple OEM part or that their beliefs that their work is on par with Apple’s certified repair processes.

But from the perspective of the customer the question comes with the implication that the customer has a certain standard they’re looking for and they are not interested in someone who doesn’t meet that standard, regardless of if the workman shares the same opinions on those standards.

>Apple on the other hand wants to prevent parts from falling in the wrong hands given the already prolific grey market for their parts.

Why would apple restrict parts sales? They still make a profit from selling the components. They are only needed for repairing a product, there is no other use for them.

I can understand why Apple doesn't want component level repairs because most repair shops dont hit the level required for the job. Rossmann is arguably the top 10% of that level of work if not higher.

On the other hand, speaking as an old EE the amount of crap Apple do to their Laptop on newer generation of MacBook circuit. You kind of understand why Rossmann has all the rage.

While I am not aware of Apple doing circuit level repairing, at least not since 2001 with first Apple stores opened. Apple's Genius Bar and repairing were there to file all the problems their products were getting in real life usage. So you get some iteration and small improvement every half generation. Somewhere along the line this stopped happening.

I’m sure Louis Rossmann knows what he’s doing and does a good job, but unless I’m going to go to his shop in…looking it up…Austin if I need my phone repaired, I’m gonna stick with authorized shops because I want to avoid the negative experiences reported upthread.

It should be possible to have an authorized and unauthorized repair center in the same building, maybe even same store, as legally distinct entities.

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