Comment by tigroferoce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tigroferoce | Hacker News Reader

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> Its a phone for christ sake, they only last a few years, where have you seen this issue even come up On this point I don't agree. My iPhone is about to be 5 years old, it's fully functioning and I'm about to pass it to my daughter. The only repair I did was changing the battery at an Apple Store, which cost around 100$ and took a couple of hours.

For me this is a decent service and a decent device lifetime (provided it will stay in my kid's hands for a few years more).

In the past I had to deal with non original repairs (in specific batteries for HP laptop) and my experience was truly truly bad. True, it was 15 years ago, so battery technology might have changed.

I don't really care for self repairing. I understand that there are people that care for that and I respect that; for them Apple probably is not the right brand. For me, personally, a phone or a laptop must work as expected, have a decade of lifetime, and might require servicing a couple of time during its lifetime max, for a reasonable price.

So far, my experience with Apple tic these boxes.

> I don't really care for self repairing

Self repair is a tiny part of the market. But if I can’t self repair because I can’t get hold of parts, then you probably can’t find an independent repair shop to fix something because they can’t get parts either. That is their goal.

> Apple is probably not the right brand

How do you imagine that other brands are not doing the exact same thing? If Apple is allowed to do it, everyone will do it. Not just on phones, on cars, on dishwashers, everything.

https://www.cdccellularrepair.com/post/samsung-parts-seriali...

My point is that if there is a market for devices that can be easily repaired, then there will be devices that can be easily repaired. If there is no such a market, then there will be no such devices.

If the second case is true, we can clearly mandate this by law, but then we must explain the reasons behind it, and we must also search for alternative ways of enforcing such reasons.

IMO the modern devices are way too complex to service on your own for most of the people. And those who might be able to technically do that often times are not interested into actually doing it. Also, the tradeoff that such a serviceability would imply might be not interesting (e.g. bulkier device, more complex waterproofing, less sturdy chassis, ...).

Again, it's my personal opinion, based on personal experience, but since we do have alternatives (e.g. the fair phone) and since these devices are not that widespread, I'm afraid my opinion is more common that you'd think.

Security isn't a binary. Banks are secure. Prisons are secure. In software and hardware the thing being secured against is increasingly the "owner" of the device, for the benefit of rentiers.

I might agree, but my experience with this brand in particular is that I buy much less devices, and I pay them more. All in all I think that the money I spend is similar, but the quantity of devices is lower.

Again, this is MY experience, in MY context, with MY use case. I believe that my use case is pretty common, but I might be wrong, of course.

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