Apple backs national right-to-repair bill, offering parts, manuals, and tools
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This is just another step in a long string of similar announcements and "actions" from Apple to gather ammo against lawsuits and new bills, delay or buy any good will they can get regarding this matter.
It's appears they are convinced some meaningful part of the "Right to Repair" can't be stopped and of course as competent strategists they are, Apple can't be caught "of the wrong side of history" so they pretend to switch sides, or even paint themselves as on of the original supporters. I wonder how bad it gets until they use Steve Wozniak's name for this...
Either way, I'm 99% sure in practical terms this will amount to as much as the "Apple-certified repair" program or those repair kits sold for almost the price of a device.
I'm sorry to be so negative, but the company is the same, the people are the same, their track record has been the same. So.. what are the chances this is different?
This is the way to think about all businesses. Even if they’ve been making your favourite products for years, never forget that they’re just here to make money.
People who attach morals, norms, and emotions to businesses are falling into the marketing trap. This is by design. Unfortunately I don’t know much of a way to get people to snap out of it other than seeing them get burned when their favourite company changes tack.
Plenty of small businesses sometimes act against their own self-interest because they genuinely care about their community and their workers. See: retiring restaurant owners who sell to someone who will keep the tradition alive rather than the highest bidder.
I would say that they have a different value system, or what they're pursuing might be more conducive to their long term survival instead of chasing the almighty dollars.
It reminds me of corporate raiders destroying companies by jacking up prices and reducing costs until it's no longer a functioning business.
My point stands. Large businesses are more exclusively profit-driven than smaller ones.
In the example, someone wanted to see a business tradition carry on even after they were no longer involved in the business. To achieve that, they accepted a lower offer for the business to sell it to someone who also wants to carry on the tradition. But that is exactly the same, as far as the money goes, as selling the business to the highest bidder and then spending those proceeds in some way to see the tradition carry on. The net profitability is the same in both cases.
It's not exactly the same. People have emotional attachments to things, like restaurants. This hypothetical owner may have made the sale they did because it made them happy to think about someone running their restaurant well after they die.
That is to say, we both took "carrying on the tradition" to mean different things, because it's inherently a squishy and emotional goal, not one you can apply a cold econimic calculus to. "If I sell to Bob for $1MM then I achieve 200 tradition points, but if I sell to BigCorp for $1.2MM then I can use that money to achieve 300 tradition points" is not necessarily how this would be thought about.
> That said, there is a bit of disconnect here as the original comment was talking about businesses, while this has turned to talking about the benefactors of the business. They are not completely analogous.
True, and perhaps that's near the crux of my argument. Private company owners who are involed in their businesses' operation are more likely to make bad-for-profit but good-for-other-reasons decisions, whereas distant public shareholders are likely to chase profit as the end-all-be-all.
I don't see the difference.
Let's say, for the sake of discussion, that the highest bidder offers $1,000,000. The party who sees the tradition vision tops out at $750,000.
You can accept the $750,000 offer and see the tradition carry on. Or you can accept $1,000,000 and spend $250,000 of it in some other way to see the tradition carry on. Theoretically the outcome is the same either way. In both cases the business sought a gross return of $1,000,000. In both cases your realized net return is $750,000. In both cases you are spending $250,000 to see your dream of the tradition carrying on playing out.
If you don't care about the tradition then you can just take the $1,000,000 and go on a vacation, or buy a car, or whatever it is that you actually want to do with the money. But in this case the tradition is what the person is said to actually want above all else, and thus that is where the money is being spent. That is, after all, why businesses seek profit – so that the benefactors can spend it on what is aligned with their self-interest, and the example here is no exception.
My whole argument is this: Public shareholders compel their businesses to treat market capitalization and/or dividends as the principal goals. Private owners, though, may have goals other than the business's value or profit, such as "tradition". Whether those other goals can be thought of in terms of monetary value seems orthogonal.
The original comment which set the context and of which we are talking to was specifically about the monetary accounting. It cannot possibly be orthogonal.
Perhaps what you are trying to say, as has been hinted at before, is that said comment, while perhaps technically true in a vacuum, doesn't really mean anything in practice? To which I would agree.
> This is the way to think about all businesses. Even if they’ve been making your favourite products for years, never forget that they’re just here to make money.
> People who attach morals, norms, and emotions to businesses are falling into the marketing trap.
and my point is that not all small business are just here to make money, ie that morals and emotions may be relevant to them. I'm baffled as to why this is a controversial point.
If your point is saying that, to small business owners, money may be exachanged for immaterial things like tradition and satisfsction, then we are in agreement!. It meams that their purpose is not "just to make money", unlike publicly traded companies, whose market-enforced purpose is "just to make money".
Owners of all businesses, no matter how large or small, use the value generated from the business to trade it for things like tradition and satisfaction that is to their personal taste, yes. There is nothing special about small businesses here.
In fact, it is likely that many small business owners also own large, publicly traded businesses at the same time. Are they magically different people, with different ideas on how to spend the money they have at their disposal, when money flows in from the large business rather than the small business? I expect you will find the answer is no. It would take someone extremely eccentric to colour their money such that "This money came from my small business, so I will only do good with it!" along with "This money came from my large business, so it is reserved only for evil! Muhuhahaha." In practice, money is money is money.
I find this read to be a little too pessimistic. They’re not an investment firm. They’re still making products that they want to sell people, and making them the way they think is best. Do they want profit? Of course. But their product is not money. They’re first and foremost an electronics manufacturer.
I agree with your assessment. On the other hand, we should be open and accepting when large companies make policy shifts.
They will need to live up to the expectations of this new enlightenment, to be sure, and not run down the “Apple-certified” path you described. But I’m hesitant to immediately consider this is the way it will be.
I do recognize that optimism and my belief that people (and the companies they embody) can make substantial changes to their default behaviors has burned me before, so your pessimism is certainly warranted.
Man, if I had a dollar for every time I heard something along these lines of "well we should still encourage X, even if it's a clear political play"
I suppose there's just something about being vaguely eager to tacitly accept overt attempts at changing the general discourse
Simply because they begrudgingly acknowledge economically progressive agendas in a very limited context, not even truly supporting it; simply pretending to have been on our "side" the whole time
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me eight or more times..."
Well, that's part of the problem. Right-to-repair bills that don't address serialized components or hardware DRM won't make it better. Apple is backing this bill because it aligns with their definition of "repair" and further reinforces the idea that the first party is the only one allowed to authorize maintenance.
This is less about letting perfect be the enemy of good, and more about struggling to identify the core problem in the first place. If Apple is a required party for me to replace my screen or reinstall a USB connector, then you aren't advocating for a "right" to repair at all. In fact, you're actually coming back around to the 'Repairs-as-a-Service' model that third-parties protested against in the first place.
If you can come up with a version of Right to Repair that eliminates this practice but which doesn’t give gangs of thieves a 10000% higher interest in stealing my phone at a concert to send it to Shenzhen, I’d be all for it. But I suspect you cannot.
Uh... you could just let the user authorize repairs. If your iPhone's root-of-trust is registered with your iCloud account, then users could authorize themselves to make repairs by just putting in the password. Entirely offline, retains Apple's DRM scheme, and even thwarts the Chinese boogeymen that you're so scared of. It just removes the part where Apple has absolute control over the feature instead of the hardware owner.
(If you know what an illegal car “chop shop” is, they operate under the same business model: stolen preowned product as an input, replacement parts sold to repair shops — or used in their own “repair shop” — as an output.)
The exact point of “hardware DRM” is that it allows me to retroactively revoke my consent for the parts of my phone to ever be used again inside some other person’s phone, through the cloud, at the moment I realize my phone has already been stolen.
(Also, FYI, there’s nothing specifically Chinese about this pipeline. It’s not like this is a scam being run by the Triads or anything. Rather, it’s just unchecked capitalism. The gangs that go around stealing phones are small-time local groups of thieves, who have realized they can make a buck by selling and delivering wholesale lots of these phones to amoral “phone chop-shops” who happen to reside in Shenzhen. Those “phone chop-shops” are only in Shenzhen because that’s where all the demand is for the huge number of parts generated by scrapping a phone, and because they can’t sell these parts on without cash-only handshake deals.)
To be clear, the “phone chop-shop” never ask any gangs to steal phones for them, either. They just say they’ll “buy phones in any condition.” (Which is why I say they’re amoral, not immoral.) Everything that happens from then on is the natural consequence of a market optimizing for profitability.
On a related topic, the true point of Apple’s “authorized repair” program, was to penalize any repair shop who knowingly purchased parts from a “phone chop-shop” by disallowing them from ever again purchasing genuine parts; thus creating a disincentive from ever buying these grey-market parts.
You. You are the user.
So, imagine the hardware DRM exactly the way it is now, but with my modifications. The super bad-guys in Shenzhen dismantle my iPhone and try to turn it into a new phone. Oh no! The DRM on the other person's phone says that their parts are paired to my iPhone. Since I never manually un-paired those parts with my iCloud account (or Hardware root-of-trust), they cannot perform the evil deed of scrapping my iPhone for parts. They are thwarted by the exact same system, in the exact same way, except hardware owners hold the keys instead of Apple.
> The exact point of “hardware DRM” is that it allows me to retroactively revoke my consent for the parts of my phone
Minus retroactive control, that's the point of my implementation. The same DRM system that you are describing can be designed so the user can authorize repairs and de-couple parts without Apple's blessing. The only difference is that it would proactively lock all parts to your iPhone and only uncouple them when the user authorizes it. In that way, it's almost more secure than Apple exclusively holding the keys.
> the true point of Apple’s “authorized repair” program, was to penalize any repair shop who knowingly purchased parts from a “phone chop-shop” by disallowing them from ever again purchasing genuine parts
Fun fact! Secondhand chop-shop components and genuine Apple-issued replacements are not the only two options. You can buy a lot of Apple components from TI and Foxconn if you browse their piecemeal catalog. On top of that, there are many people who sell hardware as "for parts" to be used as donor hardware by third parties. It almost feels like Apple created this system to punish anyone who competes with their first-party offerings...
A phone being able to be used for parts should be a default-allow condition; otherwise e.g. any phone owned by someone who dies — which is a large percentage of phones that get genuinely recycled these days! — will consider its parts non-reusable.
Now, if that sort of security doesn't matter to you; good! Me neither. My original thesis was that Apple can reconcile their current DRM scheme with users that want to repair their hardware themselves, via third-parties. I still believe that, and I don't think Apple can prove that their solution is entirely necessary to secure iPhones.
No, it does (and works well!) because the parts don't need to know that they're stolen. That's not how lost mode works†; the parts themselves aren't refusing to cooperate with the new phone. Rather, it's the other phone that needs to know that your phone's parts have been stolen. It then refuses to cooperate with the parts, after the parts identify themselves. All the parts need, for this to work, is immutable individualized bus-message signing keys (a.k.a. "serialized parts.")
Remember that we're also assuming here, a phone ecosystem that has a Trusted Computing Base — one where you fundamentally can't get root to modify the phone's firmware from the signed one that the manufacturer puts on there. (Or at least, not in a way that would leave the phone in a condition that a person just submitting a phone to a repair shop would find acceptable. Jailbroken iPhones, when possible, can no longer follow upstream updates, for just one problem. That's not the kind of thing that would be considered a "successful repair" — it's the kind of thing that'd have the phone taken back for a refund on that repair.)
The presence of a Trusted Computing Base on whatever "compute core" the other parts are going to be attached onto, means that you can't get in the way of any Certificate Revocation List that he manufacturer issues for the signing keys that these retroactively-marked-as-lost parts will present to the new phone when they attempt to pair with it upon activation.
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† "Lost mode" actually triggers three separate things:
1. it sends out a notification to the "compute core" of the lost phone that either immediately — or the next time it comes online, if it hasn't since been rooted [which as I said, is unlikely, for customer-UX reasons] — will lock itself up until someone in possession of it goes through a KYC-like identity verification process with Apple to prove that they are the legitimate owner of the phone — at which point Apple issues a signed packet that tells the "compute core" to un-clench. As long as the "compute core" is locked, it's useless to "chop shops", and just gets discarded as waste in the scrap process.
2. it looks up the certificates used by the various "serialized components" of the phone to sign their bus message traffic (which Apple knows without having to ping the phone, because it recorded those cert IDs when generating them, before burning them into the parts; and knows which phone they went into on the assembly line, because serialized parts) and puts them on an activation-time Certificate Revocation List that all other iOS "compute cores" fetch. (This is what "activation" — in the era of factory-unlocked phones — is: fetching the most up-to-date Certificate Revocation List, and checking whether the signing keys of any of the phone's parts are on it.)
3. it places the "compute core's" associated IMEI number, if any, onto IMEI blocklists; and places the "compute core's" MAC addresses onto government watch-lists. Why bother? Well, sometimes there's no "customer"; instead, some smaller number of these phones are stolen by professional gangs that own the whole pipeline, and their goal isn't parts for repair, but rather to get entire working (nice, modern) smartphones into the hands of "important" people, in countries that Apple's enclosing jurisdiction has decided should not be allowed to "import technology" from them. These groups do this by 1. Faraday-caging the phones, 2. importing them into their country, and 3. delivering them to a jailbreaker who works in a Faraday-caged room. IMEI blocking means that if you successfully did this, your phone might end up working fine on your corrupt country's networks — but the moment you bring it to another country, the baseband modem (which even rooting the phone can't really interfere with) will receive the updated IMEI blocklist from a local network provider, and lock itself up. And then, ideally, the user will try to get online anyway by connecting the phone to some major public wi-fi like an airport — at which point the state actors who monitor MAC address logs of these major public wi-fi APs, will know that there's a Person of Interest in the country.
A scheme where individuals can repair phones, but where every user who wants to order non-device-bound replacement parts must first be vetted to not themselves be a chop shop, or someone working with chop-shops; where non-device-bound replacement parts may only be shipped to such vetted individuals; and where such replacement parts must be end-to-end inventory managed (via e.g. phone activation time pairing of the replacement part with the phone) to ensure that parts are not being "leaked" out of this process via "overstock" or "shrinkage" into the grey-market pipeline. And where previously device-bound parts may become non-device-bound replacement parts, but only through the phone first being sent to Apple (or in theory some other "authorized recycler") to extract and de-pair the parts, so that those parts can't leak into the grey-market pipeline, either.
That is wrong. The Shenzhen boogeyman can be dealt with in ways that don't give Apple the de-facto iron fist over repairs. This is an obvious, bald-faced power grab no different than using terrorism to explain why encryption is a bad technology. Any reasonable jury would conclude that the value of monopolizing your second-hand supply chain far exceeds any profit recouped from snuffing out chop-shop iPhones.
Yes, but as I was attempting to emphasize, the problem is that these same repairs represent "supply chain leaks."
If the operation available to users was to "release their device and all the parts inside it from tracking, such that these parts can then be used to repair any other device" — then these parts would disappear off the face of the earth from a supply-chain perspective, where they could then be stolen from the recycler, from the repair shop, or any number of other intermediaries, before finally making their way into a new device.
(The exception to this "leak" being the one kind of "recycling" that's already permitted: the one where you're releasing the parts from tracking because you're sending them back to the first-party OEM integrator, who can then keep internal supply-chain security for where the parts go from there. I.e., the Apple recycling program.)
The obvious way to prevent the "supply chain leak" would be to change the operation being permitted: rather than "de-identifying" parts so that they're owned by nobody indefinitely until put in a new device; instead, only permit instantaneous transfers, authorized by the current owner at point of transfer, from one device directly into another, such that at all points in time, every part that's left the factory has a legal owner.
I'm a decentralized-systems nerd, so I do realize that you can do something like this without there being one central party who keeps the current supply-chain state of all parts in their own proprietary database. You can use a federated "supply chain transparency" blockchain; design the system so that the validators of this system can elect third-party companies as delegated oracles to then enforce KYC-like identity verification upon signers before they're allowed to perform transactions; etc.
But decentralization in this direction is pointless toward your stated goals, because either it's not decentralized enough to permit individuals as participants (so you inevitably have to lean on some professional, "authorized" repair shop, meaning there is still no actual "right to repair" for individuals); or it's so decentralized that it allows individuals not motivated to repair entry into the system — at which point those individuals have a valuable good (their identity-stake in the system) that they can sell to malicious actors who want to use their identities as "burner identities" (see also: Amazon + eBay sellers buying "aged" and "brushed" accounts to use to perpetrate fraud; people who sell their own email/Discord/etc accounts on carding forums for about a dollar each; etc.) Note how none of the companies talking about "supply chain transparency" are proposing it for the secondary market — only for the primary factory-to-OEM-to-consumer logistical pipeline. For the primary market, it works, because there are a set of known actors who are supposed to be participants in the system, and anyone else is supposed to be kept out. But for the secondary market, this paradigm falls apart.
There you go! I'm glad we can mutually acknowledge that this is more of an Apple problem than it is an end-user one.
> either it's not decentralized enough to permit individuals as participants (so you inevitably have to lean on some professional, "authorized" repair shop, meaning there is still no actual "right to repair" for individuals); or it's so decentralized that it allows individuals not motivated to repair entry into the system
If that's your core conceit, then I just plain disagree. The end-user is a perfectly acceptable party to authorize repair if you don't obsess over your supply chain. As the owner of that hardware, it should be their express right to choose any replacement part they desire for their screen or volume rocker. In this case, Apple has gone out of their way to break third-party options and documented repair methods. It's not about functionality or security, their current implementation (as you've identified) wholly revolves around supply chain control.
It's not illegal, but it should be. The status-quo is morally wrong and makes anti-consumer compromises to ensure the profitability of Apple's secondary market. Anti-theft technology is not inherently amoral, but hardware DRM is, when you use it like this.
> Note how none of the companies talking about "supply chain transparency" are proposing it for the secondary market
Of course they aren't.
...because the economics of it don't work out in favor of actually effectively tracing parts through the secondary-market supply chain, rendering the stated goal of "supply chain transparency" unreachable, and so the system-as-designed pointless to participate in. Are you implying something different?
> There you go! I'm glad we can mutually acknowledge that this is more of an Apple problem than it is an end-user one.
There are more participants in this ecosystem than "the end-user" and "Apple."
Specifically, the actor being harmed here is legitimate third-party repair shops. These small businesses suddenly have a problem... in that these same organized criminal gangs that were previously stealing whole phones, would suddenly have a large incentive to instead break into their repair shops to steal their stocks of "unlocked" parts! And, unlike Apple, who can just post armed guards around their factories and shipping trucks, independent repair shops are small and usually low-margin businesses — so there's very little they can afford to do about that kind of high-grade theft!
For an analogy: narcotic drugs. Drug thieves have a choice: they can try to steal drugs from a pharmaceutical supplier (far out of the way, and well-guarded + built like a fortress with barbed-wire fences and so forth) or a hospital pharmacy (deep within hospitals, also well-guarded, and likely open 24 hours) Or they can try to steal drugs from a small neighbourhood drug store (not well guarded, empty at night.) Which do you think they choose?
But ignoring that, this "releasing of parts" still harms the end-user — because it gives the grey-market buyers of repair parts — the same ones buying from chop-shops — a channel by which to acquire a stock of the critical missing parts (logic boards!) required to build full new phones out of mostly-otherwise-stolen parts.
Previously, these grey-market buyers could only operate as repair shops, repairing existing phones (i.e. building a phone up around a customer's working logic board.) But now, by buying 90% chop-shop parts and 10% legitimate released-to-secondary-market logic boards, they can construct full phones for sale, that are cheaper than the cheapest legitimate secondary-market phones! And guess what direction this takes the demand for chop-shop parts, and therefore the demand for stolen phones?
Alright, you had me doubled over in laughter for a second there. I hope to see John Deere argue the same when their anti-repair reckoning comes, the testimony would be legendary.
> But ignoring that, this "releasing of parts" still harms the end-user — because it gives the grey-market buyers of repair parts — the same ones buying from chop-shops — a channel by which to acquire a stock of the critical missing parts (logic boards!) required to build full new phones out of mostly-otherwise-stolen parts.
Two refutations:
- If this was Apple's end-goal, then they wouldn't stop users from replacing piecemeal components themselves and only use the DRM to prevent complete "ship of Theseus" situations as you are presenting. Even in that scenario, those iPhones are technically refurbished (like it or not) because their processors are OEM.
- By characterizing the secondhand market as gray, you are both acknowledging it has legitimate demand and is a market. If Apple is using their power as an original manufacturer to stop people beyond "minting" new iPhones, it should be stopped. I'm not saying this as a whistleblower, I'm saying this as a genuine regulatory and legislative suggestion.
> But now, by buying 90% chop-shop parts and 10% legitimate released-to-secondary-market logic boards
Then, as I said, force the end-user to authorize the release of the components. Make it some absolutely stupid security theater stuff, to really give people like you something to yap about. Make it a 48 hour process that involves 2 Genius Bar assistants and a remote expert who ensure that you aren't being held at gunpoint by using your Apple Watch to track your blood pressure. Then you both fix the market, give people a nice customer story to help them sleep at night, and let people repair their phones. I'm not asking for the world, it's a trillion-dollar business. Of course I'm going to expect the base-level benevolent conduct from them when regulators don't babysit their every move.
Alternatively, Apple could acknowledge that this is "not their problem" and trying to pretend otherwise is a good way of getting their anticompetitive clock cleaned.
I understand that reasoning for it (although I think that's not the only reason Apple does this).
But personally, that sort of thing is one of the reasons why I wouldn't buy an iPhone. The cost of that kind of "theft protection" is, for me, too high. I prefer not having any theft protection at all over a scheme that removes my ability to repair or modify my devices.
Hardware DRM (at least as it exists) makes really meaningful right-to-repair technically impossible.
I think that's unlikely. Phones are disguised by cases. Most tech folks can't even tell them apart when they are sitting side by side on a desk in front of them. Not without the screen coming on, anyway. Let alone in someone's pocket or at a bar. If anything Androids might be stolen more often due to socioeconomic pressure. Can't afford an iPhone, can't afford a nice neighborhood. Or vice versa, an Android gets stolen because it looks like an iPhone, a higher price target. And those would only be relevant IF the statistics agreed with your assertion here, but I don't see that they do, based on some quick searching.
Regardless, phone location was a feature of Android long before iOS. I had it on Windows CE phones before the iPhone even existed. Laptops had LoJack before smart phones existed. Theft was not deterred. Rates of recovery maybe increased, but I'm not sure we have statistics on the latest Apple tech to be able to opine about it, and I wouldn't expect that they would say anything about theft, only about recovery when the criminal is stupid enough to not use some cheap shielding they could get off of Amazon for $5.
You're right, in a literal sense; people pickpocket a phone before knowing what it is.
It's what happens right after the actual theft that makes a difference. These more-organized thieves know that these chop-shop buyers aren't (nearly as) interested in iPhones, often to the point that they aren't worth the cost of the added shipping weight. So when they manage to nab a phone, they do a quick examination, to figure out what kind of phone it is. If it's an iPhone, they drop it in a nearby trash can; or sometimes they try to con some local who doesn't know anything about phones (think: drug dealer who wants a second phone) into buying it on the street.
That's where you find the majority of "stolen iPhones": in the trash near where it was lost, or in the hands of some local who was dumb enough to buy it not realizing it will be marked "lost" in short order and become useless to them. Both of these are "recoverable" losses — which, from both the phone owner's and Apple's perspective, is a win!
Meanwhile, the Android devices go in a box, and the box goes on a boat.
> Regardless, phone location was a feature of Android long before iOS. I had it on Windows CE phones before the iPhone even existed. Laptops had LoJack before smart phones existed. Theft was not deterred.
Yeah, because as I said, this isn't — and never was — about refurbishing the device. It's about scrapping the device for parts. Location tracking does not prevent a device being scrapped for parts, because chop shops actually throw away the location-tracking bit — the "compute core" — and just keep all the other expensive parts.
Plenty of people with stolen phones see their phone mysteriously show up reporting itself to now be in Shenzhen. Then the location tracking turns off and never comes back, because the phone was chopped up and the compute-core bit thrown away.
It just doesn't happen nearly as often, per capita, to iPhone owners as it does to Android owners, because a large number of the iPhones are "rejected from the funnel."
When an IMEI is reported stolen carriers blacklist it. Either way you have to swap the IMEI, so I'm not seeing a difference.
Anyway, my estimation is that while some might, most stolen phones don't end up in China anyway. They end up on Craigslist in a city 4 miles away from the crime.
The difference in ratios between the Android and iOS ecosystems, of phones stolen-and-resold-locally and therefore "recoverable", to phones stolen-and-then-"trafficked" and so unrecoverable, comes down to a deterrent effect from how completely iOS's lost mode stops part reuse. By having the 20%-or-so of phones that are marked as lost/stolen, become effectively entirely dead weight with no reusable parts, the margin for the whole logistics pipeline (steal, ship, take apart) for this type of phone drops negative.
If we're going to draw an equivalency between the two, then we should also take care to recognize that corporations are sociopaths.
You can argue it's questionable from many perspectives – I can be a lot more unfiltered about this – but it tells you how specific of a context large American publicly traded companies work in. If that makes the idea of the large American publicly traded company problematic, that's a reasonable conclusion.
I can also see the same company fighting against state-level regulation because a patchwork of laws for this kind of thing is silly.
In Apple:s case, this may even help them, as they have wider margins to absorb the cost of repairability stuff than their competitors.
Google, Samsung, and Microsoft have been officially partnered with iFixIt for a few years now. Heck, even Microsoft has been redesigning their laptops to use magnets instead of glue, specifically for reparability.
Not to mention this is a problem more unique to the portable electronics industry.
Anyway, the regulation that is forcing change is coming in the EU. These companies don't want to design multiple variants of the same product. So change is coming regardless.
Removable batteries in phones is going to be sweet too.
If anything, this proves that Regulation Works! Big tech Leviathans can be steered if their lobbyists lose, and if governments take informed decisions about how to drive change.
This is a rare exception where the US govt hasn’t abdicated to its role, and this is the natural consequence, with Apple - we can give ‘em that - accepting this as best as it can by fulfilling its shareholder and profit-making duties.
Perhaps by explaining why they changed their mind? What factored into it, and why they had adopted the previous stance - in a meaningful way, i.e., not just vapid "protect our customers" when several of their previous moves (having genuine Apple parts seized by Customs for 'trademark' issues) have been plainly self-interest. And by explaining how they intend to make this a way of life going forward, not just a token or begrudged minimum effort offering.
Sure. We will perceive them as honest if they choose to do the right thing regardless of financial impact and completely of their own accord. If governments had to step in and force them to do things, it's just damage control.
Apple will rent you a kit for $49. Find one other manufacturer of similar devices who even pretends to do this, never mind spins up an international program for it.
> Please don't attach any morals to this because there aren't any.
Of course there are. All corporate decisions are ultimately human decisions. Any human decision in a social context has moral implications. Saying that corporate decisions are devoid of morals lets companies off the hook.
Now, I believe understand what you mean — that Apple’s decisions are pure business, that they do not consider moral or ethical implications. I believe this is demonstrably false. Apple has for decades made difficult and expensive choices which clearly serve their customer’s best interests.
They could build customer profiles based on location information and sell them; they do not. They make more effort to reduce the environmental footprint of their products than any similar company; for instance, it’s getting very difficult to find any plastic at all in Apple packaging. They could keep their mouth shut about LGBQ issues, yet they’re consistently vocal and demonstrative about their support.
Yes, all these things _also_ make Apple money. They’re brilliant at this. Just because they make money does not mean all their actions are so dictated, any more than yours or mine.
> I’m sorry to be so negative.
In our world of late-stage capitalism it’s hard to blame you for feeling cynical. Don’t tar everyone with the same brush. Not every company treats humans as grist for the mill.
Parts pairing isn’t inherently bad but it could be done in a way that is consumer friendly. Are you seriously telling me that apple can release the iCloud lock on the phone when you go to sell it but they can’t release the lock on the parts? It’s that simple. Tether the iCloud lock to the parts themselves. If I have findmy turned on and the parts are harvested they are completely useless, they simply won’t work at all. If I have it turned off they work perfectly.
This is arguably a superior system to the current one where the parts can be harvested from an iCloud locked phone and they kind of work. I can harvest a screen from an iCloud locked iPhone 15 today and it will still work. The faceid won’t work, the true tone won’t work, the front camera won’t work, and the auto brightness won’t work, but night shift will work and the screen itself will work.
And frankly as someone who does repairs as a side job it is a matter of time until the parts pairing is circumvented in some way. It likely won’t be easy and will require a sketchy $2-400 box from china along with very good microsoldering skills to move whatever bga nand ic apple has on the lcd flex to the replacement. But they’ve cracked it for every other iPhone to date including the 14 pro max. A lot of repair shops won’t do that because the hardware is pricey and the skills required are pretty intense.
This is a regulatory failure imo. I am 100% sure if apple had their way once you signed into iCloud the phone would be forever linked to you. The only reason that is not the case is because the first sale doctrine says we (in America at least) have a right to resell the things we buy. But that doesn’t explicitly say anything about the individual components of the things we buy and that hasn’t been legally tested afaik so here we are. Or maybe I’m wrong here, I’m not a lawyer at all
And that doesn’t touch upon their supply chain hostility. I do repair as a side business so I don’t really mess with phones much because I don’t want to do lcd swaps all day. I have a day job and really just want stuff I can do 1-3 nights a week and maybe on the weekend and more of the diagnosis and microsoldering work that I find challenging and enjoyable. As a result I do laptops and consoles a lot more. MacBooks are frustrating because there are several situations in which I simply cannot get chips.
Apple buys them all? Or forces TI or whoever to not sell them to digikey/mouser/etc. LCD panels are the same. This is more complicated and gets into the complexity of oem vs 3rd party which may not be economically feasible anymore with modern electronics fabrication. So then should there be regulatory requirements that apple or Samsung or whoever can’t control 100% of a certain chip, lcd panel, whatever so that I as an independent entity can still provide cheap component level repairs of your MacBook?
Sigh. The sad part is this industry will likely be obsolete in 5-10 years (the idea of component level repairs kind of already is) but it doesn’t have to be. This isn’t an “automation made my job obsolete” situation. This is a “powerful companies don’t like a lack of control” situation. As a result, we lose an industry that could potentially create a lot of local small business and jobs. It’s okay, apple and Samsung need that money more anyway I guess
Of course there are other companies that have similar approach, but if you want to make a change, I am guessing Apple would be the best company to try to force into more nature and consumer friendly practices.
When you are at the scale of Apple, you could have a whole team designing your right-to-repair compliant processes, and lobbyists to ensure the law as passed is most favorable to your implementation.
It also fits in nicely with Apples general SKU-minimization philosophy (though they've been loosening up there). It is a lot easier to stock parts/manuals/tools for 3 phone SKUs per year which you continue to sell for 2 years than for 25 Samsung Galaxy somethings.
I’ve always thought RtR enthusiasts would be surprised when they finally caught the car. And here we are.
Also running a small batch of non-RtR compliant phones is probably going to result in a more expensive device than a mass produced RtR device due to economies of scale, whereas I’d guess it’s much easier for a small airline to undercut competitors by foregoing safety checks, so there’s more adverse incentives in the airline case.
https://blog.execustaffhr.com/legal-compliance-based-on-your...
This is mostly done to not suffocate small companies.
A bad analogy if I may, we have less expectations with kids than with adults.
Why develop anything new when copying someone else’s work is so much more lucrative?
IMO the core of right to repair should be more focused on preventing anti-competitive artificial barriers to repair, not forcing companies to give away their secret sauce.
And unless your product is covered under a patent (and even if it is), China's going to knock it off anyway.
frankly, it’s the smaller players who are more likely to go under, like Vanmoof, where as the consumer i’m MORE in need of the right to repair it myself.
I’ve run into this personally with a Rapsodo golf launch monitor with a faulty battery, where i attempted to replace it myself. I couldn’t find the battery online and the company refused to sell me just the battery. They said i had to buy a new device.
Apple really can’t win. Oppose RtR. Gets criticized. Complies with RtR. Also gets criticized. LOL
Thats especially true when it comes to this, which is something they've been aggressively fighting against for years.
Wrong, they can just do i
- publish schematics for everyone (not only approved partners)
- publish diagnostic software for everyone
- sell repair tools and spare parts to everyone
- allow legit users to use their broken devices parts for spare parts by providing ways for the owner to transfer ownership or renounce ownership claim over the device.
- actually offer repair services instead of pretending soem small issue is unfix able and the user should buy a new device sicne repalcing the motherboard costs as much as a new device.
- admit immediately where there is an hardware problem not only after they are forced by the justice system (at least we would avoid those annoying HN Apple fanboys that were rudely accusing people with the keyboard problem that they are putting food or drink on those keyboards and claimed Apple super paid engineers would have caught any problem with their SciFi robot hands that they use to test their keyboards, no joke, so many fanboys were defending Apple in that period)
We need to remove the threat of that regulatory stick and add another atick threatening them for lack of openness. Then there is the carrot hobbyists will find a use for their chips that creates a secondary market like rtlsdr or rpi back when. Let the FCC go after people actually breaking the law rather than making sure the world is safe from things a few people might use for breaking the law.
Which is why those things are usually independent subsystems. You can be completely open about everything else and still keep tight control over those things.
I do not think that the "apple approved partners" have access to software that can at the same time diagnose a hardware issue and change the bandwidth or other parameters to illegal values.
I remember one other issue , maybe it was fixed, but if you were a partner with Apple and someone had a broken product that needed a new part you had to first send the broken part to Apple and then they would send a replacement , so a customer would have to wait for days. It is a system that encourages the user not to repair and just give more money to Apple.
It makes sense people are skeptical now when they were already fooled once.
Personally I'm going to believe it when I see it.
All they did is some PR pretending to support a law they will clearly refuse to obey. There is no explanation for this except that it's a Machiavellian act.
Hugh Jeffreys demoed it with a laptop and phone
iphone 15 https://youtu.be/dbRKQ0OjQeE?si=hb5lNXSwUYIxXyyj&t=323
"You can right to repair, you just have to wait 3 hours on the phone on the world's least stable customer service line."
I shouldn't have to drag my balls through apple's pile of glass to use the product I purchased. This is nearly every giant corporation these days, so I guess i have to just stop purchasing anything but necessities.
I should note I do not blame the customer service representatives for this. Most businesses are obviously running a skeleton crew and most of the people you talk go have zero authority to fix an issue.
The wait times seem nonexistent, and you can schedule a callback at a time of your choosing so you can skip the line entirely.
That said, my personal favorite is just texting them over iMessage. No waiting, no reading off serial numbers and hoping the representative heard you correctly over a phone line with ancient audio quality, and no symmetrical communication that requires you to devote all your attention to the conversation.
Simply get it done on your own time.
Besides, maybe the big solar flare comes and you can't call Apple for a few months or years. Offline repair needs to be possible.
If that happens, the cell towers are probably down, and your primary goal is to avoid starvation; not repair a phone that outside of taking photos is now basically useless.
Also, where are you even charging your phone after such an event? How are you repairing that method and preventing that from getting stolen?
(I know which wire needs 24v to cut the thermostat out of the equation and talk directly to the furnace, but I'm sure there are cases where such a workaround isn't available.)
There are some replacement parts lying around, so I anticipate that certain areas (the cities) will have power restored in weeks. It's figuring out how to fabricate new parts that will take years. Plus, some have solar panels. So power will likely be available for certain users well before long distance connectivity is restored.
My solar panel inverter is also configured with an app that I would have a hard time coming by without internet (it's supposed to be a dealer only thing but I got them to set me up).
It's an increasingly relevant part of the stack for things that are more important than cat videos.
...or something. I'm uncertain about these conclusions because this isn't really the kind of engineering I'm into. But I no longer trust the people who installed it, or the people who designed it, so I'm kind of on my own (it was kind of a pricy system, I can't afford to just replace it).
But however bad the situation is, it's made worse by vendors trying to prevent users from tinkering. At least Lennox is ineffective at keeping me out of their dealer facing controls. The awful thing about Apple is that they're good at it.
In the video linked above they say the parts have to be Apple-certified. It's not as flexible as buying any random part and being able to use it right away, but it's not surprising considering it's Apple. Still, this makes swapping parts a predictable process.
That's not going to work if you want to make a working phone out of two broken ones, it's the repair program which prevents you to repair that is moot.
I feel two ways about bricked devices too. Those stacks of devices that are fine hardware-wise but locked so essentially useless.
What apple can do is unlock the parts only on owner's consent. Then it will be win win on both sides.
This seems like the best solution. Frees up parts for reuse when the owner has permitted it while still bricking stolen devices.
Not only because his clout now heavily depends on dissent but also because his individual needs go far beyond that of the average repair shop, much less the average consumer.
There is no world in which Apple can meet those needs short of him getting direct access to all internal classified documentation and the assembly line to pick and grab any piece and part he might desire.
not sure if this is related, but it looks like a step in the right direction.
The only reasonable price for documentation that already exists is quite frankly zero.
Right now, some repair shops (e.g. Louis Rossmann) have had to buy broken laptops and scavenge components in order to make repairs.
Presumably this news means that Apple is making the configuration tools more widely available to third parties, but I’ll bet they will only authenticate parts supplied directly by Apple, not parts scavenged from other devices!
(There is perhaps some logic to all this: it makes phones less desirable to thieves if they can’t be broken down and resold for parts)
I vaguely recall stories of Apple sending out a shipping pallet of industrial tooling to replace a screen. The speculation at the time was that they were trying to be absurd and demonstrate why the average Joe shouldn’t be trying to do what their approved facilities can.
I would definitely like for some things to be reasonably accessible to me for fixing so I didn’t have to rely on privacy disrespecting repair shops.
More discussion over here:
I hope we'll gradually see decent alternate compatible parts, with a better self-fixability.
How much does it cost to replace a similar part on an Android phone released the same year?
For Android: I have actually asked the repair shop a few minutes ago, and the answer ranges between 50€ and 400€ depending on the actual model, because the Android market is much more diverse (EDIT: for Android phones released around the same period).
But with a more low-end Android phone, you can get cheaper repairs.
I still hope that a bit more options for parts will lead to lower prices, because I prefer to keep devices as long as possible.
An iPhone SE uses high quality parts that are highly durable.
An iPhone SE, as you noted, is on the low to mid range for repair when compared to other smart phones.
If you use a low-end Android phone you can get cheaper repairs. Presumably because they’re cheaper, lower quality parts.
I’m not entirely sure what the complaint is about.
There is just a hope that a more open situation on iPhones will lead to cheaper yet decent quality repairs for older iPhones, so that it is more encouraging to repair rather than replace.
I think that’s it’s unlikely to see much lower prices (while maintaining quality) given that Android has that more open repair situation yet the iPhone repair pricing is on the low-mid range even now for high-quality, high-durability parts.
To make them cheaper, with high quality and high durability you need the volume pricing that Apple commands from suppliers.
basically what we have here is a California set of laws that they’re more okay with, and a Minnesota set of laws they dont like, so they’re using the opportunity of interest from the White House to get California’s law passed by Congress to render the Minnesota one redundant and ignorable before that one's idea spreads
What I like about the US is that you can do the same on anything, while still operating within a familiar framework in comparison to a different country
At the state level, for business if the case law in Delaware isn't your favorite, you can literally just go argue for the opposite in Wyoming. They have a chancery court too.
It still is a land of opportunity, as long as you’re willing to warp the universe of opportunities yourself.
So yes they'll let a shop repair your device, or you can do it yourself, no problem. But you won't be buying even genuine Apple parts from eBay or pulling them from a broken device and reusing. You must, MUST, purchase directly from Apple at their list prices.
1/ deposition competitors with inferior repairability v performance scores, ultimately leading to increased market share among the most discerning customers, who are also influencers for other non-expert buyers
2/ eventually create a thriving secondary market that reaches consumers who otherwise wouldn't consider buying Apple products, ultimately leading to increased market share among non-expert buyers and children (who grow up to be customers)
Here’s what I think of Apples right to repair support: bullshit
- Electronic components.
Most attempts to water down R2R specifically involve limiting the access provided to "assemblies" rather than individual chips. OEMs don't actually do component level repair[0], the labor costs are too high, so they make the consumer eat the cost of a logic board swap. Furthermore they don't want to have to sell components because that makes product cloning easier.
- Parts pairing tools.
Parts used to authenticate the user are typically paired to the device specifically to prohibit third-party replacement. This is for a legitimate reason[1], but that reason has been weaponized into a generic prohibition on third-party repair. Repair shops should have access to the tools needed to swap serialized parts between phones.
- Calibration tools.
Parts that aren't explicitly locked out for security reasons still sometimes require calibration. This is mainly because Apple likes to get the most out of their parts, and is a legitimate engineering reason, but Apple won't provide the calibration tools because it's PrOPrIETaRY. This often generates confusion when people swap logic boards and think that something is paired when it's not, and we can't tell the difference until someone actually goes and builds their own calibration tool for it[2].
- "Intellectual property"[3] exemptions.
People who make third-party pairing or calibration tools run the risk of spurious DMCA 1201 claims. While DMCA 1201 is ostensibly there to prevent people from selling copying tools for copyrighted works, that protection also applies to software, and software has a nasty habit of working its way into absolutely everything. While it might ultimately be legal to produce a tool to allow parts to be swapped, that still subjects the producer of that tool to years and years of litigation to prove their legality. Even the existing DMCA 1201 exemption process, which is specifically intended to prevent this, only applies to individual acts of circumvention and not tools. We need either a separate exemption process for tools, or at the very least, an extension of copyright misuse to include "adding DRM to things that are not copyrightable" and statutory damages for such misuse.
[0] Unless forced to do so to fix a product defect, and usually it's done like shit by the lowest bidder
[1] Fake touch sensors can just lie and provide the same fingerprint data each time
[2] Such as the calibration tool for the MacBook angle sensors, which everyone thought was paired to the device - even Apple's PR team - but wasn't. People were hallucinating all sorts of explanations as for why you would need to lock down an angle sensor when it turns out Apple just doesn't communicate any of this.
[3] I'm using the phrase "Intellectual property" in the sense of "anything we can use to stop competitors from competing", not in reference to any actual, specific law.
This is how the automotive industry has managed 3rd party repairability, and it’s served them well. It’s almost less about the parts themselves (gears/shafts/bearings can measured and machined and fasteners can generally be found off the shelf), and more about the the components not having interchange part numbers, or official service manuals with torque specifications. It’s an entire market separate from official channels of part acquisition.
I’m dealing with a consequence of an “assembly” now. I have a GTI with VW/Audi 6-speed manual transmission of type 02Q. If you looked at all VW/Audi vehicles with a standard/manual over the last 25 years, it’s going to be a 02M, 02Q, or 0FB - all of these sharing roughly 80% of their parts with one another. But, it’s an assembly, so you cannot find individual replacement gears, pinion bearings, synchro rings, shift forks, etc from OEM, everything is aftermarket. If you’re having transmission problems that cannot be fixed with new seals, input bearings, sensors, or fluid change, you need to get a whole new transmission according to VAG.
My first gear synchro ring is busted and instead of buying $40 3-inch diameter piece of stamped brass, VAG wants me to drop $5000+ for the part. The labor would be less for the swap than doing the repair, but they would rather make me spend money on the part so they can sell the old one to a remanufacturing company and they can sell me the trans for $3000. I can go to a salvage yard and get one for $400 or pick and pull (and hate myself for trying to wrestle it out) for $250.