Apple is lobbying against right to repair 6 months after supporting it
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Doesn't this describe every company, is there any company in a capitalist market would care about anything other than money? I might be wrong or shortsighted but happy to be proved wrong.
Private companies can afford not to subscribe to the single core tenet of capitalism which is to "maximize shareholder value".
"Founders" like Musk and Jobs have a short window where they can move their companies in directions which matches their vision, but that closes quickly after the company goes public and their stock gets diluted enough so that they be ousted.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-compan...
"In Shlensky v Wrigley, a famous American case, the firm that owned the Chicago Cubs baseball team refused to hold games at night, even though this would have increased profits and value. The director, Mr Wrigley, argued that installing lights for the games would disturb the peace of the surrounding environment." Good example of it not being 100% about money.
Sure. There are plenty of smaller companies whose goal is financial sustainability while also pursuing some other objective. It's just much harder to maintain that position when you have millions of investors expecting growth or increasing returns.
When real human beings - who can care about things - stand up and speak on behalf of a company, we're falling for a hell of a deception if we think their words represent anything solid.
many cases of very common damage to such devices is very much fixable, at least theoretically for a small fraction of the price
they mainly care about you not repairing them
any supposed "compromised security" could be handled with free user choice in form of a hardware lock-down mode (with appropriate warnings) but the huge majority of their users don't need nor care for that
they provide no proper repair, only replacement of whole sometimes multiple components which given their design often means the whole motherboard, even if needed repairs can often be done with much much less cost
their repair is also believed to systematically misclassify damage and needed repairs (i.e. it looks like it's structured with a focus on avoiding actual repairs). E.g. not just are there many cases of them stating that there was water damage without there being any sign of that they also use overly sensitive water intrusion sensors which frequently go off without any intrusion. Stories of them claiming other damage when the repair was e.g. just a faulty cable.
they have done many steps to either make repair outright impossible or so cumbersome that they monetary make no sense (e.g. their "repair program")
As far as I remember multiple PR campaigns which focused around fearmongering about "evil independent repair shops" have indirect ties with Apple. Indirect enough so that Apple can claim that had nothing to do with them.
I.e. they in my opinion really don't want you to repair your devices, or worse upgrade them.
Security in many (maybe not all) cases seems to play no role outside of being a good excuse.
Beyond repair shops, there is a healthy cottage industry with thousands of participants - maybe tens of thousands - who do repairs in their homes as a hobby, extra income or for friends and family. Buying and fixing broken second-hand doodads for resale can be a profitable hobby, and saves items from being consigned to trash early. Apple gets $0 from this aftermarket, and ends up competing with its own products from 2018. I don't think they are pleased about Oregon's bill, especially as we've hit the limits of Gordon's Laws.
It's more than a little depressing that marketing can be so effective even when it's a bald-faced lie
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1ZK1CO/
Privacy is just a marketing bullet point for them and a brand differentiator. There’s no substance there. Everyone is pro-privacy when compared to Google.
As someone who prefers Apple products these days, I don't run into many people who blindly think that privacy is some kind of immutable characteristic of the corporation. We absolutely understand that it is a position they put themselves into because it attracts customers. It's important to their bottom line.
> Apple would abandon prioritizing privacy the moment market conditions stop that from being a profitable position to have
True, but I think the leaders at Apple are well aware of how risky abandoning such a core selling point would be for future sales. They have to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, much less actual privacy violations, or it'll tank their reputation. I think it unlikely they will conclude that selling the data is more valuable anytime soon.
Luckily there are so many anti-Apple people constantly scrutinizing their every action for possible malfeasance, I expect we'll hear about it very quickly and loudly if/when it happens. A problem to worry about then. Right now, their competition is largely unconcerned with privacy already.
You should read the terms of service.
One law firm specializes in this, and the story above has been the case in each of the five or six times it has been done.
Yet they claim, with a straight face (and even have writers like Matt Levine carrying water for them) that really, truly, honestly, they're not doing this to avoid liability, they're doing it "to make the process easier for the plaintiffs and streamline their legal efforts".
Like how utterly stupid do they think we are? Why on earth would a multinational for profit company spend considerable effort to actively assist people who are suing them?
Because the work overall the organization is doing becomes more valuable with this change. As an analogy, it's akin to saying you'll deal with a specific problem for this part of the day - and the rest will be focussed on other productive things. For a whole class of problems, your overall day would go better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVAmnV65_zw
In one of his videos they mention how they're able to sometimes source parts and it's by workers sneaking broken boards out of the factory and if that isn't a depressing state of repairs I don't know what else could be worse. The bar is so low here, a law that just prohibited Apple from seizing genuine parts from 3rd party repair shops who salvage them from broken phones/laptops would already be an improvement.
That may also be one of the contributing factors to why Apple began enforcing serialized parts in their product lineups but in my opinion, isn't anything new: we have such a system at my workplace that prevents components from being illicitly used or is blocked from being allowed onto a test flow because, this is "what the [big] customer wants".
First its engineering challenges that require pairing. Now its to keep the evil repairmen from installing surveillance modules (?).
1. Make the product as reliable as possible.
2. Make the product non-repairable.
Every company also increases profit by selling more units, so when a company's only performance metrics come from Wall Street, well, here we are.
The only solution in the absence of significant competition (which applies to Apple) is regulation. There need to be laws that mandate not only repairability but also that Apple absorb the now-externalized societal cost of all the e-waste their devices produce.
Can you use a gen1 iphone - it would only be about 15 years old (2g phone networks are being dismantled, and may only be on frequency that were not even allocated to phones when that was built). If it breaks what can you repair on it to make it work again?
Of course sometimes it isn't worth repairing. I had my 50 years old furnace repaired 2 years ago - but I was already saving to replace it as a modern one is so much more efficient (I also knew the city was putting in natural gas pipes, so I wanted to wait)
The market for mobile phones is abnormally dysfunctional.
Apple deserves criticism for desktop PC repairability, though. At least in the past. There were several iterations of Mac mini or other desktops that they intentionally made harder to repairable with no gain. I don't even mean the T2 chips that at least have a semi-plausible excuse, I mean like soldering in the RAM or gluing together the body. Again the market has spoken; I think even the creative pro market went to Windows long ago.
Making a phone modular isn't that complicated -- they, in fact, used to do it. Many flip phones had replaceable batteries that the user could so easily remove that they made external chargers in case you wanted two batteries. The amount of space and weight required to put a processor in a socket of the type traditionally used in laptops is negligible, even for a phone, but would significantly lower the cost of repairs because a broken connector on the logic board wouldn't require you to replace the expensive SoC. The electronics in many modern phones are already layered to preserve space and the contact points between layers are a natural position for modular component boundaries.
Re processor sockets etc: When is the last time you had to throw away the phone you use because of a bad CPU? Bad connector on logic board? The whole thing is a single solid piece now, it doesn't really fail. It's basically screen and battery, and both are actually not that hard to replace on iPhones.
That mobile phones lack any kind of meaningful standard is rather the problem, but the form factor hasn't significantly changed since the original iPhone.
> When is the last time you had to throw away the phone you use because of a bad CPU?
That's the point. The CPU doesn't go bad, but it's expensive, and right now if a kid snaps off the USB connector on your phone you may have to replace the entire logic board including the CPU. Likewise if you're attempting a repair of something else and you damage one of the tiny fragile internal connectors in the process. Then you need a new logic board, but that could be a $20 part instead of a $200 one if everything else wasn't soldered to it.
> Bad connector on logic board, what connectors? The whole thing is a single solid piece now, it doesn't really fail. It's basically screen and battery, and both are actually not that hard to replace on iPhones.
There are often separate connectors for not just the screen and battery but the camera(s), earpiece, antenna(s), and also stuff like this:
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Taptic_Engine
As I said, there are already a lot of connectors in the thing. Adding two or three more wouldn't be a big deal, but would do a lot in terms of repair cost by separating the things most likely to break from the things with the highest cost.
It would also give you the ability to do upgrades. Any kind of standard for attaching more memory or storage would significantly extend the practical life of most devices, because it's generally not the CPU that becomes too slow.
I'm not convinced that phone upgrades would work too well, due to incompatibilities. Except for storage. I think if the govt wants to be helpful here, mandating a microSD slot (at least an internal one) would improve longevity far more than the other things combined.
What progress? How would having a standard memory or storage connector suitable to the form factor stifle progress?
> It's not like the government mandated a standard for desktop PCs, it just made sense for the industry.
It makes sense in any industry where there are a large number of companies that have to interoperate with each other. The big problem with phones is that there aren't a large number of companies -- the SoCs are pretty much all made by Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung and Apple and Samsung don't sell a lot of chips to third party OEMs.
What they ought to do is break them up so there is some real competition in the market, or at least stop letting them buy up their competitors. But if that isn't going to happen then something else needs to happen, because the status quo is broken.
> I'm not convinced that phone upgrades would work too well, due to incompatibilities.
There is a new form factor for memory called CAMM, quite space efficient. Suppose there was a smaller version of that suitable for phones, all the phones used it, and then compatibility exists in the sense that every phone using DDR5 is compatible with every other phone using DDR5, but if your phone takes DDR6 then you need DDR6, also a standard, just a newer one. Why would this not work? It works for everything else.
I could believe the phone chipmaking status quo is broken or monopolized if I saw a lack of progress and price increases. Instead, we've been getting remarkably faster and more versatile phone hardware at a steady pace. And most consumers care about that, not about modular upgrades. There are a few smaller areas I feel like the manufacturers are pushing consumers rather than listening to them, like removing headphone jacks to sell BT earbuds.
No it doesn't. You put the memory on the chip and then you add more via the connector. The memory on the chip is faster but there's less of it. Cache hierarchies are useful.
This is already a thing. All modern CPUs have SRAM caches integrated into them. Xeon Max has integrated HBM. It still has memory slots.
> And we're past that even, cause we have storage-on-chip, which is both faster and more secure (in the "hardware security" sense which is of course sketchy but still a thing).
This is in no real sense more secure. You can secure data on an untrusted storage device simply by encrypting it.
It's also not obvious how this would be any faster. NVMe with four PCIe lanes is enough for some of the fastest desktop SSDs, and if you wanted more you could always add more lanes. A PCIe lane isn't that many pins.
This, however, does not exempt them from the responsibility of the e-waste created by their non-repairability.
In the past iPhones living long enough to allow a second hand marked was a major part of how they where able to capture such a huge market share. Without that they would have struggled to establish themself to the degree they have due to being "just for the wealthy".
Also one of their main selling points is the label of a "super well build best of engineering" product. People still associate longevity with that.
With the world wide financial situation of most not wealthy people getting worse in recent years and iPhone having gotten even more expensive longevity has become an increasing important reason why non-wealthy people might still buy new iPhones, even if it's second hand still for a high price.
BUT the more they make them long lived the more they want repair (or worse upgrade) to not make monetary sense for anyone. At the same time the more they gain from pretending they care about repair, and it's just because of user safety and similar that the price of it is so high and/or it not being possible. I mean a "super well build best of engineering product" should normally be repairable right?
Also Apple engines are not their sales team and they care about trying to make an actual "super well build best of engineering product" often looking down intentional brittle products.
They don't want you to repair devices with used parts or 3rd party parts, because then they don't make a profit.
And that you pay almost the same price as repairing it at the apple store.
The self repair program is just a marketing scam.
Last time I went to an Apple Store I asked about repairing the power button of a (then) three year old device and the answer was “buy a new one, your device is too old”. So, I put in doubt that they favor repairs, as in the end new devices make more money.
Needless to say, my device still works perfectly (except for the button) two years after that comment, and probably will do so for several years more.
Apple: "That would be $890 to repair, maybe we should talk about helping you get into a new Mac?"
Then (doh!) I realized what you meant...
This is why when you take your laptop into the store, they don't offer to just desolder the bad chip, and replace it. They don't want to take the time or money to train their store in doing these repairs. There's a lot that can go wrong and its easier to just make the policy to swap the entire component - the whole logic board. It's a lot quicker to do, it's a lot quicker to train, it's a lot lower risk in terms of chemical exposure, proper-ventilation, and materials disposal. If they take the entire bad motherboard, they can box them all up and ship them in bulk.
It is cheap to be activist on social media but much harder to be one in the physical non-anonymous world where you stand to really risk something.
It's wrong-headed of legislators to try to narrow the ecosystem, and restrict the axes along which companies can distinguish themselves. Fundamentally it should be the market that chooses, not legislators. If consumers want locked-down, appliance-style devices (and they seem to), why is that an invalid offering?
If the thesis is that legislators know what consumers want better than consumers (or Apple) then I wholeheartedly disagree.
That’s exactly what right to repair is about. Right to repair promotes market competition.
Laws promote efficiency and progress by aligning incentives with market forces. Right to repair is a perfect example of such a low. It promotes autonomy and market competition. I find it confusing that anyone not profiting directly off the status quo would be against it. Regardless the people profiting off it are in the minority so hopefully the majority continues to push for the passage of more such laws.
Why should I care about Apple's rights? Aside from any argument about slippery slope, I'm a happy enough customer. Last time I've felt the need to repair an iPhone was a decade ago, and it was for a cracked screen, which wasn't expensive to repair. It seems to me like people with niche business interests are trying to force them on a market that has already decided against them.
I guess it depends on whether you believe capitalism and that "invisible hand" stuff is silly.
> It promotes autonomy and market competition.
Those are good things. I want the autonomy to buy the best-for-me (safe, compact, rugged, beautiful) user experience possible, but I'm very happy that there's market competition (Fairphone, etc.) for customers who want the phone equivalent of a project car.
I don’t really know the claim you’re making exactly, but if you’re saying that capitalism is not about laws and regulations then yes that is quite silly. Capitalism doesn’t work without laws protecting contracts, private property (in its innumerable forms), etc. Like I said, we don’t let the market decide many things so that capitalism _is_ possible.
Feel free to clarify if you didn’t mean to make that argument.
It doesn't. It does affect the resell value of iphones, it diminishes the trust people have in buying second hand units. Low quality parts can hurt Apple's and iPhone brand image.
So really you simply don’t know what will happen to resell values of iPhones. They could increase or decrease. Claiming one or the other is speculation.
Just dont actually measure either of these. I'm a bit afraid to talk important things in front of iphones given their atrocious security record.
Also you mentioned quality, but I don't see any CUDA/Nvidia on their platforms. They might advertise quality, but they are closer to B- quality. Please forget the butterfly keyboard white-washing campaign or 'you are holding your phone wrong'.
t. AAPL shareholder
If I want a smartphone I can choose between the Google appliance or the Apple appliance. That's no choice at all.
> It's wrong-headed of legislators to try to narrow the ecosystem, and restrict the axes along which companies can distinguish themselves. Fundamentally it should be the market that chooses, not legislators. If consumers want locked-down, appliance-style devices (and they seem to), why is that an invalid offering?
This is just crazy. If the consumer wants Apple OEM they know where to get it. Right to repair with generic instead of OEM broadens the market. It doesn't narrow it.
If you really, really care, you can take it to an Apple OEM repair shop for that info.
Apple made the phone and sold it to you. They should have a right to make whatever sort of phone they want, and you should have a right to choose whether or not to buy it.
> Right to repair with generic instead of OEM broadens the market. It doesn't narrow it.
Btw, you're comparing to the used car market, and that's not a great one. It's hard or expensive to judge the actual condition of what you're buying. Most common metric is the odometer reading, and even that can be illegally tampered with.
They are clearly anti-competitive, anti-consumer and more than a little disingenuous.
No real surprise, most corporations are. The difference with Apple is that those being victimized are some of their most vocal defenders. It's kinda like an abusive marriage.
Just look at their actions, ignore words from marketing teams (ie everything that goes officially outside to us). FU to freedom, openness, and laser focus on what generates revenues, we know whats better for you and your rightfully bought devices. If you disagree you will lose warranty, we kick you out of our platforms or worse, much worse.
Self-repairs and everything proprietary were pain point for all Apple devices for decade and a half. All efforts in privacy I saw were carefully crafted PR with some tiny logical loophole that for sure won't be misused by some 3-letter agencies, we pinky promise wink wink.
Really, why the surprise?
I do think right to repair is important. I think companies should be forced to produce and sell repair parts. I don’t think we want to force 3rd party compatibility. It’s different with a car IMO - a non OEM suspension component better meet whatever specification, there is liability(maybe?) if that fails. A cheap screen with 80% sRGB just looks bad, but won’t kill you. No manufacturer incentive to care about quality at all!
The majority of the special sauce lies in the overall integration and the software. The reason Apple goes so hard against all this is because they have lost most of their special sauce; their competitors have caught up and even surpassed them on many points both for software and integration.
This is why they push a narrative of their stuff being made from unreproducible special sauce when it is clearly a logical impossibility, Apple itself having zero production capability of anything. You have to remember that current Apple is run by an operation man, that special "skill" is basically rationalizing supply chain and pushing suppliers to get whatever he wants at whatever specs they need for whatever price he wants.
That's basically the whole problem: this fool has his massive ego engaged in the company and he believes that he creates a lot of value with his "work" because in the ends it makes a lot of profit. And this is why he wants you to believe that the value lies in sourcing said parts. Not in actually making them, not even in specifying them and not even in the labor for replacing them. He would rather use the cheap slavery labor of china, more profit for him, no need to pay a living wage to peoples living in a free country.
If Apple were a company taking risks, investing large amounts of capital for manufacturing cutting edge stuff (preferably in the free world where they make most of their money...) they would have a leg to stand on. You could only get parts for Apple devices from themselves and it would make sense because they would be the only ones producing them and that would be it, anything else could be considered "fake" in some way.
But it is not the case, they buy parts from 3rd party suppliers that sell them to their specs and conditions; then they get another 3rd party to assemble them and finally they sell them making the vast majority of the profit in the chain. They already got their profit for the integration and design, they shouldn't be allowed to prevent suppliers to sell the parts they make for Apple in the open market at whatever price they want to. And then the consumer is free to choose, go back to Apple and its inflated profits for repairs or find another business who could provide the same service at lower cost while providing same quality for parts. Considering how bad Apple pays its employees the funniest thing is that the other business is more likely to pay a better wage to its worker while providing same or better service quality. At the very least a lot more of the value goes into labor than into Apple profits which in itself can only be better for everyone...
What you want here is a way for the owner of the device to tell if the parts are OEM. That doesn't require prohibiting non-OEM parts, just putting a menu in the system to show if any are present, which you can check when buying a used device.
You might even go so far as to put the name of the manufacturer in the menu, and then people might be fine with an iPhone replacement screen from Samsung but not one from Value To Be Filled In By Manufacturer, Inc. (This doesn't require any kind of technical registration system, just read the manufacturer name out of the device and display it; there are existing laws against trademark infringement.)
> A cheap screen with 80% sRGB just looks bad, but won’t kill you. No manufacturer incentive to care about quality at all!
Except that it looks bad, and they want someone to buy it.
If you can afford it, you can take your phone to Apple and get guaranteed authentic parts.
But why can't everyone else just get cheap service from the small phone shop on the corner? How does it affect you if someone else decides they risk getting their phone fixed with unauthorized parts?
Right now if you swap two iphone motherboards just bought from the apple store, none of the two resulting iphones work properly despite both only having genuine parts
Cells phones are a little harder, but still doable. I think the low quality of Android has more to do with their typical price point, and just the strange culture around disposable low quality phones.
In fact, much of this existed with older Mac's - I had swapped out the memory, fans, battery, etc of my old Macbooks. Nothing prevented me from ensuring I was getting OEM equipment, but I also had the choice to get different hardware if I desired. Which in my case was important: memory that cost 1/4 the price, an SSD at 2x the performance, etc.
All that to say: I think we've already had a mix of user repairability (and/or) trustworthy parts for a long time. I think it worked well enough, and the move away from it screws people over (especially poorer folks).
Or 700$+ when your ssd fail because you need to change the whole laptop motherboard.
And as for your argument I believe the Framework 13 has quite proved that things are not as binary as that and with Apple resources they definitively could do a better work ...
Framework 13": 0.62 by 11.7 by 9 inches, 2.9 pounds
It's actually lighter, but I suppose it is 0.01 inches thicker.
Individuals (or third parties) right to repair does not impact you going directly to Apple for a genuine, calibrated repair.
So then this changes nothing for you? Nothing in these laws prevents Apple from repairing your products.
I happen to think that's a pretty poor justification for scuttling/kneecapping right to repair, but I wouldn't go as far as to say it changes nothing for them.
It similar to how you can bring an iphone out more easily without worry of it being stolen for ransom since you can lock it down and wipe it remotely.
If we allow 3rd parties to produce parts for cars, why can't they make parts for phones where the stakes are much lower? Perhaps there's a market for low-end replacement parts for phones? There certainly is for car parts.
As for third-party parts, the reason why the repair market is flooded with 80% sRGB garbo screens is because Apple took the good screens off the market. Sure, you can buy a screen assembly from their weirdly debranded parts store, but that's deliberately designed to force you to buy components you don't need. Remember, a screen assembly also means replacing the front cameras, Face ID sensors, etc. If you want to buy just the LCD or OLED and put it into an existing assembly, which is the only way any of this shit makes financial sense to repair, sorry, you're not allowed to buy just that.
The thing about manufacturer-branded repair services is that they're built like a McDonalds. Everything is designed so that they can hire the cheapest labor possible. That's why they have really expensive custom hotplates to remove iPhone glass, and why they'll charge you for a new Face ID sensor just because you need new screen glass. Component-level repair requires investing in your employees, which is the last thing Tim "Ship Jobs To 'Jaina" Cook would ever do.
The reason why people like Louis Rossmann were able to beat the Genius Bar on price was not because he was buying cheap parts. It's because he was buying genuine[1] parts produced by companies breaking their exclusivity agreements with Apple, and then investing money into his employees to do the skilled fix.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts#Origins_...
[1] Genuine in the sense of "meets Apple specifications", not in the sense of "Blessed by His Holiness, the iPope".
My MBA had a failure in the charging circuit. Battery was fine, laptop was fine on AC power. Apple said that because of all of the components they'd have to replace, it'd be nearly $900. For a perfectly functional laptop with a perfectly functional laptop that just could not have one chip tell it to allow current to pass through.
But yeah I'd trust a used Android phone even less. They're basically garbage past the first owner, or maybe even before.