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Comment by cherioo | Hacker News Reader

There are several way different groups are viewing right to repair

Consumer: right to repair means fixing my broken display will be a DIY job for $50? Sweet!

Repair shop: right to repair means I can source a display from lowest bidder, charge $150 for broken screen, and make $120 in profit? Let’s go!

Apple: right to repair means you must buy $275 display module to fix a broken display. So we can keep some nice nice profit.

Samsung seems to be there with Apple. Looking at the price of display module I am worried iFixit is also there with Apple. And iFixit and Samsung couldn’t find a good split on who gets to keep the profits.

It is crazy that an iPhone display module from iFixit appears to cost more than Apple 1st party repair.

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On the subject of replacement parts cost vs total Apple 1st party repair cost, a recent video I watched by UK YouTuber "Mrwhosetheboss" did a comparison of cost, turnaround time and other aspects between three different iPhone repair options and highlighted some of the dynamics at play:

* "Phone repairs are getting ridiculous - Here's why.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oreZytDYoEU

From my admittedly biased outside perspective, the repair process he experienced (and previous coverage by multiple other outlets about "DIY repair with official Apple tools") certainly strongly suggests that Apple is trying to do as little as possible in terms of pricing & availability to support 3rd party or DIY repairs to meet their legal/PR obligations.

So, if official 1st party parts pricing isn't competitive with total 1st party repair cost I'm going to assume it's intentionally obstinate behaviour and that the blame lies wholly at Apple's feet.

iFixit parts are expensive because they offer top notch service and quality control, at least in my experience. I bought a couple of parts from them, and was always very happy. The fix kits are fantastic. Once a package was lost, they just sent it again (i ended up receiving it twice).

I've bought parts from other websites, and while they were cheaper, they were not always good quality. A battery seemed to have way less capacity than the oem part, screwdriver bits were so soft they broke on first use, etc.

It sucks that spare parts are so expensive. All those supply chain optimisations don't work if you need to keep parts stocked all over the world....

This is obviously anecdotal: I keep wanting to support iFixit and I still come back to them despite their increased cost + shipping compared to Amazon because I believe in good QC from a reputable company and I believe in their mission.

Unfortunately I have been burned twice. First iPod batteries: They seems like they are sitting around forever and are of the same quality as what you'd find on Amazon (they look the same as well).

Secondly I was super excited for their magnetic mat with marker. All the youtubers were promoting it and I snatched it up despite it seeming quite pricy for what you get. The marker failed after 1-2 uses. In both the iPod battery + marker case, they were willing to ship replacements but it takes time and is a hassle and by then the enthusiasm is gone. I walked away thinking what did I pay extra for?

Also after using their toolkits for a while, I don't consider their tools top tier quality anymore, just middle of the road and does not seem worth the price (maybe during their black friday deals it is more palatable).

I've had the same impression, unfortunately. You have to like them because of their dedication to the mission, and they've achieved a lot. But I bought a laptop battery from them that didn't last long at all, and (at least at first) their bit sets stripped themselves on first use, and the spudgers might as well have been made out of butter.

Sounds like they're well into the "cost optimisation" phase. ie. replace good quality manufactured products with inferior quality stuff

Hi Nebula8804,

Sorry to hear about these problems! We stand behind our products, and have the lowest return rate in the industry. We treat quality like a ratchet: when we identify problems, we fix them and implement processes to keep it from happening again. I'm constantly challenging the team to raise quality bar for ourselves and the products we sell.

Sometimes lightning strikes twice, and I apologize. I understand the hassle. If you give us the chance to make it right, we will.

Can you suggest some better tools? I struggle to find good tools.

Based on the post, the high price of parts from iFixit was Samsung's fault.

And to be fair high end samsung phones have the best display in the market, period.

I would really dubt thwt they sell the best stuff to Apple (possible but...)

Apple only uses old cheap technology. They resisted putting OLEDs in the iPhone for many years.

The high price is probably just reality. Samsung's display assemblies have always been expensive. I've seen the real inventory values back in the Note 6 era, and the component cost at repair time. Repair services were probably getting a few dollars from their markup. I'm not even sure the the consumer facing part of their repair operations was profitable. It seemed like most of the focus was on bulk refurbishment where they rebuilt hundreds of $model at once.

Building a 500ppi 120Hz AMOLED display with a hole punched in it, and bonded perfectly to fancy glass is just expensive.

i think the point is that you start with repairability from the start, otherwise you are just reverse engineering how to take it apart.

I'm skeptical that you could design a repairability-first phone without introducing more ways for it to break in the first place.

I realize that I'm a non-central example of a phone customer, but I'd be more than willing to give up thinness for more repairability, and I loathe hole punch/cutout screens, so I would actively pay more money to get the simpler rectangular screen, which would presumably come with ease of repair benefits (assuming that were an option. Unfortunately, it appears that almost no one except Sony still makes rectangle displays for phones anymore).

It's absoultely true that making a phone more repairable comes with tradeoffs. Thinness being the most obvious one, but It's also likely true that a truly repairable phone would be more expensive.

I do not think that performance, reliability, or longevity are necessary tradeoffs though.

In a moment of reflection, transpose that idea to cars or planes. Commercial aircraft fly for 30 years or more, (with some flying since WW2) because they are repairable, not despite the fact that they are repairable.

The case could also be made for consumer white goods.

Let's not confuse enshitification with reliability.

Nobody wants a phone with the utilization rate or maintenance cost proportional to a commercial airliner.

They do not "fly for 30 years": they fly for a few thousand hours a year at most, amidst hundreds of man-hours of maintenance. A high level of repairability is a requirement for them to even operate for their intended purpose.

Phones are not aircraft. (Or cars, etc.)

Let's deconstruct that take.

> They do not "fly for 30 years": they fly for a few thousand hours a year at most, amidst hundreds of man-hours of maintenance.

By 2021, N309US, a Delta Air Lines Airbus A320, had flown 89,638 hours in 31 years. That's an average of 2891 hours per year, or just short of 8 hours per day, every day, over 31 years.

The mean-time between overhaul of a CFM56 aircraft engine is 10,000 hours. Or, if you would drive at an average of 60 km/h, 600,000 kilometers. And that's for one of the most highly stressed part of an aircraft.

> Nobody wants a phone with the utilization rate or maintenance cost proportional to a commercial airliner.

So, to hit the same utilization rate as N309US, you would need to use your shiny iPhone 8 hours a day, every day of the year. Good luck with that.

> Phones are not aircraft.

Indeed. As we just discovered, they have a long, long, long way to go to come anywhere close.

Your examples confirm what I said. Your "30 year" aircraft spends 2/3rds of that time literally not functioning as an aircraft.

As for my "shiny iPhone" (I don't use an iPhone) and "Good luck" using it 8 hours a day: I don't understand the hostility or how you've arrived at the belief that 8 hours a day is a long time for a phone to operate. My unremarkable phone reports a current uptime of 180 hours. You're suggesting that being unusable for 16+ hours a day is the norm, but here on Earth, if phones routinely stopped working as phones for more than a few minutes a week people would riot.

The point is that there are different kinds of machines in the world with different constraints and demands in their designs, and different operating models for how they are used. You seem to be trying to make a better/worse argument out of things share practically nothing in common and it doesn't work at all.

> Looking at the price of display module I am worried iFixit is also there with Apple

They mentioned in the article that one of the reasons they ended the partnership with Samsung was over the high cost of repair parts.

> It is crazy that an iPhone display module from iFixit appears to cost more than Apple 1st party repair.

Probably because Apple is selling it to them with a sizeable markup?

> Repair shop: right to repair means I can source a display from lowest bidder, charge $150 for broken screen, and make $120 in profit? Let’s go!

This is a pretty hostile take. A more generous take would be that repair shops can consistently source quality parts without skirting the law, allowing them to compete with manufacturers on service, turnaround time, and possibly even price.

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