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Comment by MyFedora | Hacker News Reader

No, this is a side effect of Apple striving to design the world's most unrepairable devices, or more accurately, earn more money with overpriced repairs by creating an artifical monopoly on Apple device repairs using part pairing. Why else would there be no option to pair parts for repairs if you can prove that you are the owner of the device?

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They often use security as an excuse to be anti-repair.

That doesn't mean they're lying any time they mention security. Many of the things they do really are to benefit the customer. One of those is having strong locks on stolen phones.

Security is often a cloak for anti-consumer measures for companies. For another example, Netflix and friends have adopted the “we noticed suspicious activity on your account” phraseology to dress up their password sharing crackdown as something consumers want.

If you want to make sure that thieves do not steal iPhones, you need to ensure there is no point in taking them apart for parts.

Which means you need to prove both: you are the owner of the device; and that the parts are not stolen. This means serial number on each part (likely already exists), database of individual parts with "stolen" flag, and a secure way to query this before pairing.

Or don't bother with all that, and just prohibit pairing of parts with unknown origin - which means prohibiting all 3rd party services.

I know this is a hot take but hear me out.

I think it makes sense these days for Apple to make phones without much care for repairability. Labor is too expensive to bother with spending hours on repairing a phone. Cheaper to produce new one.

The problem with that is the environmental impact of disposable electronics, but Apple is leading the way and using recycled materials, avoiding plastic, becoming carbon neutral etc.

I think this is the direction the industry is generally going to move towards. It makes sense and stops being a problem when the entire product is recyclable and/or uses recycled material in the first place. They’ve been touting their advancements pretty loudly, but I don’t think it’s getting picked up by journalists.

This is a very succinct description of what Apple is trying to achieve. Imagine inside your laptop there are two boxes: the compute and the battery. You can get any of those swapped by Apple. Apple then takes care of the 2 remaining Rs on its own with the box you swapped.

That's what Apple wants.

I learned recently that Apple shreds old devices instead of selling them to keep the price of old-iPhones artificially inflated by limiting supply.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/94386/the-truth-about-apples-fre...

>Apple is leading the way and using recycled materials, avoiding plastic, becoming carbon neutral etc.

How is avoiding plastic better? If you mean by making phone bodies out of metal, that's not better for the environment. It takes a LOT more energy to make things out of metal than plastic, and even though metal is recyclable, that too takes a LOT of energy (high melting point), and for a small item like a phone seems rather unlikely anyway. Plastic is recyclable too, it just isn't done much because people don't want to and it costs too much.

>It makes sense and stops being a problem when the entire product is recyclable and/or uses recycled material in the first place.

Phones are not "recyclable", and likely never will be. There's far too many different materials in them, which can't be readily separated.

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