The Story of Samsung's failed deal with iFixit, as told by iFixit's CEO
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
Providing consumers with information on where to find reputable companies selling repair parts would be a much more palatable alternative to selling them yourself.
> “I don’t know why Samsung insists on charging so much for service parts,” Wiens says, visibly frustrated. “The prices that we see are out of line with what we know components actually cost to manufacture.” Wiens starts to elaborate but stops himself. He clarifies that he would love to discuss this more, but his contract with Samsung prevents him from doing so.
In this case, the for-profit business relationship with Samsung also stands in the way of advocating for consumers.
> Providing consumers with information on where to find reputable companies selling repair parts would be a much more palatable alternative to selling them yourself.
That does not really make sense. They are a repair company and the only company selling specialized parts is, of course, the manufacturer.
> also stands in the way of advocating for consumers.
That is much too bleak. They made a deal happen in the first place, which is large progress even if it did not quite work out, and compromises are a fact of life.
I'm sensing some contradiction in that.
Pricing and packaging parts in a way that ensures its cheaper to buy a different phone is the opposite of a free market. Breaking your screen or wearing out your battery shouldn't mean you have to replace both, but it does if you own a Samsung and want genuine Samsung parts.
Did this approach get disclosed when consumers bought the phones, or only when something happened?
Is there some regulation forcing them to act in this manner?
Also, I like repairability laws here too even if some people don't.
Withholding any moral judgement, I do think these current incentives contribute to a direction we don’t want society to go. Feels like we should fix the incentives here to encourage reuse.
Sure, but you're allowed to not be happy about it and to criticize the supplier.
Support right to repair!
It's mutually beneficial: iFixit handles a service business that Valve would rather not be in, and customers get a more repairable product. It's also a source of revenue for iFixit that is probably more reliable than depending on advertising or selling tools.
A similar deal with Samsung or another phone maker would be amazing.
Samsung will make more money from you if they can sell you cloud services and other ecosystem stuff, just like Apple does with their platform.
Just look at how much revenue Apple’s services business brings in as a proportion of their business, at a much better margin than hardware sales.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...
Services are rapidly growing as a proportion of Apple’s electronics business and I suspect that Samsung is similar if they’re playing their cards right.
There’s going to be a point where Samsung really doesn’t care if you have an old phone or not, as long as you are using Samsung services for your digital life.
Exactly. I usually use ifixit's guides but often by the parts on amazon or ebay because generic parts are generic parts, but if ifixit could certify that their parts are OEM certified, I'd definitely consider paying the extra that they charge to buy from them.
How else would the skills and information needed be obtained and maintained?
Doing these things is not cheap! Just tooling can surprise one thinking about this activity.
In fact, the more for profit repair centers there are, the better.
Back when things came with some expectation about service, one could find shops all over the place able to do services.
I learned a lot about how to repair and setup CRT Televisions from one back in the 70's when...
I WAS A 6TH GRADER IN PRIMARY SCHOOL!
No joke. The shop was right across the street. Before high school I was reflowing circuits and boards, testing and replacing tubes, other components and could do a basic bring up on a new CRT.
Skills I used in high school for date money.
It is crazy how far away from that we have come.
Doesn't this mean exactly what the person you're replying to said?
This is too shallow. Yes, it's possible that this can go wrong. Doesn't mean it will. If they're showing you on video how easy or hard it is to repair something, that doesn't leave a lot of room for the sort of thing you're hinting at.
The whole thing comes across as self-promotion for their tools/parts business. Add in their dabbling in lobbying for regulations to force manufacturers to make devices that you can buy ifixit (and other) kits for… and it starts to feel as disingenuous as Epic’s “pro-consumer” interest in outlawing the razors/blades business model that game consoles use.
While working on small screws like torque or pentalobe, you either have crappy drivers or Wera. iFixit is the provider of "good but not Wera" class tools which most DIYers and even professionals can use without any problems.
Wera is "The Purveyor of Top Notch Tools", so that even companies like Apple and BMW use/supply their tools in their factories and repair centers, however they're out of reach for many people.
Allen wrenches are easier to screw up than you might think, but you can usually find some with a cut end rather than a sheared end if you look. Get into Torx, and you still have choices in the sizes used for construction screws. Get beyond that and you've got very little.
iFixit fills that void. You're ordering anyway, and it's nice to have some options that are quality without being super expensive professional grade. Like, I'll use a pentalobe screwdriver a couple times in my life. I need it to work, but it doesn't have to be Wera levels of good or ergonomic. Interchangeable bits are totally ok for my use case; I don't need dedicated drivers in every size.
Good grief, I hope you phrased that poorly and don't actually mean what you seem to mean.
That means cooperating with and occasionally coercing OEMs into playing ball.
Availability of parts and tools is critical to being able to repair anything and iFixit's entire business is based on repair.
Strategies restricting parts and tools as a moat protecting repair and secondary (used) markets should rightfully be illegal. Lobbying for this, especially when your business is repair and repair supplies, is self-preservation, and not lobbying against forces trying to put your business out of business is... irresponsible.
But isn't that why they exist? I have always seen the teardowns and repairability scores as advertising. If they didn't sell repair tools then what would they make money on?
Anyway, I'm not surprised it didn't work. Engineers see possibilities while lawyers only think about how something goes very wrong and the company ends up in court.
(That's assuming that this was shut down by Samsung legal. I didn't see that in the article, though I skimmed a bit so maybe I missed it.)
We also see devops and netsec often play the lawyer role, where they feel their job is to block others from deploying anything that's not a golden cathedral.
To be fair to the lawyers -- that's primarily what companies hire them to do.
Not so sure I agree with this. Lawyers are supposed to provide an analysis of the legal risks of things the company wants to do. It's the job of management to take that information and weigh it against the other business factors to determine if the risk is worth taking or not.
If a company is too risk-averse, legally speaking, that's a fault of management, not the lawyers.
That said, good lawyers won't just give a binary "recommend/don't recommend" answer. They'll also provide various options for other ways of doing something that have different risk profiles.
Take your old phone, put Docker on it, and do anything!
Phones, even very old phones, are incredibly capable devices: cameras, antennas, accelerometers, large touchscreen. They just need a new purpose.
The battery is not dangerous or even particularly perishable if its always kept between 30% and 60% charge.
I got ahold of most of my friends and family's "old phones living in a drawer", and I did more or less get the prototype working with a message queue, but I never really figured out a good way to utilize the built in h264 encoding chips, so it was always extremely slow software encoding, slow enough to where I don't think anyone would have actually paid me for it, and I lost interest in it.
I don't think it was a dumb idea, and it's not something I've completely given up on doing eventually, but I don't think it was as clever as 23 year old me thought it was either. If anyone here disagrees feel free to take it and run with it.
Same for those phones - that one CPU can replace a box of phones.
I'm not saying it was the best idea ever, and I haven't pursued it in like 8 years.
And there's little or no downside for freelancing plaintiffs' lawyers to file questionable lawsuits in the hope of extracting a nuisance-value settlement. So the mentality tends to be, what the hell, let's give it a shot. (A.k.a. "moral hazard.")
Maybe someday there will be a movement to boycott these abusive companies or something.
Check out https://futo.org
https://gitlab.futo.org/keyboard/latinime/-/blob/master/LICE...
https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay/-/blob/master...
Yeah, that's.. Unfortunate. I hope they don't attempt to relicense immich (AGPL), at least..
Nothing about their current licenses stand out as unreasonable to me. Even though their licenses aren't technically "open source" - i.e. not an OSI approved license - their license is clearly in the same spirit and I would absolutely refer to it as "open source" in casual discussion.
They did the wrong thing at first, but their intent was obviously not malicious and they corrected it. Why let that undermine the rest of the good things they're doing?
This reads like suggesting people should boycott their favorite restaurants because reasons.
Your comment reads like you ignored all of the context of my comment.
It's like if your favorite restaurant served really good burgers for $1000, but if the pickles and lettuce fell out and you tried to put them back in, the waiter would come over and slap the burger out of your hand and make you spend another $1000 to get a whole new burger.
Repairability is treated like a terminal good around HN, and that's understandable, but it doesn't reflect the values of the general public. Most civilians who crack their screen are going to put up with it until they can buy a new phone, because they were going to get a new phone anyway.
The fact that a repair is expensive is in a feedback loop with this sort of behavior. If consumers wanted to keep phones for five years and have an affordable battery or screen swap during that time, they'd demand it, and they'd get it. There are a lot of Android phone vendors.
That isn't to say that the status quo is ideal, and I do expect it to change as Moore's Law starts to level out, with smartphone design following the same curve. I would even say we're starting to see that happen.
But if consumers thought Samsung was abusive and showed no regard for them, they wouldn't buy phones from Samsung. But they do buy phones from Samsung, so they don't think that.
That's what it means to say "what they can get away with." That's the meaning of that phrase. If Samsung were just mailing anthrax to every third customer, they could not get away with that and they'd go out of business very quickly. If they treat a small subset of customers with extreme contempt, they can get away with it.
You're telling me that something very popular, with high brand loyalty, is actually abusive and the people who are loyal to it should not only stop buying but organize some kind of boycott. Which is just strange.
In your hypothetical, nobody would go there. Nobody buys $1000 burgers, nobody likes abusive service. But, in your hypothetical, somehow this is not just a successful restaurant but one of the most successful in the world. Because... people are forced to go there?
I honestly am trying to be as charitable as possible and I just can't see any sense in your position. As far as I can tell you just dislike some brands and are angry that other people like them and refuse to stop buying their products, even though you think they should for their own good. It's very convoluted.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's acceptable.
It's not that at all. It's "those people could negotiate a better deal if they acted together".
> not just stop buying but organize a boycott.
The goal isn't to not buy, the goal is to get a better deal and then keep buying.
One was a proprietary cable for a tv and another was a specific-length ignition wire for a stove top pilot light. Both times I was able to find a no-name brand replacement part on amazon but reviews were mixed and there was no guarantee of fitment. And it wasn't that much of a discount compared to Samsung's direct parts store which was quite pricey. I paid over $60 for that pilot light wire.
However, I made the mistake of putting it in the dishwasher on a Sanitize cycle (normal cycle is meant to/should be okay).
The heat deformed the pitcher (just plastic).
I did some various heating myself to make the top sit right again, but it just never did, and it being very slightly off-kilter was enough to not trip the fill mechanism.
So I went to buy a new one.
Holy hell.
One hundred and twenty dollars.
For this:
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-DA97-17395A-Refrigerator-Rese...
And this is not someone on Amazon gouging. Indeed Samsung themselves want $140.
https://samsungpartsusa.com/products/da97-17395a
for a plastic water pitcher.
> I paid over $60 for that pilot light wire.
Not Samsung, but I had a double oven whose circuit board died. The manufacturer wanted more than the cost of the oven for a new circuit board (was an older oven). That one thankfully ended up being a fairly common and simple fix (some capacitors and some other things - there was someone on eBay selling repair service - "$59, send me your board, and I'll send it back in three days repaired").
The one from Amazon is probably going to be counterfeit, was manufactured for $1, and doesn't fit quite right.
That being said, the stock one was probably manufactured for 25¢.
When prices started out not just expensive but beyond that overpriced to boot.
It's almost understandable if it's a one off part that not many people will buy because it costs money to make extras and keep them stocked, but something like a pitcher, you could imagine that lots of people would like to have multiple of them.
My dad's tv is like that, the weird proprietary cable that connects the external control box to the actual screen, except the cable is literally not for sale and even the connectors aren't available if you wanted to try and make your own. They have to baby the existing one and hope it doesn't completely break.
We're ending our Samsung collaboration
I mean, it's pretty easy to guess:
They want to run the spare parts division at a profit, they know they've got no competition (except used parts off recycled phones) and like some car makers, they know that means they can charge through the nose.
Wikipedia tells me [1] Samsung released 17 distinct model numbers in 2023, and 30 in 2022. Presumably a lot of those have custom, nonstandard screens with rounded corners and curved edges and camera notches and folding and fingerprint readers and whatnot. So presumably the minimum order quantity is huge - they can't just hold a few spare screens and make more on demand, they probably have to buy (and pay for) several years of spares upfront.
And of course every phone will have multiple parts, different subassemblies (do you want to order the screen with or without the fingerprint reader?) and maybe different colour schemes as well. And any spare parts you make and don't sell are wasted.
So it's very easy for a spare parts division to be very inefficient, if it's not well managed. If they're determined to run the division at a profit - that inefficiency gets passed right along to the end user.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy#Release_history
Samsung seems insufficiently concerned customers will hold Samsung responsible for the problem and buy a device from another manufacturer. I call this behavior market leader syndrome.
Too unprofitable? Too much hassle? Oh..
But part of the problem can only be solved by Samsung. They're the ones releasing 30 phone models in a single year - and the ones making design decisions like having six different screens available for the same phone because the coloured bezel is glued to the screen.
And of course if Samsung buys screens for $50 and sells them to ifixit for $100, holding 1000 in stock requires half the capital outlay if Samsung does it.
Although I'd love to know what iFixit thinks, esp since I'm hoping to hang on to it for a few more years at least. Was hoping to find a general database of phones, but it looks like they don't do a ton of reviews. Only 21 smartphones listed here, including both apple and android. https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit... Of which only 3 were samsung.
https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/legacy-smartphone-score...
I bought it the instant it was released so I've gotten 2 years out of it so far with just a few scratches from constantly forgetting and putting it with my keys in my pocket. I have a 2nd battery for quick swapping, but that also helps with battery longevity. I protected the USB port with one of those magnetic connectors so hopefully that will last a while too.
For consumers they had the galaxy S Active line which sadly has been discontinued..
It seems if they have limited resources they should focus on the most repairable models of all major phone manufacturers and tip the needle that way.
I'm willing to bet that Samsung has hundreds of different SKUs, across their different categories: rugged enterprise phones, S class, A class, etc.
At my local Microcenter, they literally have 27 different phones across about a dozen model number of Samsung (A05, A15, A25, etc). Most of them are all built on similar manufacturing processes, so I'm guessing that the repairability of a closely related one is comparable.
So, I feel if they'd call out FairPhone (which rightly deserves the 10 out of 10) they could also highlight this effort from Samsung to encourage things like this, one that maybe warrants an... 8? Just guessing :)
'course, thanks to the EU replaceable batteries will probably be a lot more common, although maybe not as easily swappable as this one. The other things are fairly unique too - perhaps they were aiming for easier repair since it was a business/military phone.
What's wrong that they can't afford to make a generous deal with a much smaller player that likes to keep broken phones from being a show-stopper?
Not just a good deal but a generous deal, what happened to the kind of business acumen that made things like this affordable for successful businessmen?
Are billion-dollar outfits not as capable as they were in the past when they were only multi-million-dollar orgs?
Why would that be?
Doesn't always work in any case.
I really struggle to read these types of interviews. If I wanted to read the novel I would buy the book… but if I’m reading an article I don’t want the fluff…
But usually I just want pyramid-style writing for the news.
Now, almost everyone has a lengthy backstory that is told at least once per season, and it's a significant amount of the runtime of the show.
It's gotten to the point that even athletes that have basically no backstory still end up with a lengthy segment on themselves. For fairness, I guess?
i.e. It's cheaper per unit-airtime to have a small crew interviewing people for backstory (+ editing) than recording people doing the course. They can pad-out the expensive bit (holding the events) with filler/b-roll.
And yes, I watch Sasuke when I get a chance. Also, Australian Ninja Warrior. The British one isn't as good, IMO, but we watch that, too.
I should say I’ve struggled with this too, I have to be super mindful otherwise I’ll flip and skim and find myself distracted. But it is interesting there’s an embracing of this by many - “I always ask ChatGPT to summarize xyz.”
It's not a complaint about the text being long. It's a complaint about the text being content-free.
Guess one could train an LLM to de-fluff articles?