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The cost of the tools required for device repair and the cost of genuine components make self repair almost as expensive as getting a repair from an Apple retail location or an Apple Authorized Service Provider

Malicious compliance accomplished.

Apple's instructions for all of the battery repairs include expensive equipment like an iPhone battery press to put a replacement battery back in place.

It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.

Apple is known for their... interesting attitude towards repair, even in the previous manuals that have leaked. It somewhat reminds me of German automotive engineering --- lots of special tools and fixtures when a simpler and more conventional process would work just as well.

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In just about any other situation in life, you will have to make some investment in tools with the understanding that you can use them multiple times.

For example, I bought the iFixit repair kit nearly a decade ago and I have used it for any minor work for all that time. $80 spent once and I’ve never once needed to fish for some strange bit or tool no matter what device I’ve opened. In fact, the iFixit kit will still be sufficient for this entire repair plus the 9 volt battery of course.

Unless you’re saying all these are one time use tools but I didn’t see that from the parts lists.

I get what you mean and I agree. I own lots of tools just because I understand that they are a good investment.

What I think the parent is referring to is this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120983

Obviously it is bullshit to suggest that a consumer would buy these tools. But it is also bullshit to suggest that you actually "need" a 'battery press' just because it is on the parts list.

The average phone repair shop will know how to loosen some battery adhesive very well with various techniques. So I don't think they will be discouraged by the Apple documentation.

Malicious compliance? Seems like it, a little bit. Still useful though.

I think it could also be a sort of protection from customers breaking things leading to bad press. As you point out repair shops will be capable of doing repairs just fine, but your average users will probably think twice about getting the tools. I guess I can use myself as an anecdotal example, I’m the sort of person who might try to do a repair despite never having done any sort of work on electronics since I build a radio and a weather station in the Danish equivalent of high school decades ago. I’d probably end up breaking some parts.

I’m rich enough to buy the Apple tools but I’m too much of a grinch to buy them. I actually think iFixit protects me from myself as well because it’s too complicated (for me) to buy the tools I’d need.

I can see why a company would want to prevent consumers from doing things that might reflect negatively on them. On the other hand, it doesn't make sense.

If a customer does something stupid and breaks their phone then they shouldn't blame Apple, a responsible journalist won't make out that it's Apple's fault, a competent reader won't get the impression it was Apple's fault from an truthful article.

I know it's asking a lot for sensible action from consumers, responsible journalists, a discerning news audience, a megacorp that respects individual rights. I think ultimately this is Apple's problem and their customers and should hold them to a higher, pro-social standard. That could be through government regulation, wallet voting, or "unauthorized" repair.

> If a customer does something stupid and breaks their phone then they shouldn't blame Apple, a responsible journalist won't make out that it's Apple's fault, a competent reader won't get the impression it was Apple's fault from an truthful article.

"shouldn't blame", "responsible journalist", "competent reader".

I see you're an idealist. :)

> If a customer does something stupid and breaks their phone then they shouldn't blame Apple, a responsible journalist won’t make out that it’s Apples is fault,

Even ignoring the existence of plenty of less responsible “journalists”, if Apple were to publish “works reasonably well most of the time in the hands of a careful person with experience” repair manuals, I think it’s certain Apple would be blamed by almost all journalists.

And I don’t think adding stringent warnings to their manuals would make things better for them. On the contrary, I expect “the Internet” would burn them at the stake for adding those terms.

Any complaints shouldn’t be aimed against these repair methods, but at repairing being that difficult for modern stuff.

But even then, it’s hard to complain. Thing is: pouring lots of good glue inside a smartphone and making parts fit incredibly tight together makes them much stronger and makes it easier to make them water resistant.

The Apple provided tools are the ones used at first party Apple stores to perform authorized repairs. At some point, some bean counter tabulated the cost of building X000 machines and shipping them across the globe for a marginal increase in repair quality and deemed it a worthy tradeoff.

If you want to repair phones to the equivalent quality of Apple stores, Apple makes it possible via their "overengineered" machines. There's nothing in Apple's ToS that forces you to make repairs this way, you're welcome to buy the Apple genuine part and use your own heat mats and press and whatever and knowingly make that tradeoff.

And good tools can reduce the skill required to make the repair.

Good skill can reduce the tools required to make the repair.

(Watch the Asian repair videos on YouTube. Not necessarily just phones but other things too.)

I was holding out for the EU DMA third party app store, but it's clear that Apple is not on a good trajectory. The fact that they slept on Siri for so long only to then finally add "Open"AI to it with limited availability is, but another dot in the pattern.

When MacOS was still called OSX and developers were the Macbooks greatest contributors and cheerleaders, things looked a lot different. A lot of the current framework components were copied from community components back then.

I'll miss the closed loop payment card support from iOS, but for everything else, I'll just say good riddance ...

> I'll miss the closed loop payment card support from iOS

I was definitely hurting for a while for lack of this (and iMessage) on Windows. While I haven’t gotten over iMessage (and use a KVM with my iPad to resolve that), the additional friction for payments has actually been a boon for my bank account.

The more friction we feel with payments, the fewer payments we make. Cash is higher friction than cards. Manual card input is higher friction than password manager autocomplete. Autocomplete is higher friction than apple pay. I haven’t found anything lower friction than apple pay.

By switching back to password manager autocomplete (which is unreliable at best), I’ve found my spending has gone down, because the cost of friction in payment is higher than the value of the item.

(I clearly also have too much disposable income, but that’s a whole other tangent)

That is a good point. At some point I started spending way too much on mobile payments.

If you think something like German automotive engineering or iPhone production can be substitute by a “simpler and more convenientional process”, you probably don’t understand how it works. These things have evolved and have been optimized to within parts of a percentage; almost everything is there for a good, time tested reason. (Except for ultra-novel stuff that has been around for a year or two - there they may pay with process inefficiencies for novelty)

don’t glorify german automakers too much. they’re 5-10 years behind Tesla when it comes to manufacturing optimization, sw/hw integration, BEV efficiency, etc.

Only thing missing from Tesla to beat them now is being better at actually building lasting cars. Hopefully Tesla eventually learns what "tolerance" means and that cars sometimes get wet from rain.

headlines don’t reflect the reality. they’re at worst average reliability-wise. The reason I know you’re talking purely off headlines is because the wet thing was suuuch an obvious rage bait from a software bug

The cost of the tools required to cut my lawn is far more than hiring someone to cut it.

Likewise for almost every home or car repair.

The whole point is that the tools are largely a once off purchase and repairing your phone is something you might do throughout your life. Therefore the initial costs should be spread over a longer period.

Do you expect your iPhone 16 battery press tool to still be useful in 2 phone generations ? How many times do you see yourself replacing the iPhone 16's battery ?

If Apple was also promising to keep the same process for the next 7 years I'd see a point to this, but this of course not the case.

https://www.selfservicerepair.com/en-US/tool-kit-rental

Considering that it's been the same battery press going back at least as far as the iPhone 12, it's probably going to continue to be the same battery press for a long time. Especially now that they've definitely been using the same battery press across at least two methods of gluing in the battery (the adhesive with pull tabs, and the new adhesive that's released electrically).

> Do you expect your iPhone 16 battery press tool to still be useful in 2 phone generations ? How many times do you see yourself replacing the iPhone 16's battery ?

Lots of my bike tools I have will take over a decade to get my money back on my stuff alone. But I get to do something I mostly enjoy. I can also help out friends/acquaintances when they need it. The same goes for this.

What seems to be lost here:

- Bikes will last decades with good maintenance. An iPhone wont, even if the device hardware was somewhat kept alive most standard software functionalities will be lost.

- Bikes don't mandate fancy tools for regular maintenance. Regular people won't need your super pricey tools to replace brakes or tires. You can use them if you want to, but that's your hobby, not what the maker mandates.

You can enjoy nice tools, but that's orthogonal to the issue here IMHO.

> Bikes don't mandate fancy tools for regular maintenance.

Phone batteries need replacing every few years. The kind of maintenance that a bike used daily will need on that schedule is absolutely stuff that requires fancy tools.

Current iPhone batteries are rated 1000 cycles. That's many years if you mostly leave your phone in standby, that will be less than a year before it significantly degrades if you're using it daily and not just for web/SNS browsing.

That's my home's experience, if you listen to The Vergecast that's the hosts' experiences as well.

> Lots of my bike tools I have will take over a decade to get my money back

That's... a bit surprising. Maybe one or two I could see, like a truing stand or some one-off equally proprietary thing for one brand of part, but what else?

Edit: nvm, there seems to be plenty of Park Tools brand niche reamers and so on that are many hundreds of dollars. I would think they'd remain viable for much longer than a battery replacement press though, since you'd adapt it to a particular bike's repair needs with different bits.

Hey do you have any recommendations on a small kit to bring for long bike trips?

Blackburn switch tool with chain press, tire levers, patch kit, spare tube. For anything not fixable with those, you visit a shop.

> Do you expect your iPhone 16 battery press tool to still be useful in 2 phone generations ?

Let's assume a "no" for the sake of the discussion.

> How many times do you see yourself replacing the iPhone 16's battery ?

100s of times (for 100s of different phones, obviously), because otherwise you _would not be buying repair tools_!

The whole notion that you buy a set of high-tech tools and then use them only once or twice is the insanity that causes this whole discussion to even take place. These are tools intended for professional repair shops, not for consumers to repair their own phone.

My dude, I bought a Park Tools Crank Puller CCP-44. This works on a M12 or M15 crank bolt. This is great since it worked on my Peloton and my bike. Then the other day, my friend's bike needed a CCP-22 which works on an M8 crank bolt. Oh no, why did the bike industry not all use M12. I am replacing my iPhone 13 tomorrow with an iPhone 16. Three years of use. If I were using it another three years, I might use the battery press once. This is how tools are. To have amortized utility, you need to use them multiple times. The CCP-22 was a one-time use tool.

Replacing a consumable part, particularly a battery, should not be a complex repair requiring specialised tools.

iPhone batteries have been replaced long before Apple provided specialized tools, so you don’t need any of them. They will make your life a lot easier though.

Can you name something that Should be a complex repair?

Replacing the mainboard?

Why should it be complex?

It shouldn't be. But it's a relatively more complex task.

> but clearly that's not necessary

You are both wrong and contradicting yourself. If it isn't necessary, then complaining about the tools is moot since as you wrote yourself, it's not necessary.

But, if you design a portable consumer device and you know to what tolerance you need a battery to be adhered to the case to make it not come loose, you know what pressure, movement, adhesive etc. are needed to make that happen for the form factor the battery is going to fit in. You know who doesn't know that? Pretty much everyone who isn't an engineer, and for most people who are an engineer, they might know that these are parameters that exist, but they aren't going to know every variation for every device ever produced. So now that nonsense about it being "clearly" is not so clear anymore.

Engineering things to be safe and reliable is pretty difficult. Add in batteries and it's suddenly one or more orders of magnitudes more difficult. That much is definitely clear, because when you cut corners, just guess or think to yourself "it is just a battery and some adhesive, how hard can this be" you get phones self-igniting on airplanes.

If we take your full line as a quote:

> It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.

Do you really think there are a bunch of people using manual hand tools mass producing every aspect of a phone? Sure, there might be a bunch of steps where manual labour was effective and efficient, but it's not like you show up at the factory with your suitcase of tools and go to work at your desk.

What they reproduced is the parameters. And that is exactly what you want. A repaired product should be as close to a freshly manufactured product as possible if you're going to be liable for it.

> What they reproduced is the parameters. And that is exactly what you want. A repaired product should be as close to a freshly manufactured product as possible if you're going to be liable for it.

This has some sense to it, mostly from the liability point of view, but this

> if you design a portable consumer device and you know to what tolerance you need a battery to be adhered to the case to make it not come loose, you know what pressure, movement, adhesive etc. are needed to make that happen for the form factor the battery is going to fit in.

as someone who works in this field, this is overstating the matter quite a bit. The tolerances for something like pressure in this instance are going to be wide enough that "press firmly" would suffice in a rework document. It's made to be very simple on purpose for manufacturing, and a lot of slop is built in so that we're not in this situation where microns or milli-newtons matter and cause a battery fire somewhere down the line. The fixtures are primarily for efficiency gains, and in that sense I would agree with the gp that press fixtures are not practically necessary in an at-home version of this process.

> The fixtures are primarily for efficiency gains

I agree, however, the battery example was a prime candidate for "it is not always as simple as it seems". LiPo batteries don't like getting squished.

Pouch cells are normally under compression as force is required to keep the plates together. A firm press isn't going to hurt them. If you're applying enough force to actually crush and short the cell, you are far too ham-fisted to do work like this. In fact using a tool to apply pressure is more likely to cause damage.

Sorry, but have you ever repaired anything? The number of things the price and complexity of a phone, that can be repaired for less than the replacement cost, when you include tools, is…very small.

I've repaired older Androids. The only tools I needed were a set of screwdrivers, which I already had. The fact that Apple is trying to make it seem like you need special tools only for their devices is the problem.

I also repair my white goods, black goods, car, HVAC, etc. Most of those don't require special tools either.

Then use an older android. Nobody is stopping you.

I was gonna say, iPhones are way more reliable than German cars, it’s not a fair comparison! Then I thought about their respective depreciation curves…

> It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.

If they copy-pasted their production line processes the parts would cost less than $40 total.

Their production line process is optimised for producing millions of devices.

I wonder if aliens exist, what technology they have for basics like transportation. Do they just load themselves into a cannon and shoot them to the destination? Just completely different ways of doing everything.

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