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Why Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair

231 points by PleaseHelpMe 9y ago

jankotek 9y ago
Top comment under article: > This is such bs. iPhone is one if not the only smartphone the oem support for about 5 years. My son is rocking a 5s currently with the latest os update. About a year ago, I swapped out the battery myself.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Which, while poorly phrased, at least does raise a valid point that the story is complex. There are some things Apple does very well (e.g. supporting newer versions of iOS on older gear, ensuring it continues to have a life), and some things they do very badly (no replaceable batteries). Other vendors have the exact opposite problem (my LG G5 has a replaceable battery, but I have no idea how long it'll continue to receive OS updates from my carrier).
  - rubatuga 9y ago
    The Samsung Galaxy A5 I bought in 2015 stopped getting security updates after the summer of 2016. If that isn’t pure planned obsolescence, I don’t know what is. On the contrary, my dad’s iPhone 5 from 2012 got five years of updates. I foresee that since the iPhone 5S is a 64 bit processor, it will see at least six iOS revisions before being EOL’d
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    Every iPhone I had has had a "replaceable battery". Sure - it's a fiddly job usually done by a technician, but I think that is a small drawback these days. In 5-ish smartphones I have replaced at least one screen each, and only 1 battery. So if something should be user replaceable why focus on battery? Ability to expand storage (even only internally) would have been a useful iPhone feature.
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      If we define "user replaceable" as "requires specialized tools and skills, while voiding the warranty in the process", can we agree we've stretched the term beyond usefulness?
      - alkonaut 9y ago
        Yes definitely agree, however 1) if the battery needs replacing within warranty doesn't that mean the user shouldn't have to? There is of course a case where the user thinks the battery life is bad but apple doesn't agree so the warranty doesn't help. 2) there is a difference between replaceable and user replaceable and my point was that "replacable" is usually enough since batteries are so rarely replaced compared to e.g screens. I have no stats but my personal guess would be that an average iPhone has at least one screen replacement.
      - sbuk 9y ago
        Semantics, but you said "replaceable battery" not "user replaceable battery.
- pat_space 9y ago
  They have a point. My 2013 rMBP is still solid and I don't foresee replacing it for years.
  - gambiting 9y ago
    I still use a late 2009 MacBook Pro on a daily basis and I have absolutely no need to replace it. It's fast enough to browse the web, watch videos and do light programming work. I've only replaced the hdd with a 128GB SSD few years ago and everything else is stock and still works.
  - thearn4 9y ago
    Still using a 2011 MBA. I just had to change out the magsafe charging port/IO board, but other than that its held up great.
    - smnscu 9y ago
      Rocking a (very abused, still working great) 2012 MBA and a 2012 27" iMac. Only changes were a new battery (€70) and more RAM.
  - 6d6b73 9y ago
    And my 2011 Dell I use for networking has only gotten better with time. Larger battery, more ram, SSD hd, Blueray DVD RW. I will take something that can be updated over something that is just a few mm smaller any day.
  - scriptkiddy 9y ago
    And I still have a toshiba satellite from 2008 that works as well as the day I bought it. I think reliability isn't something only high end manufacturers offer.
- IBM 9y ago
  The second top level comment is much better: >This is basically an advertorial for the Right to Repair legislation. I continue to be amazed by how uncritically this topic has been covered. Jason Koebler at Vice has basically been an activist on this issue, rather than a journalist. And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc. This may be fine for vehicles (and even that is questionable now that cars are becoming more advanced and require more expertise to repair), it would be silly for consumer electronics which is a much more dynamic and fast changing industry. And as for the story about environmental standards. EPEAT is a shit standard if it would have prevented Apple from creating a unibody Macbook Pro. It was right to change. The real reason that Apple lobbied them to change it isn’t some silly conspiracy about making them harder to repair, it’s about making better products. I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR. Whenever a silly environmental story about Apple pops up, he’s the go-to guy for a negative quote.
  - jogjayr 9y ago
    > This may be fine for vehicles (and even that is questionable now that cars are becoming more advanced and require more expertise to repair), it would be silly for consumer electronics which is a much more dynamic and fast changing industry. Sorry can you explain why it's silly because the electronics industry is more dynamic? > And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc. From an environmental standpoint that doesn't sound like a terrible private interest group. If 3rd party repair gets support from manufacturers it lowers barriers to entry to the repair industry. Which would make repairs cheaper. That in turn would encourage more consumers to consider repairs over replacements. In theory, at least. > I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR. The saying "doing well by doing good" comes to mind.
  - bo1024 9y ago
- falcolas 9y ago
  Counter anecdote: I have never been able to swap out a battery in a sealed Apple device. Even attempting to remove the screen is a much bigger financial risk than I am willing to undertake. And my six year old 5 has long since hit the proverbial trash. It was too slow about four years ago.
  - copperx 9y ago
    Even the 6 is excruciatingly slow today.
- Too 9y ago
  Does ios still become 2x slower on old phones every time they update it for a new phone release? I remember previously fast iPhone 4s becoming close to useless when iPhone 5 came out after an os update.
zzalpha 9y ago
That's a long article to point out the obvious: if you can't fix it, you have to buy a new one. I would've changed the "Why" in the title to "How", since that's where the article really illuminates some industry dynamics I wasn't aware of. Of course, if LIBOR taught us anything, it's that industry shouldn't be left to regulate itself...
- jpttsn 9y ago
  What does LIBOR have to do with regulation? What does regulation have to do with the OP?
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    Did you read the article? If not, search for "Macbook Pro". It spends a lot of time talking about voluntary standards bodies for eco-friendly/sustainable technology development, and how those standards are manipulated by participants, rendering them utterly meaningless.
    - jpttsn 9y ago
      I should've been clearer: I'm opining that regulation is probably the wrong word. As the article explicitly says: > It’s important to note that these are not government-enforced regulations
      - zzalpha 9y ago
        Yeah which is precisely the point. If they were it's possible they'd have a little teeth. But if, as a society, we claim to value things like sustainability, and then leave industry to police itself, it should be no great surprise that the outcomes are poor. The Clean Air Act would've been an abject failure if it'd been the Clean Air Voluntary Industry Recommended Practices if you Feel Like It Group.
        jpttsn 9y ago
        I agree. So what do you make of the fact that these environmental policies are not government regulation? Maybe the voters claim to care about sustainability more than their actual choice of politicians reflects?
scottlegrand2 9y ago
As long as we have Shenzhen, no tool/screw will remain proprietary for long...
- criddell 9y ago
  I don't understand what can be proprietary about a screw. Is the design of the screwdriver protected by a patent or something?
  - falcolas 9y ago
    Limited need, and thus availability, of driver heads. While possible, it's not simple (as in I have a set in my house already, or can get them as part of a regular set of drivers) to get pentalobe and tri-wing driver heads.
    - criddell 9y ago
      That may be true, but it doesn't make it proprietary.
  - NikolaNovak 9y ago
    Few years back Apple 'silently' switched to a variation of Pentalobe screw which some thought might be patented. Stories also abounded about people going to their store for unrelated repair, and coming out with their regular screws replaced by pentalobe screws. There are of course "compatible screwdrivers" out there, per the original post, but whether patented or not, it was a fairly transparent way of Apple keeping people out of their own hardware.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      Honest question, how can you patent a screw shape? Isn't literally every other screw shape prior art?
      - Domenic_S 9y ago
criddell 9y ago
From the article, Apple's statement: “Highly-integrated design allows us to make products that are not only beautiful, thin and powerful, but also durable, so they can last for many years,” the company said. “When repairs are needed, authorized providers can ensure the quality, safety, and security of repairs for customers. And when products do reach end of life, Apple takes responsibility for recycling them safely and responsibly.” Sounds reasonable to me.
- mamcx 9y ago
  I need to replace my old iMac. I can't stand to not use SSD anymore. I can't upgrade the new iMacs to SSD, and the prices that Apple give me are too much. I can't afford it, and I can't change to SSD later. So, I go hackintosh or find a way to be rich somehow. The first look more possible.
  - thescriptkiddie 9y ago
    Depending on the year, you should be able to retrofit an SSD into an older iMac. I've done it with a 2011 27" model myself. https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIYIMACHDD09/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIYIMACHDD09/
    - mamcx 9y ago
      That is what I have done with my current one.
- backtoyoujim 9y ago
  So durable that they cannot withstand being disassembled doesn't sound right to me.
  - redial 9y ago
    I cannot disassemble my 20 year old soccer ball without sacrificing it. Still has lasted 20 years tho.
SamReidHughes 9y ago
If consumers wanted an easy to repair product, they would have bought them. What they really want is thin, lightweight phones that are new enough not to be slow.
- falcolas 9y ago
  Consumers can't buy what isn't available. Also, what consumers want, and what is good for the environment, rarely mesh very well.
  - jpttsn 9y ago
    Meanwhile, what consumers don't buy isn't available for long. It's a chicken and egg situation. Unless, of course, you're arguing that the suppliers have coordinated to screw consumers. But that would be illegal, wouldn't it?
    - falcolas 9y ago
      > But that would be illegal, wouldn't it? Only if proven. And there would be a tremendous cost to attempt to prove it. Ultimately I do believe they create hard-to-repair phones exactly for the reasons they state - it makes it easier to make them thin and light - but I also believe this is harmful to consumers in the long run.
- br_smartass 9y ago
  Or maybe all companies saw the better strategy for the profit of the industry was for people to need to keep buying new phones frequently and so they all removed that option from the customer hands, on a backdrop of design efficiency and 'innovation' and then it was done because consumerism is a big pile of bullshit. Most people when I see they talking about it, and I suppose most people in general, would like stronger screens and more battery even if it meant a thicker phone, but the illusion of "last generation" and stuff like that make so, for marketing purposes, supported by the profit motive, that it should not be this way because "customers"... I'm sorry, I just think it's absurd that people take those tales uncritically like that. My current phone is a middle-end Sony, it's screen already has that kind of shatter that starts to spread, the p2 connector stopped working these days, and after I bought it I could not find any of the accessories to help me preserve it(screen protection, cover, etc), had to buy some chinese stuff online that were worthless, it's less than a year old. We're systematically made of idiots. I still have an S3 that I used for 3~4 years, it's screen is intact and all the rest works fine.
StillBored 9y ago
Its not just about repair-ability, its about software support too. Apple, when compared with the android phone manufactures is probably a better choice for long term use. That is because while my android phone (asus) has a battery I can replace in under 1 minute, the software support probably won't last for 5 years like my daughters iphone5 which after a new battery is a perfectly functional updated device. So if you want to do something about the throwaway culture, minimum support periods might be a good thing to look at too.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Yeah, at least for security bugs. I'm still using a Nexus 7 (2012) with Lollipop and it works fine, including the apps, even if their developers hate my guts for having to stick with older APIs :)
  - numenor 9y ago
    Mine is a humble Galaxy S3, bought when it first came out, now running Android 7.1.2. Since neither Android nor the handset maker has a chokehold on me, I can choose to upgrade/downgrade, muck around in general. It is my device to do whatever I wish. Plus the lovely external SD card to put whatever I want and not rely on any @#$% cloud.
    - limeblack 9y ago
      Unfortunately I'm pretty sure newer S8 have locked bootloaders or I could be wrong.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I could upgrade as well (I already run ClockworkMod, in fact), I just don't have the patience to deal with eventual problems. As for the external storage, I can use any flash drive with an OTG micro-USB port, which are common and cheap nowadays (or a regular drive with an OTG cable). But I rarely need the extra space.
    - ihattendorf 9y ago
alkonaut 9y ago
I have only had good experiences repairing iPhones. Most everything can be fixed within an hour and at a reasonable cost. A key factor is the large user base (many million) for each model of the iPhone, so 3rd party parts are usually cheap and diagnostics for almost any problem is easy to google. Compared to e.g washing machines it's a pleasure to have a broken smartphone.
- falcolas 9y ago
  This is hardly universal. Repairing an iPhone is a 2-3 week affair involving mailing it off and hoping I get it back. I do live in the US, just not in or near a major urban center.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    Wow. I realize you have huge distances but in the town I was born (pop 40k, 100 mile drive to next town which is similar. Basically the same geography as Alaska or Canada in northern Sweden) there is at lest 4 or 5 places that fixes it while you wait. It's not a big town but phone repair shops are about as common as barbers. So if a town is big enough to get your hair cut you can fix a screen... We are probably extreme in Sweden though.
    - falcolas 9y ago
      We have one repair shop in town, and they can not work on the newer phones without voiding the warranties, and they can not get replacements directly from Apple. So, they generally refuse to work on Apple devices as a result. Our nearest Apple store is about 600ish miles away, in Seattle. Android is another matter, and they're more than happy to work on those devices.
devy 9y ago
It's a shame that smart phones are so hard to repair these days. Ben Evans from a16z even argued that "selling smartphones is a subscription business" and that "You pay an average of $700 or so every two years (i.e. $30/month) and Apple gives you a new phone." [1] I think the car industry is probably similar in that so many parts become more electronic and less mechanic and if a sensor is gone, the entire part has to be replaced. (Not a car geek, but the ones who are, please feel free to chime in here!). And with the EV revolution, that trend is going to be accelerated. [1]: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/7/13/content-isnt-king http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/7/13/content-isnt-ki...
- scottLobster 9y ago
  I'm not sure the analogy is all that apt. Sensors can fail all the time for reasons beyond the company's intention or control. Phones on the other hand should be an easy-battery swap away from future usefulness. And that's just from the hardware perspective. There is no functional reason my Nexus 5X should stop receiving security updates next year, other than the fact that Google wants to sell more Pixels (which I will probably buy because going without security updates is cutting off my nose to spite my face).
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    The updates thing may change once Android 8 becomes more common, as they have now taken a clue from their ChromeOS experience and decoupled the UI/app layer from the core OS layer. Thus getting updates out there for the UI layer will not be hampered by having Qualcomm etc drop support for their SOCs 12 months after initial introduction (meaning 6 months before they start showing up in the first devices). And frankly i don't see how much difference there really is between Apple and Google here. Google offer a bunch of compatibility tools etc that allow new APIs to function (up to a point) on older devices. Similarly Apple will regularly leave out big ticket items on their updates for older devices, meaning that if it is something the app dev wants to make use of they can only support the newest Apple is shipping. Never mind that i hear again and again that getting the latest iOS on an older device makes said device slow as a slug.
matt_s 9y ago
I understand the sustainability concerns but what is the answer? More regulation from the government that would impact their designs? That doesn't sound right, I don't think there are smart phone designers working for the government. I have replaced screens and batteries on iPhones, it isn't wizardry but does require technical acumen and some special screw-driver/pry tools that won't break things. It isn't an open standard like PC parts but there are lots of other industries that are mostly closed and engineer their products to only last a certain usage threshold. Engineering them to last longer costs way too much.
franciscop 9y ago
On the other hand you can make a full iPhone by buying each of the components if you know where to find them (disclaimer: I've met Scott before): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA
yodon 9y ago
I fail to see the validity of all the conspiracy theory evil claimed around modern manufacturing techniques. The overwhelming majority of consumers have spoken, and what they have said is they will pay more for smaller lighter devices and will not pay more for consumer repairable devices. Manufacturers have responded in exactly the way the majority of consumers asked them to, by making smaller lighter devices rather than repairable ones. Connectors add space and weight, making devices bigger and heavier and less desirable to the vast majority of consumers.
programmertote 9y ago
My cousin's iPhone 6 stopped charging a few days ago. Everything works, but it seems like the port for charging is worn out or something and wouldn't recognize/charge when being plugged in. He is visiting from Australia and he took a lot of pictures lately with his phone. So he went to the Apple store in New York to get it fixed (in the hope to save his photos/data). They told him that they'll give him a discount for a new iPhone 6 (same model) for just ~$270 or there's no way to fix it. I thought changing the charging port should be relatively easy. Now it is certain that my cousin will lose all of his photos in the old phone unless he gets it fixed at an unauthorized repair center.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  I've had to pick dust out of the port with a paperclip a few times
  - k-mcgrady 9y ago
    This. They cleaned it for me at the store but it sounds really similar to what's going on here. It is a very common problem though so it would be weird of them to miss it.
  - programmertote 9y ago
    Yeah, he told me that he did similar thing in the past before and it worked. Now that trick no longer works for him unfortunately... Thanks for the tip though!
    - Majora320 9y ago
      Try buying a spray canister of compressed air, works wonders for cleaning dusty electronics.
- scarface74 9y ago
  With all of the things that can happen to a phone -- damage, loss,theft etc. I would never trust any data that I cared about to remain on the phone. I would be auto syncing like crazy over iCloud or Google Photos.
chrisco255 9y ago
There's a trade off between modularity and sleek design as Apple has proven better than anyone. They were arguably the first PC manufacturer to take design seriously and while Macs began to become more difficult to repair beginning with the iMac in 1998, there's no questioning that the component choices (from the external to the internal) lent itself to an increasingly sleek design that eventually led Apple to create the best-in-class laptops and desktops. This push towards sleek design also gave Apple the chops to create the original iPod in the first place...which eventually lead to the revolutionary iPhone...which completely upended the mobile phone industry. As a PC fan, I love creating and building my own box...carefully selecting my motherboard, case, processor, and memory in the process...and I rest easy knowing I can upgrade my machine over time... But I wouldn't question the value that highly integrated designs that Apple and others have brought to the table. You can feel the quality in the products they make. There's a lot of careful thought and design. Modularity and repairability are a necessary sacrifice to build products that sleek. Take a look at the failed Project Ara by Google: https://atap.google.com/ara/ https://atap.google.com/ara/. It would have brought modular parts and design to the mobile phone industry. While a great concept, and something that appeals to my custom rig PC roots, it may not actually have been that useful in practice for the vast majority of the general public.
- jaytaylor 9y ago
  My MacBook Air is sleek and also very easy to repair and service. This aspect of products is not so black and white, and comes down to the design decisions made by the product people and engineers.
  - crispyambulance 9y ago
    Yeah, "easy" is in the eye of the beholder. For some folks a BGA rework is a piece of cake, for others it means "scrap". Depends on your tools, skills, time, will-power, documentation and tolerance for screw-ups. Mostly skill. I've seen techs performing successful BGA replacements on laptop MOBO's in repair stands in Mexico with pathetic equipment.
    - 9y ago
acd 9y ago
There is only one planet earth. Either we decide to take care of the planet together or we do not care. PC computers can be repaired easily and use standardized parts that are user replaceable. Why not make phones the same with standard hardware and open boot loaders?
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Sadly the development i am seeing is that PCs are becoming phone-like faster than phones are becoming pc-like...
krylon 9y ago
I am reminded of that company from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy whose products were built so they could not possibly fail - and then it turned out they were impossible to repair when they did. It's a shame companies do this, not just to phones. Laptops and small-form-factor desktops have the same problem. A few years back, a coworker had a problem with a laptop, Lenovo R500, I think, that required replacing something inside the laptop (I forgot what part exactly). I found this maintenance manual, and it was exemplary, with lots of diagrams and drawings that made taking this machine apart and putting it back together a cakewalk even for somebody as clumsy as me (meaning, I successfully performed the "operation", with hardly a clue what I was doing guided solely by the excellent manual, and it ____ing worked!) That is the standard, vendors should aspire to. And I think, Douglas Adams was on to something - if you design something with repairability (is that a word?) as a goal, I would not bet surprised if the result was also more reliable.
- jventura 9y ago
  HP is also a well-behaved player regarding repairments. For instance, here's the service manual for my HP DV5 laptop: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02666786.pdf http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02666786.pdf. You can find the replacement procedures for almost all components after page 48..
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I've got one of the variants of an HP Envy. There's a long rubber foot on the underside of the computer, which covers up a few of the screws to open the bottom. The problem is that you're going to tear up the strip when removing it (beneath the rubber is a separate, padded adhesive strip that tears easily). Mounting a SATA drive required purchase of some model-specific adapters and a rubber drive caddy. Either the caddy or the adapter came with an extra rubber foot, but I think that each of those parts came out to about $30. Pluses: Individual parts are available to order directly from HP. Once you've identified your machine's exact variant, you can get the service manual and replacement part numbers. The actual disassembly+reassembly was (in my case, at least), really easy, with just a few screws. Minuses: The parts are expensive, model-specific, the correct model number is sometimes confusing to find. Opening the machine can be a destructive operation, for some models. Internal connections don't always use standard interfaces. Close to every model seems to have customized parts, and there are a lot of model variations, so finding second-hand replacement parts is difficult. As seems to be the usual trend, I'm sure that the business models would be a better experience and the consumer models would be worse.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
When an article is filled with "Advocacy groups say .." and "report by the <we dislike this state of affairs> organization" you can expect it to be filled with poorly sourced 'facts' and weakly reasoned 'conclusions.' And this article does not disappoint in that regard. The industry got hooked on 'upgrade every year or so' it did wonders for the bottom line because you could sell the same high margin product to the consumer again and again. It isn't surprising when you consider the people who designed and built your product are sitting there at the company still, and now what do they do? You can't really just lay them off (not and expect to catch the next wave of what ever) so you start them off designing and building the next version, which, as a requirement is "make it so that someone who owns the old one will want to buy the new one." Great but that is then conflated with the challenge of disposing of the previous one which, for all intents and purposes, can't really be 'recycled' so much as separated into recoverable metal [1][2] and then either burying the rest or incinerating it. And that gets conflated with the 'If you would just support it I could keep it' story line, where new features can't run on the old device (I've got an older iPad for example stuck on IOS 6 for that reason but its a great media player) and of course the FOSS community saying that if you document the device they would build alternative software packages for it. And that gets conflated with 'if I could get it fixed I would' which would support repair shops (which seem to flourish in places like China but less commonly in the US) where problems are diagnosed down to the chip level and fixed on the spot. But that interferes with warranty calculations (you crack a screen and have a shop replace it, but then the mainboard develops an intermittent, was that a manufacturing problem or a repair shop problem? can be impossible to know.) And all of that burys the state of the art which is that most of the toxic stuff has been taken out of electronics, and caveat people who violate the laws, or places which care to little to enforce the laws, the stuff is reasonably disposed and what can be recovered is. What is missing is any sort of vision by either one of the agencies or organizations they talk with about what a better system would look like from an implementation level (we know about lax enforcement of the current stuff). [1] https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/Case%20Study%20on%20Critical%20Metals%20in%20Mobile%20Phones.pdf https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/Case%20Study%20on%20Critical%... [2] http://services.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/05/ULE_CellPhone_White_Paper_V2.pdf http://services.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/05/UL...
Lagged2Death 9y ago
...at a certain point, the tech industry’s chemical suppliers were enlisting family members to pay for IEEE memberships to help vote down new environmental measures. Nothing to see here, just the free market regulating itself. Good job!
pointytrees 9y ago
I think the consumer frustration stems from the desire to buy once, then use it for 10+ years. I'm driving a 17yr old vehicle with 350k+ miles, and just keep taking it in for quarterly tune ups and it runs great. Sure I would love an auto-pilot tesla, but I'm more than happy to save loads of money by maintaining my existing vehicle.
indigo0086 9y ago
I only see this as a good thing. Breeds competition as consumer trust and loyalty degrades. Rather than allow a company to continue doing this and have us still fund their companies, anyone should come forward and provide better products and they'll get the message.
Zenst 9y ago
In many aspects in ever decreasing size tech the balance between repairable and size come into play. One way to see this aspect would be a PC compared to a laptop One is larger but you can replace many components with ease to a laptop that has a more limited and indeed costly replacement/repair factor and even then you are constraints limited compared to a PC. But it does get better, I can't but help feel that the lack of standards limit the drive to swap in and out parts. More so when those standards are driven by SOC manufacturers more than most and help to lock in phone manufacturers into certain brands of SOC.
paulmd 9y ago
Smartphones are highly "engineered" products (in the sense that they are more than a simple combination of off-the-shelf parts). And typically the more "engineered" a product is, the more difficult it is for an end-user to service. That goes double if it's extremely space-constrained, as engineers are forced to get "creative" to fit their constraints. As a relatable example, consider PC building. In a standard PC case, you can pretty much throw together any selection of (compatible) parts and expect them to work. In contrast very compact mini-ITX builds can be very challenging, not all combinations of parts will fit in a given case, heat becomes challenging to dissipate without excessive noise, and assembly can be very fiddly, with exactly one right order to put all the parts together. And even if you are doing the smallest fiddliest case you can buy, you still will not actually approach the sizes that are possible with an engineered product like the MSI Trident 3/Corsair One/Zotac Magnus let alone the noise profiles. That said, Apple definitely crosses the line from "compact product that is necessarily difficult to service" into actively obstructing service efforts, which is a problem. For example I accept that soldering parts down is thinner than socketing them, but it's an asshole move to glue components into place. Apple is certainly not alone here, however. It's virtually impossible to find a phone without an integral (non-replaceable) battery nowadays, and MicroSD slots are rather uncommon as well (yes Google, I know there's a lot of bad flash out there, that's why I source nice stuff from camera stores). I don't have any good suggestions to fix this, there's no "but wait there's a better way" at the end of this post. There was a prototype phone a while back that was built from pluggable "modules" but obviously it hasn't taken off. The closest thing is probably a dedicated hacker/tinkerer phone like the Neo900 but you will definitely have to live with it being 3-4x as thick as an iPhone. The iPhone is making enough compromises in terms of functionality (eg battery life, external antenna connector, etc) that there might be a niche for a more full-featured device but it's clearly not what the mass market wants.
csours 9y ago
I've spent some time thinking about this from an automotive manufacturing perspective (I work for an automotive manufacturer, previously on the shop floor). Engineering is all about trade-offs - both physically/materially/technically, and in time and money. As an engineer/designer you have a set of requirements to meet: Product Safety, Customer Needs, Marketing Needs, and Technical Requirements. Then you can spend some time on Serviceability - but any time and money you spend on Serviceability is time you are not spending on improving the product and hopefully reducing the need to repair and replace parts in the first place. Then you start manufacturing the thing, and problems come out of the woodwork. If you put a thousand parts together that's at least two thousand things to go wrong (and often many more). So you spend time designing for manufacturability/assembly - add an alignment slot to this connector, color coordinate these parts so it's obvious what goes together, make this bolt/fastener easier to insert. This is called Poke-Yoke, or idiot proofing. You spend a lot of time on this because there are a lot of idiots. If you are good at manufacturing you learn how to make the thing quickly, with high quality, and with a small number of workers. This is called Lean Manufacturing. The upshot of all of this, is that the connectors, parts, assemblies, fasteners, adhesives and all of that are designed so that the widget goes together right the first time, in such a way that an idiot can put it together, and it should work for a long time.
limeblack 9y ago
On top of this Apple is forcing Recyclers to shred Phones and Laptops https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp73jw/apple-recy... Not exactly a green thing to do in my opinion.
abalone 9y ago
This is a super disingenuous article from the Verge. It's based on a highly biased "report" by the Repair Association trade group led by iFixit, whose business is impacted by this approach. They are now attempting to make an environmental argument. Pay close attention and you'll note that their premise, that user-repairable devices are better for the environment, is entirely unsupported. Where do you think most user-removed parts end up? In landfill. Whereas devices traded in to Apple can be recycled properly. Apple even has a custom-designed robot to disassemble iPhones to achieve maximum recyclability.[1] They also offer zero support for the claim that Apple's approach shortens the lifetime of devices. Apple offers a battery replacement program![2] You can extend your iPhone's life! And they recycle the old battery properly. iFixit just doesn't like that they can't sell you the kits to do it yourself. Apple's obvious motive, which this sensational article fails to dispute, is to make their devices smaller, watertight, and generally better. That is why they pack and glue the interiors with custom parts and seals. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc [2] https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power
Animats 9y ago
One alternative is "impossible to repair, but rugged". Encapsulate the whole thing and make it watertight, dusttight, and airtight. (Yes, you can get microphones and speakers for that environment.) Lose the connectors and have wireless charging and audio out. The problem with Apple's products is fragility, not repairability. Nokia had this nailed over a decade ago. I have a Caterpillar B15 phone, which is the modern equivalent of "doesn't break". Here's one of my projects, restoring a Teletype Model 15 from the 1930s.[1] This one was in bad shape. Those machines are 100% repairable; any part can be removed and replaced with common hand tools, usually just with a screwdriver. It took about a month to overhaul. I have it running, connected to a laptop computer. The typing quality isn't very good; I could do a rebuild on the type basket but haven't done so. The price of this repairability is a big, heavy machine. There are people in Shenzhen who repair iPhones at that level. They un-solder chips with a hot air rework station, put down a solder paste stencil, put in a good chip from another broken phone, heat up the new chip to solder it in, and have a working board. It's feasible because it's such a monoculture - there are so many identical phones, and you don't need a broad parts stock. For brands with a lot of models, and a smaller markup over parts cost, few people bother. [1] http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.html http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.htm...
justforFranz 9y ago
Doesn't Apple already have more money than god?

231 points by PleaseHelpMe 9y ago

Top comment under article: > This is such bs. iPhone is one if not the only smartphone the oem support for about 5 years. My son is rocking a 5s currently with the latest os update. About a year ago, I swapped out the battery myself.

zzalpha 9y ago
Which, while poorly phrased, at least does raise a valid point that the story is complex. There are some things Apple does very well (e.g. supporting newer versions of iOS on older gear, ensuring it continues to have a life), and some things they do very badly (no replaceable batteries). Other vendors have the exact opposite problem (my LG G5 has a replaceable battery, but I have no idea how long it'll continue to receive OS updates from my carrier).
- rubatuga 9y ago
  The Samsung Galaxy A5 I bought in 2015 stopped getting security updates after the summer of 2016. If that isn’t pure planned obsolescence, I don’t know what is. On the contrary, my dad’s iPhone 5 from 2012 got five years of updates. I foresee that since the iPhone 5S is a 64 bit processor, it will see at least six iOS revisions before being EOL’d
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Every iPhone I had has had a "replaceable battery". Sure - it's a fiddly job usually done by a technician, but I think that is a small drawback these days. In 5-ish smartphones I have replaced at least one screen each, and only 1 battery. So if something should be user replaceable why focus on battery? Ability to expand storage (even only internally) would have been a useful iPhone feature.
  - zzalpha 9y ago
    If we define "user replaceable" as "requires specialized tools and skills, while voiding the warranty in the process", can we agree we've stretched the term beyond usefulness?
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      Yes definitely agree, however 1) if the battery needs replacing within warranty doesn't that mean the user shouldn't have to? There is of course a case where the user thinks the battery life is bad but apple doesn't agree so the warranty doesn't help. 2) there is a difference between replaceable and user replaceable and my point was that "replacable" is usually enough since batteries are so rarely replaced compared to e.g screens. I have no stats but my personal guess would be that an average iPhone has at least one screen replacement.
    - sbuk 9y ago
      Semantics, but you said "replaceable battery" not "user replaceable battery.
pat_space 9y ago
They have a point. My 2013 rMBP is still solid and I don't foresee replacing it for years.
- gambiting 9y ago
  I still use a late 2009 MacBook Pro on a daily basis and I have absolutely no need to replace it. It's fast enough to browse the web, watch videos and do light programming work. I've only replaced the hdd with a 128GB SSD few years ago and everything else is stock and still works.
- thearn4 9y ago
  Still using a 2011 MBA. I just had to change out the magsafe charging port/IO board, but other than that its held up great.
  - smnscu 9y ago
    Rocking a (very abused, still working great) 2012 MBA and a 2012 27" iMac. Only changes were a new battery (€70) and more RAM.
- 6d6b73 9y ago
  And my 2011 Dell I use for networking has only gotten better with time. Larger battery, more ram, SSD hd, Blueray DVD RW. I will take something that can be updated over something that is just a few mm smaller any day.
- scriptkiddy 9y ago
  And I still have a toshiba satellite from 2008 that works as well as the day I bought it. I think reliability isn't something only high end manufacturers offer.
IBM 9y ago
The second top level comment is much better: >This is basically an advertorial for the Right to Repair legislation. I continue to be amazed by how uncritically this topic has been covered. Jason Koebler at Vice has basically been an activist on this issue, rather than a journalist. And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc. This may be fine for vehicles (and even that is questionable now that cars are becoming more advanced and require more expertise to repair), it would be silly for consumer electronics which is a much more dynamic and fast changing industry. And as for the story about environmental standards. EPEAT is a shit standard if it would have prevented Apple from creating a unibody Macbook Pro. It was right to change. The real reason that Apple lobbied them to change it isn’t some silly conspiracy about making them harder to repair, it’s about making better products. I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR. Whenever a silly environmental story about Apple pops up, he’s the go-to guy for a negative quote.
- jogjayr 9y ago
  > This may be fine for vehicles (and even that is questionable now that cars are becoming more advanced and require more expertise to repair), it would be silly for consumer electronics which is a much more dynamic and fast changing industry. Sorry can you explain why it's silly because the electronics industry is more dynamic? > And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc. From an environmental standpoint that doesn't sound like a terrible private interest group. If 3rd party repair gets support from manufacturers it lowers barriers to entry to the repair industry. Which would make repairs cheaper. That in turn would encourage more consumers to consider repairs over replacements. In theory, at least. > I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR. The saying "doing well by doing good" comes to mind.
- bo1024 9y ago
falcolas 9y ago
Counter anecdote: I have never been able to swap out a battery in a sealed Apple device. Even attempting to remove the screen is a much bigger financial risk than I am willing to undertake. And my six year old 5 has long since hit the proverbial trash. It was too slow about four years ago.
- copperx 9y ago
  Even the 6 is excruciatingly slow today.
Too 9y ago
Does ios still become 2x slower on old phones every time they update it for a new phone release? I remember previously fast iPhone 4s becoming close to useless when iPhone 5 came out after an os update.

zzalpha 9y ago

That's a long article to point out the obvious: if you can't fix it, you have to buy a new one. I would've changed the "Why" in the title to "How", since that's where the article really illuminates some industry dynamics I wasn't aware of. Of course, if LIBOR taught us anything, it's that industry shouldn't be left to regulate itself...

jpttsn 9y ago
What does LIBOR have to do with regulation? What does regulation have to do with the OP?
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Did you read the article? If not, search for "Macbook Pro". It spends a lot of time talking about voluntary standards bodies for eco-friendly/sustainable technology development, and how those standards are manipulated by participants, rendering them utterly meaningless.
  - jpttsn 9y ago
    I should've been clearer: I'm opining that regulation is probably the wrong word. As the article explicitly says: > It’s important to note that these are not government-enforced regulations
    - zzalpha 9y ago
      Yeah which is precisely the point. If they were it's possible they'd have a little teeth. But if, as a society, we claim to value things like sustainability, and then leave industry to police itself, it should be no great surprise that the outcomes are poor. The Clean Air Act would've been an abject failure if it'd been the Clean Air Voluntary Industry Recommended Practices if you Feel Like It Group.
      - jpttsn 9y ago
        I agree. So what do you make of the fact that these environmental policies are not government regulation? Maybe the voters claim to care about sustainability more than their actual choice of politicians reflects?

scottlegrand2 9y ago

As long as we have Shenzhen, no tool/screw will remain proprietary for long...

criddell 9y ago
I don't understand what can be proprietary about a screw. Is the design of the screwdriver protected by a patent or something?
- falcolas 9y ago
  Limited need, and thus availability, of driver heads. While possible, it's not simple (as in I have a set in my house already, or can get them as part of a regular set of drivers) to get pentalobe and tri-wing driver heads.
  - criddell 9y ago
    That may be true, but it doesn't make it proprietary.
- NikolaNovak 9y ago
  Few years back Apple 'silently' switched to a variation of Pentalobe screw which some thought might be patented. Stories also abounded about people going to their store for unrelated repair, and coming out with their regular screws replaced by pentalobe screws. There are of course "compatible screwdrivers" out there, per the original post, but whether patented or not, it was a fairly transparent way of Apple keeping people out of their own hardware.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Honest question, how can you patent a screw shape? Isn't literally every other screw shape prior art?
    - Domenic_S 9y ago

criddell 9y ago

From the article, Apple's statement: “Highly-integrated design allows us to make products that are not only beautiful, thin and powerful, but also durable, so they can last for many years,” the company said. “When repairs are needed, authorized providers can ensure the quality, safety, and security of repairs for customers. And when products do reach end of life, Apple takes responsibility for recycling them safely and responsibly.” Sounds reasonable to me.

mamcx 9y ago
I need to replace my old iMac. I can't stand to not use SSD anymore. I can't upgrade the new iMacs to SSD, and the prices that Apple give me are too much. I can't afford it, and I can't change to SSD later. So, I go hackintosh or find a way to be rich somehow. The first look more possible.
- thescriptkiddie 9y ago
  Depending on the year, you should be able to retrofit an SSD into an older iMac. I've done it with a 2011 27" model myself. https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIYIMACHDD09/ https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIYIMACHDD09/
  - mamcx 9y ago
    That is what I have done with my current one.
backtoyoujim 9y ago
So durable that they cannot withstand being disassembled doesn't sound right to me.
- redial 9y ago
  I cannot disassemble my 20 year old soccer ball without sacrificing it. Still has lasted 20 years tho.

SamReidHughes 9y ago

If consumers wanted an easy to repair product, they would have bought them. What they really want is thin, lightweight phones that are new enough not to be slow.

falcolas 9y ago
Consumers can't buy what isn't available. Also, what consumers want, and what is good for the environment, rarely mesh very well.
- jpttsn 9y ago
  Meanwhile, what consumers don't buy isn't available for long. It's a chicken and egg situation. Unless, of course, you're arguing that the suppliers have coordinated to screw consumers. But that would be illegal, wouldn't it?
  - falcolas 9y ago
    > But that would be illegal, wouldn't it? Only if proven. And there would be a tremendous cost to attempt to prove it. Ultimately I do believe they create hard-to-repair phones exactly for the reasons they state - it makes it easier to make them thin and light - but I also believe this is harmful to consumers in the long run.
br_smartass 9y ago
Or maybe all companies saw the better strategy for the profit of the industry was for people to need to keep buying new phones frequently and so they all removed that option from the customer hands, on a backdrop of design efficiency and 'innovation' and then it was done because consumerism is a big pile of bullshit. Most people when I see they talking about it, and I suppose most people in general, would like stronger screens and more battery even if it meant a thicker phone, but the illusion of "last generation" and stuff like that make so, for marketing purposes, supported by the profit motive, that it should not be this way because "customers"... I'm sorry, I just think it's absurd that people take those tales uncritically like that. My current phone is a middle-end Sony, it's screen already has that kind of shatter that starts to spread, the p2 connector stopped working these days, and after I bought it I could not find any of the accessories to help me preserve it(screen protection, cover, etc), had to buy some chinese stuff online that were worthless, it's less than a year old. We're systematically made of idiots. I still have an S3 that I used for 3~4 years, it's screen is intact and all the rest works fine.

StillBored 9y ago

Its not just about repair-ability, its about software support too. Apple, when compared with the android phone manufactures is probably a better choice for long term use. That is because while my android phone (asus) has a battery I can replace in under 1 minute, the software support probably won't last for 5 years like my daughters iphone5 which after a new battery is a perfectly functional updated device. So if you want to do something about the throwaway culture, minimum support periods might be a good thing to look at too.

icebraining 9y ago
Yeah, at least for security bugs. I'm still using a Nexus 7 (2012) with Lollipop and it works fine, including the apps, even if their developers hate my guts for having to stick with older APIs :)
- numenor 9y ago
  Mine is a humble Galaxy S3, bought when it first came out, now running Android 7.1.2. Since neither Android nor the handset maker has a chokehold on me, I can choose to upgrade/downgrade, muck around in general. It is my device to do whatever I wish. Plus the lovely external SD card to put whatever I want and not rely on any @#$% cloud.
  - limeblack 9y ago
    Unfortunately I'm pretty sure newer S8 have locked bootloaders or I could be wrong.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I could upgrade as well (I already run ClockworkMod, in fact), I just don't have the patience to deal with eventual problems. As for the external storage, I can use any flash drive with an OTG micro-USB port, which are common and cheap nowadays (or a regular drive with an OTG cable). But I rarely need the extra space.
  - ihattendorf 9y ago

alkonaut 9y ago

I have only had good experiences repairing iPhones. Most everything can be fixed within an hour and at a reasonable cost. A key factor is the large user base (many million) for each model of the iPhone, so 3rd party parts are usually cheap and diagnostics for almost any problem is easy to google. Compared to e.g washing machines it's a pleasure to have a broken smartphone.

falcolas 9y ago
This is hardly universal. Repairing an iPhone is a 2-3 week affair involving mailing it off and hoping I get it back. I do live in the US, just not in or near a major urban center.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Wow. I realize you have huge distances but in the town I was born (pop 40k, 100 mile drive to next town which is similar. Basically the same geography as Alaska or Canada in northern Sweden) there is at lest 4 or 5 places that fixes it while you wait. It's not a big town but phone repair shops are about as common as barbers. So if a town is big enough to get your hair cut you can fix a screen... We are probably extreme in Sweden though.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    We have one repair shop in town, and they can not work on the newer phones without voiding the warranties, and they can not get replacements directly from Apple. So, they generally refuse to work on Apple devices as a result. Our nearest Apple store is about 600ish miles away, in Seattle. Android is another matter, and they're more than happy to work on those devices.

devy 9y ago

It's a shame that smart phones are so hard to repair these days. Ben Evans from a16z even argued that "selling smartphones is a subscription business" and that "You pay an average of $700 or so every two years (i.e. $30/month) and Apple gives you a new phone." [1] I think the car industry is probably similar in that so many parts become more electronic and less mechanic and if a sensor is gone, the entire part has to be replaced. (Not a car geek, but the ones who are, please feel free to chime in here!). And with the EV revolution, that trend is going to be accelerated. [1]: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/7/13/content-isnt-king http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/7/13/content-isnt-ki...

scottLobster 9y ago
I'm not sure the analogy is all that apt. Sensors can fail all the time for reasons beyond the company's intention or control. Phones on the other hand should be an easy-battery swap away from future usefulness. And that's just from the hardware perspective. There is no functional reason my Nexus 5X should stop receiving security updates next year, other than the fact that Google wants to sell more Pixels (which I will probably buy because going without security updates is cutting off my nose to spite my face).
- digi_owl 9y ago
  The updates thing may change once Android 8 becomes more common, as they have now taken a clue from their ChromeOS experience and decoupled the UI/app layer from the core OS layer. Thus getting updates out there for the UI layer will not be hampered by having Qualcomm etc drop support for their SOCs 12 months after initial introduction (meaning 6 months before they start showing up in the first devices). And frankly i don't see how much difference there really is between Apple and Google here. Google offer a bunch of compatibility tools etc that allow new APIs to function (up to a point) on older devices. Similarly Apple will regularly leave out big ticket items on their updates for older devices, meaning that if it is something the app dev wants to make use of they can only support the newest Apple is shipping. Never mind that i hear again and again that getting the latest iOS on an older device makes said device slow as a slug.

matt_s 9y ago

I understand the sustainability concerns but what is the answer? More regulation from the government that would impact their designs? That doesn't sound right, I don't think there are smart phone designers working for the government. I have replaced screens and batteries on iPhones, it isn't wizardry but does require technical acumen and some special screw-driver/pry tools that won't break things. It isn't an open standard like PC parts but there are lots of other industries that are mostly closed and engineer their products to only last a certain usage threshold. Engineering them to last longer costs way too much.

franciscop 9y ago

On the other hand you can make a full iPhone by buying each of the components if you know where to find them (disclaimer: I've met Scott before): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA

yodon 9y ago

I fail to see the validity of all the conspiracy theory evil claimed around modern manufacturing techniques. The overwhelming majority of consumers have spoken, and what they have said is they will pay more for smaller lighter devices and will not pay more for consumer repairable devices. Manufacturers have responded in exactly the way the majority of consumers asked them to, by making smaller lighter devices rather than repairable ones. Connectors add space and weight, making devices bigger and heavier and less desirable to the vast majority of consumers.

programmertote 9y ago

My cousin's iPhone 6 stopped charging a few days ago. Everything works, but it seems like the port for charging is worn out or something and wouldn't recognize/charge when being plugged in. He is visiting from Australia and he took a lot of pictures lately with his phone. So he went to the Apple store in New York to get it fixed (in the hope to save his photos/data). They told him that they'll give him a discount for a new iPhone 6 (same model) for just ~$270 or there's no way to fix it. I thought changing the charging port should be relatively easy. Now it is certain that my cousin will lose all of his photos in the old phone unless he gets it fixed at an unauthorized repair center.

bpicolo 9y ago
I've had to pick dust out of the port with a paperclip a few times
- k-mcgrady 9y ago
  This. They cleaned it for me at the store but it sounds really similar to what's going on here. It is a very common problem though so it would be weird of them to miss it.
- programmertote 9y ago
  Yeah, he told me that he did similar thing in the past before and it worked. Now that trick no longer works for him unfortunately... Thanks for the tip though!
  - Majora320 9y ago
    Try buying a spray canister of compressed air, works wonders for cleaning dusty electronics.
scarface74 9y ago
With all of the things that can happen to a phone -- damage, loss,theft etc. I would never trust any data that I cared about to remain on the phone. I would be auto syncing like crazy over iCloud or Google Photos.

chrisco255 9y ago

There's a trade off between modularity and sleek design as Apple has proven better than anyone. They were arguably the first PC manufacturer to take design seriously and while Macs began to become more difficult to repair beginning with the iMac in 1998, there's no questioning that the component choices (from the external to the internal) lent itself to an increasingly sleek design that eventually led Apple to create the best-in-class laptops and desktops. This push towards sleek design also gave Apple the chops to create the original iPod in the first place...which eventually lead to the revolutionary iPhone...which completely upended the mobile phone industry. As a PC fan, I love creating and building my own box...carefully selecting my motherboard, case, processor, and memory in the process...and I rest easy knowing I can upgrade my machine over time... But I wouldn't question the value that highly integrated designs that Apple and others have brought to the table. You can feel the quality in the products they make. There's a lot of careful thought and design. Modularity and repairability are a necessary sacrifice to build products that sleek. Take a look at the failed Project Ara by Google: https://atap.google.com/ara/ https://atap.google.com/ara/. It would have brought modular parts and design to the mobile phone industry. While a great concept, and something that appeals to my custom rig PC roots, it may not actually have been that useful in practice for the vast majority of the general public.

jaytaylor 9y ago
My MacBook Air is sleek and also very easy to repair and service. This aspect of products is not so black and white, and comes down to the design decisions made by the product people and engineers.
- crispyambulance 9y ago
  Yeah, "easy" is in the eye of the beholder. For some folks a BGA rework is a piece of cake, for others it means "scrap". Depends on your tools, skills, time, will-power, documentation and tolerance for screw-ups. Mostly skill. I've seen techs performing successful BGA replacements on laptop MOBO's in repair stands in Mexico with pathetic equipment.
  - 9y ago

acd 9y ago

There is only one planet earth. Either we decide to take care of the planet together or we do not care. PC computers can be repaired easily and use standardized parts that are user replaceable. Why not make phones the same with standard hardware and open boot loaders?

digi_owl 9y ago
Sadly the development i am seeing is that PCs are becoming phone-like faster than phones are becoming pc-like...

krylon 9y ago

I am reminded of that company from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy whose products were built so they could not possibly fail - and then it turned out they were impossible to repair when they did. It's a shame companies do this, not just to phones. Laptops and small-form-factor desktops have the same problem. A few years back, a coworker had a problem with a laptop, Lenovo R500, I think, that required replacing something inside the laptop (I forgot what part exactly). I found this maintenance manual, and it was exemplary, with lots of diagrams and drawings that made taking this machine apart and putting it back together a cakewalk even for somebody as clumsy as me (meaning, I successfully performed the "operation", with hardly a clue what I was doing guided solely by the excellent manual, and it ____ing worked!) That is the standard, vendors should aspire to. And I think, Douglas Adams was on to something - if you design something with repairability (is that a word?) as a goal, I would not bet surprised if the result was also more reliable.

jventura 9y ago
HP is also a well-behaved player regarding repairments. For instance, here's the service manual for my HP DV5 laptop: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02666786.pdf http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02666786.pdf. You can find the replacement procedures for almost all components after page 48..
- khedoros1 9y ago
  I've got one of the variants of an HP Envy. There's a long rubber foot on the underside of the computer, which covers up a few of the screws to open the bottom. The problem is that you're going to tear up the strip when removing it (beneath the rubber is a separate, padded adhesive strip that tears easily). Mounting a SATA drive required purchase of some model-specific adapters and a rubber drive caddy. Either the caddy or the adapter came with an extra rubber foot, but I think that each of those parts came out to about $30. Pluses: Individual parts are available to order directly from HP. Once you've identified your machine's exact variant, you can get the service manual and replacement part numbers. The actual disassembly+reassembly was (in my case, at least), really easy, with just a few screws. Minuses: The parts are expensive, model-specific, the correct model number is sometimes confusing to find. Opening the machine can be a destructive operation, for some models. Internal connections don't always use standard interfaces. Close to every model seems to have customized parts, and there are a lot of model variations, so finding second-hand replacement parts is difficult. As seems to be the usual trend, I'm sure that the business models would be a better experience and the consumer models would be worse.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

When an article is filled with "Advocacy groups say .." and "report by the <we dislike this state of affairs> organization" you can expect it to be filled with poorly sourced 'facts' and weakly reasoned 'conclusions.' And this article does not disappoint in that regard. The industry got hooked on 'upgrade every year or so' it did wonders for the bottom line because you could sell the same high margin product to the consumer again and again. It isn't surprising when you consider the people who designed and built your product are sitting there at the company still, and now what do they do? You can't really just lay them off (not and expect to catch the next wave of what ever) so you start them off designing and building the next version, which, as a requirement is "make it so that someone who owns the old one will want to buy the new one." Great but that is then conflated with the challenge of disposing of the previous one which, for all intents and purposes, can't really be 'recycled' so much as separated into recoverable metal [1][2] and then either burying the rest or incinerating it. And that gets conflated with the 'If you would just support it I could keep it' story line, where new features can't run on the old device (I've got an older iPad for example stuck on IOS 6 for that reason but its a great media player) and of course the FOSS community saying that if you document the device they would build alternative software packages for it. And that gets conflated with 'if I could get it fixed I would' which would support repair shops (which seem to flourish in places like China but less commonly in the US) where problems are diagnosed down to the chip level and fixed on the spot. But that interferes with warranty calculations (you crack a screen and have a shop replace it, but then the mainboard develops an intermittent, was that a manufacturing problem or a repair shop problem? can be impossible to know.) And all of that burys the state of the art which is that most of the toxic stuff has been taken out of electronics, and caveat people who violate the laws, or places which care to little to enforce the laws, the stuff is reasonably disposed and what can be recovered is. What is missing is any sort of vision by either one of the agencies or organizations they talk with about what a better system would look like from an implementation level (we know about lax enforcement of the current stuff). [1] https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/Case%20Study%20on%20Critical%20Metals%20in%20Mobile%20Phones.pdf https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/Case%20Study%20on%20Critical%... [2] http://services.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/05/ULE_CellPhone_White_Paper_V2.pdf http://services.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/05/UL...

Lagged2Death 9y ago

...at a certain point, the tech industry’s chemical suppliers were enlisting family members to pay for IEEE memberships to help vote down new environmental measures. Nothing to see here, just the free market regulating itself. Good job!

pointytrees 9y ago

I think the consumer frustration stems from the desire to buy once, then use it for 10+ years. I'm driving a 17yr old vehicle with 350k+ miles, and just keep taking it in for quarterly tune ups and it runs great. Sure I would love an auto-pilot tesla, but I'm more than happy to save loads of money by maintaining my existing vehicle.

indigo0086 9y ago

I only see this as a good thing. Breeds competition as consumer trust and loyalty degrades. Rather than allow a company to continue doing this and have us still fund their companies, anyone should come forward and provide better products and they'll get the message.

Zenst 9y ago

In many aspects in ever decreasing size tech the balance between repairable and size come into play. One way to see this aspect would be a PC compared to a laptop One is larger but you can replace many components with ease to a laptop that has a more limited and indeed costly replacement/repair factor and even then you are constraints limited compared to a PC. But it does get better, I can't but help feel that the lack of standards limit the drive to swap in and out parts. More so when those standards are driven by SOC manufacturers more than most and help to lock in phone manufacturers into certain brands of SOC.

paulmd 9y ago

Smartphones are highly "engineered" products (in the sense that they are more than a simple combination of off-the-shelf parts). And typically the more "engineered" a product is, the more difficult it is for an end-user to service. That goes double if it's extremely space-constrained, as engineers are forced to get "creative" to fit their constraints. As a relatable example, consider PC building. In a standard PC case, you can pretty much throw together any selection of (compatible) parts and expect them to work. In contrast very compact mini-ITX builds can be very challenging, not all combinations of parts will fit in a given case, heat becomes challenging to dissipate without excessive noise, and assembly can be very fiddly, with exactly one right order to put all the parts together. And even if you are doing the smallest fiddliest case you can buy, you still will not actually approach the sizes that are possible with an engineered product like the MSI Trident 3/Corsair One/Zotac Magnus let alone the noise profiles. That said, Apple definitely crosses the line from "compact product that is necessarily difficult to service" into actively obstructing service efforts, which is a problem. For example I accept that soldering parts down is thinner than socketing them, but it's an asshole move to glue components into place. Apple is certainly not alone here, however. It's virtually impossible to find a phone without an integral (non-replaceable) battery nowadays, and MicroSD slots are rather uncommon as well (yes Google, I know there's a lot of bad flash out there, that's why I source nice stuff from camera stores). I don't have any good suggestions to fix this, there's no "but wait there's a better way" at the end of this post. There was a prototype phone a while back that was built from pluggable "modules" but obviously it hasn't taken off. The closest thing is probably a dedicated hacker/tinkerer phone like the Neo900 but you will definitely have to live with it being 3-4x as thick as an iPhone. The iPhone is making enough compromises in terms of functionality (eg battery life, external antenna connector, etc) that there might be a niche for a more full-featured device but it's clearly not what the mass market wants.

csours 9y ago

I've spent some time thinking about this from an automotive manufacturing perspective (I work for an automotive manufacturer, previously on the shop floor). Engineering is all about trade-offs - both physically/materially/technically, and in time and money. As an engineer/designer you have a set of requirements to meet: Product Safety, Customer Needs, Marketing Needs, and Technical Requirements. Then you can spend some time on Serviceability - but any time and money you spend on Serviceability is time you are not spending on improving the product and hopefully reducing the need to repair and replace parts in the first place. Then you start manufacturing the thing, and problems come out of the woodwork. If you put a thousand parts together that's at least two thousand things to go wrong (and often many more). So you spend time designing for manufacturability/assembly - add an alignment slot to this connector, color coordinate these parts so it's obvious what goes together, make this bolt/fastener easier to insert. This is called Poke-Yoke, or idiot proofing. You spend a lot of time on this because there are a lot of idiots. If you are good at manufacturing you learn how to make the thing quickly, with high quality, and with a small number of workers. This is called Lean Manufacturing. The upshot of all of this, is that the connectors, parts, assemblies, fasteners, adhesives and all of that are designed so that the widget goes together right the first time, in such a way that an idiot can put it together, and it should work for a long time.

limeblack 9y ago

On top of this Apple is forcing Recyclers to shred Phones and Laptops https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp73jw/apple-recy... Not exactly a green thing to do in my opinion.

abalone 9y ago

This is a super disingenuous article from the Verge. It's based on a highly biased "report" by the Repair Association trade group led by iFixit, whose business is impacted by this approach. They are now attempting to make an environmental argument. Pay close attention and you'll note that their premise, that user-repairable devices are better for the environment, is entirely unsupported. Where do you think most user-removed parts end up? In landfill. Whereas devices traded in to Apple can be recycled properly. Apple even has a custom-designed robot to disassemble iPhones to achieve maximum recyclability.[1] They also offer zero support for the claim that Apple's approach shortens the lifetime of devices. Apple offers a battery replacement program![2] You can extend your iPhone's life! And they recycle the old battery properly. iFixit just doesn't like that they can't sell you the kits to do it yourself. Apple's obvious motive, which this sensational article fails to dispute, is to make their devices smaller, watertight, and generally better. That is why they pack and glue the interiors with custom parts and seals. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc [2] https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power

Animats 9y ago

One alternative is "impossible to repair, but rugged". Encapsulate the whole thing and make it watertight, dusttight, and airtight. (Yes, you can get microphones and speakers for that environment.) Lose the connectors and have wireless charging and audio out. The problem with Apple's products is fragility, not repairability. Nokia had this nailed over a decade ago. I have a Caterpillar B15 phone, which is the modern equivalent of "doesn't break". Here's one of my projects, restoring a Teletype Model 15 from the 1930s.[1] This one was in bad shape. Those machines are 100% repairable; any part can be removed and replaced with common hand tools, usually just with a screwdriver. It took about a month to overhaul. I have it running, connected to a laptop computer. The typing quality isn't very good; I could do a rebuild on the type basket but haven't done so. The price of this repairability is a big, heavy machine. There are people in Shenzhen who repair iPhones at that level. They un-solder chips with a hot air rework station, put down a solder paste stencil, put in a good chip from another broken phone, heat up the new chip to solder it in, and have a working board. It's feasible because it's such a monoculture - there are so many identical phones, and you don't need a broad parts stock. For brands with a lot of models, and a smaller markup over parts cost, few people bother. [1] http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.html http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.htm...

justforFranz 9y ago

Doesn't Apple already have more money than god?