16 ms·

Internal Documents Show Apple Is Capable of Implementing Right to Repair

246 points by kaboro 8y ago

smush 8y ago
So I admit being pessimistic about actually getting Right to Repair laws passed. Lawmakers keep being told that 'it stifles innovation' and since they often have as limited understanding of technology as I do as to the innards of political wheel-greasing they often fall for that tripe. Are there any known Right to Repair statutes (US or Int'l) or bills that show signs of life?
- ghaff 8y ago
  Massachusetts passed Right to Repair as a ballot measure (which Tesla basically flaunts by making manuals extremely expensive to rent). But note that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to repair without special tools and knowledge."
  - smush 8y ago
    > But note that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to repair without special tools and knowledge." I'm okay with that. I just don't want businesses to be able to deny access to their manuals, threaten to void warranties for 'abuse' for performing an action that their authorized techs do all the time without any adverse effect on the hardware, or remotely kill software used in the hardware because someone replaced some atoms arranged in a less than ideal manner with some other atoms arranged in a more ideal manner without paying the business themselves to do it.
- lightedman 8y ago
  Anti-tying provisions of the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act.
benologist 8y ago
With over 200 billion in savings the only thing they can’t do is be honest about what you are repairing for the third time!
kevinherron 8y ago
I guess I believe in this "right to repair" movement, but only so far as to ensure that if you're capable of taking your device apart and putting it back together without breaking anything that you don't automatically void some warranty. I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines. I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  > I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines. Why not? > I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user. It is always and exclusively at the cost of the user?
  - duado 8y ago
    Making something that’s easy to take apart often makes it bigger, because interfaces need to be modularized. I’ve never needed to open one of my iPhones and would not want them 1mm thicker to be repairable.
    - Zarath 8y ago
      Maybe you've never needed to open your iphone because it would serve no purpose. If I could upgrade my old iphone by taking it apart, I wouldn't have bought a new one in the first place...
      - abalone 8y ago
        You don’t have to buy a new iPhone to replace the battery, so presumably you’re imagining upgrading the processors, camera, sensors or some other aspect of the iPhone. Those components are so tightly integrated and custom fitted in each iteration of the device that it is technically impossible to “upgrade” them independently.
xoa 8y ago
I really dislike the "Right to Repair" movement because I see it as a lobbyist (iFixit pushes it heavily for example since they make money off it) & niche driven push that is both wasting a real chance to get at some actual critical problems and generating new ones of its own. The two big issues are reasonable life span as part of the purchase price, and questions about ownership vs security. 1. For the first, most people do not care about "right to repair", what they want is a more roughly a "right to have repaired for a reasonable time period related to the cost of the item in question." Ie., it's a standard Free Market pricing issue: they want general use case reliability to be internalized into the pricing shown up front. So for example, if someone spends $100 on a bargain basement phone, maybe it only gets a year. If they spend $500-1000 on a phone, there is a sense that it should last a good 4-5 years. And in either case if it doesn't the manufacturer should take care of it at no further direct cost to the customer. The way things stands right now is that effectively there is an externality and information imbalance: some percentage of buyers get screwed at odds they don't know as well as the manufacturer, unless they pay a bunch more money to insure against it (and again, the manufacturer knows the odds not them). It's something that should just be part of the upfront price so everything can be compared evenly. How the manufacturer "takes care of it at no further direct cost to the consumer" is an implementation question for which there are many good answers that come with different tradeoffs and costs. "Right to Repair" legislates one specific solution, rather then correctly legislate the desired result and then let everyone experiment and adapt. 2. The second part ties into the idea of trusted software and hardware chains vs owner control and it's complex. Take the brouhaha over Touch ID repair: allowing any independent 3rd party to "repair/replace" that by definition means any 3rd party can hack it and replace it with something malicious too. Giving up the control of that to Apple changes the repair market, but it also changes the level of expense necessary to compromise it. Same thing for the software stack: more control means more ability to have things get messed up, be social engineered, etc. I'm not comfortable with it being illegal for me to specifically buy a device with a cryptographically secured hardware chain that cannot be altered. I know the tradeoff there is that there is more of a single point of failure and risk I could be left with a non-functional device (though point 1 requiring the manufacturer to offer a 4-5 year warranty or whatever could help). But that's a tradeoff I want to be able to make in some cases. I do think though far more gradations could be mandated as being offered. Say, manufacturers must offer it as a one-time order option: in Apple's case, I would support them being legally required to offer customers a model of phone shipped that can accept owner inputted root signing certificates. As in, an actual physically separate model (fuses) that cannot be changed afterwards so somebody could also buy a model like now with Apple roots only. Then the choice can be made (I'd also be fine with Apple or whomever being absolved from any liability or support requirements resulting, more freedom for the owner should mean more responsibility for the owner too). But I've yet to see a Right To Repair that covers any of this. -- It all stinks because I think these are really important issues and ones that would make the overall market a lot better. And I think particularly for the first the public has a general sense that something is wrong but they don't know how to really express the root of the problem. RtR seems to piggy back on that, but not in a great way.
beamatronic 8y ago
I was recently upgrading a 2008 MacBook. Upgraded the hard drive and the memory. It was so easy. It is an absolute joy to service this machine. It also has many useful ports and an awesome battery indicator on the side.
- cydonian_monk 8y ago
  I feel the same about my 2012 MacBookPro. While it was a _tiny_ bit down the path of "not user serviceable", replacing the battery and trackpad was extremely easy. And one of the first things I did to it was replace/upgrade Apple's RAM and drop an SSD into the optical bay.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    It’s important to note that this was the case even despite the fact that the battery and trackpad were not considered “user replaceable”.
  - bluedino 8y ago
    The G4 Powerbooks and first-generation Intel laptops were a PAIN to open up and service. We only have it good for one generation (unibodies)
- smacktoward 8y ago
  I'm old enough to remember the days of the "cheese grater" Power Mac/Mac Pro, when Apple would explicitly call attention to how expandable and user-serviceable a case they'd designed for it. How times change!
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    I still think that the "cheese grater" was the pinnacle of apple desktop design (and I've never owned a mac), I just love it - enough that I damn near bought a broken one to use to build my new PC in the end laziness won and I went corsair but it's still an amazing piece of industrial design.
danet 8y ago
That is why I'm holding to my 2011 ThinkPad T420 for dear life. I replaced keyboard 3 times ($30-$40 off ebay), changed HDD to SSD, and replaced CD-ROM with another SATA drive bay. Not having USB3 is annoying, the CPU is a little slow and the batteries aren't what they used to be, but the things still works and gives me no problems. I would like to get something smaller and lighter but all the affordable light laptops come with at most 8GB of not upgradable memory, whereas mine has 12GB and upgradable to 16. What I ended up doing is getting a desktop computer for anything that needs performance and every time I look at anything apple, it just looks like I'm about to get on a treadmill of shelling out a couple of thousand dollars every year without the ability to own, upgrade or repair any of my devices.
- enobrev 8y ago
  I've been building my desktop (and now servers) for 25 years. The idea of taking my computer in to a store to fix a drive or ram or worse, buying a new one because of a hardware issue is absolutely foreign to me. I had hoped laptops would be just as easy to tweak and build by now but it seems the world favors the apple way. I'm going to keep building. It's _far_ less expensive. I can tweak my system to fit my needs and adjust as my needs change. And I have a solid understanding of the most used tool in my life. Also things like PC part picker make it so much simpler than it used to be that I barely even need to think about it any more.
- errantspark 8y ago
  I don't think this really holds water. I bought a Thinkpad L380 recently, it was a great computer with upgradable ram and ssd. I ended up returning it because of the lack of a ThunderBolt 3 port, but if it had one of those I think it would have been near perfect.
- cogburnd02 8y ago
  > Not having USB3 is annoying You could get an expresscard to USB3 card?
- jbverschoor 8y ago
  I dunno.. My current mpb is from 2013 and I don't see any point upgrading this anytime soon. Except for the 1 model newer version for higher 4k fps
smileybarry 8y ago
This is probably already used for countries where Apple has no local presence. Here in Israel there are no Apple labs, so up till this year iPhones had to be shipped to Apple Ireland for repairs. (but Macs and iPads could be repaired by authorized, non-Apple labs due to a less-stringent repair policy) Recently the news reported of a specific authorized reseller gaining the option to repair iPhones here, and sometimes even outright replace them -- all authorized by Apple. Maybe this programme made that possible.
system2 8y ago
Even with right to repair, if users cannot find the parts (especially chips) they won't be able to fix anything. Also, they can make it more complicated circuitry to make it harder to fix. No matter what, users are still at the mercy of the manufacturer.
devwastaken 8y ago
They certainly can, but instead they're purposefully making it impossible to get specific board components so that a single chip defect/failure becomes an $800 paper weight https://youtu.be/gmRd9IVE6dc https://youtu.be/gmRd9IVE6dc at 8:30 Louis explains that newer MacBooks, one of the most common issues is unfixable due to isl9240 being unsourceable.
intopieces 8y ago
Anyone who has ever been to Shenzhen’s HQB electronic market will chuckle at the Apple claim that iPhones are “too complex” for non-Apple techs to repair.
sparky_ 8y ago
The grammar mistake in the supposed official document - "Keep doing what your (sic) doing" - is very unlike Apple. Raises a red flag on authenticity in my mind.
mises 8y ago
It's nice to see that Apple is trying to help people repair parts. I personally see nothing wrong with Apple choosing to do this itself and simultaneously saying that it doesn't want the government stepping in.
Proven 8y ago
This is nonsense. I am capable of blowing $20K in one night. Why should I do it? You can't buy something and make up new service demands thereafter, or force a private company to design a product or service according to your requirements. What you may do is vote with your money and not buy what you don't like. The fake right to repair is a nonsense idea... Can't wait for it to become "law" so that I can force Ubuntu to code latest h/w drivers for my 5 year old distro.

246 points by kaboro 8y ago

So I admit being pessimistic about actually getting Right to Repair laws passed. Lawmakers keep being told that 'it stifles innovation' and since they often have as limited understanding of technology as I do as to the innards of political wheel-greasing they often fall for that tripe. Are there any known Right to Repair statutes (US or Int'l) or bills that show signs of life?

ghaff 8y ago
Massachusetts passed Right to Repair as a ballot measure (which Tesla basically flaunts by making manuals extremely expensive to rent). But note that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to repair without special tools and knowledge."
- smush 8y ago
  > But note that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to repair without special tools and knowledge." I'm okay with that. I just don't want businesses to be able to deny access to their manuals, threaten to void warranties for 'abuse' for performing an action that their authorized techs do all the time without any adverse effect on the hardware, or remotely kill software used in the hardware because someone replaced some atoms arranged in a less than ideal manner with some other atoms arranged in a more ideal manner without paying the business themselves to do it.
lightedman 8y ago
Anti-tying provisions of the Magnusson-Moss Warranty Act.

benologist 8y ago

With over 200 billion in savings the only thing they can’t do is be honest about what you are repairing for the third time!

kevinherron 8y ago

I guess I believe in this "right to repair" movement, but only so far as to ensure that if you're capable of taking your device apart and putting it back together without breaking anything that you don't automatically void some warranty. I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines. I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
> I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines. Why not? > I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user. It is always and exclusively at the cost of the user?
- duado 8y ago
  Making something that’s easy to take apart often makes it bigger, because interfaces need to be modularized. I’ve never needed to open one of my iPhones and would not want them 1mm thicker to be repairable.
  - Zarath 8y ago
    Maybe you've never needed to open your iphone because it would serve no purpose. If I could upgrade my old iphone by taking it apart, I wouldn't have bought a new one in the first place...
    - abalone 8y ago
      You don’t have to buy a new iPhone to replace the battery, so presumably you’re imagining upgrading the processors, camera, sensors or some other aspect of the iPhone. Those components are so tightly integrated and custom fitted in each iteration of the device that it is technically impossible to “upgrade” them independently.

xoa 8y ago

I really dislike the "Right to Repair" movement because I see it as a lobbyist (iFixit pushes it heavily for example since they make money off it) & niche driven push that is both wasting a real chance to get at some actual critical problems and generating new ones of its own. The two big issues are reasonable life span as part of the purchase price, and questions about ownership vs security. 1. For the first, most people do not care about "right to repair", what they want is a more roughly a "right to have repaired for a reasonable time period related to the cost of the item in question." Ie., it's a standard Free Market pricing issue: they want general use case reliability to be internalized into the pricing shown up front. So for example, if someone spends $100 on a bargain basement phone, maybe it only gets a year. If they spend $500-1000 on a phone, there is a sense that it should last a good 4-5 years. And in either case if it doesn't the manufacturer should take care of it at no further direct cost to the customer. The way things stands right now is that effectively there is an externality and information imbalance: some percentage of buyers get screwed at odds they don't know as well as the manufacturer, unless they pay a bunch more money to insure against it (and again, the manufacturer knows the odds not them). It's something that should just be part of the upfront price so everything can be compared evenly. How the manufacturer "takes care of it at no further direct cost to the consumer" is an implementation question for which there are many good answers that come with different tradeoffs and costs. "Right to Repair" legislates one specific solution, rather then correctly legislate the desired result and then let everyone experiment and adapt. 2. The second part ties into the idea of trusted software and hardware chains vs owner control and it's complex. Take the brouhaha over Touch ID repair: allowing any independent 3rd party to "repair/replace" that by definition means any 3rd party can hack it and replace it with something malicious too. Giving up the control of that to Apple changes the repair market, but it also changes the level of expense necessary to compromise it. Same thing for the software stack: more control means more ability to have things get messed up, be social engineered, etc. I'm not comfortable with it being illegal for me to specifically buy a device with a cryptographically secured hardware chain that cannot be altered. I know the tradeoff there is that there is more of a single point of failure and risk I could be left with a non-functional device (though point 1 requiring the manufacturer to offer a 4-5 year warranty or whatever could help). But that's a tradeoff I want to be able to make in some cases. I do think though far more gradations could be mandated as being offered. Say, manufacturers must offer it as a one-time order option: in Apple's case, I would support them being legally required to offer customers a model of phone shipped that can accept owner inputted root signing certificates. As in, an actual physically separate model (fuses) that cannot be changed afterwards so somebody could also buy a model like now with Apple roots only. Then the choice can be made (I'd also be fine with Apple or whomever being absolved from any liability or support requirements resulting, more freedom for the owner should mean more responsibility for the owner too). But I've yet to see a Right To Repair that covers any of this. -- It all stinks because I think these are really important issues and ones that would make the overall market a lot better. And I think particularly for the first the public has a general sense that something is wrong but they don't know how to really express the root of the problem. RtR seems to piggy back on that, but not in a great way.

beamatronic 8y ago

I was recently upgrading a 2008 MacBook. Upgraded the hard drive and the memory. It was so easy. It is an absolute joy to service this machine. It also has many useful ports and an awesome battery indicator on the side.

cydonian_monk 8y ago
I feel the same about my 2012 MacBookPro. While it was a _tiny_ bit down the path of "not user serviceable", replacing the battery and trackpad was extremely easy. And one of the first things I did to it was replace/upgrade Apple's RAM and drop an SSD into the optical bay.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  It’s important to note that this was the case even despite the fact that the battery and trackpad were not considered “user replaceable”.
- bluedino 8y ago
  The G4 Powerbooks and first-generation Intel laptops were a PAIN to open up and service. We only have it good for one generation (unibodies)
smacktoward 8y ago
I'm old enough to remember the days of the "cheese grater" Power Mac/Mac Pro, when Apple would explicitly call attention to how expandable and user-serviceable a case they'd designed for it. How times change!
- noir_lord 8y ago
  I still think that the "cheese grater" was the pinnacle of apple desktop design (and I've never owned a mac), I just love it - enough that I damn near bought a broken one to use to build my new PC in the end laziness won and I went corsair but it's still an amazing piece of industrial design.

danet 8y ago

That is why I'm holding to my 2011 ThinkPad T420 for dear life. I replaced keyboard 3 times ($30-$40 off ebay), changed HDD to SSD, and replaced CD-ROM with another SATA drive bay. Not having USB3 is annoying, the CPU is a little slow and the batteries aren't what they used to be, but the things still works and gives me no problems. I would like to get something smaller and lighter but all the affordable light laptops come with at most 8GB of not upgradable memory, whereas mine has 12GB and upgradable to 16. What I ended up doing is getting a desktop computer for anything that needs performance and every time I look at anything apple, it just looks like I'm about to get on a treadmill of shelling out a couple of thousand dollars every year without the ability to own, upgrade or repair any of my devices.

enobrev 8y ago
I've been building my desktop (and now servers) for 25 years. The idea of taking my computer in to a store to fix a drive or ram or worse, buying a new one because of a hardware issue is absolutely foreign to me. I had hoped laptops would be just as easy to tweak and build by now but it seems the world favors the apple way. I'm going to keep building. It's _far_ less expensive. I can tweak my system to fit my needs and adjust as my needs change. And I have a solid understanding of the most used tool in my life. Also things like PC part picker make it so much simpler than it used to be that I barely even need to think about it any more.
errantspark 8y ago
I don't think this really holds water. I bought a Thinkpad L380 recently, it was a great computer with upgradable ram and ssd. I ended up returning it because of the lack of a ThunderBolt 3 port, but if it had one of those I think it would have been near perfect.
cogburnd02 8y ago
> Not having USB3 is annoying You could get an expresscard to USB3 card?
jbverschoor 8y ago
I dunno.. My current mpb is from 2013 and I don't see any point upgrading this anytime soon. Except for the 1 model newer version for higher 4k fps

smileybarry 8y ago

This is probably already used for countries where Apple has no local presence. Here in Israel there are no Apple labs, so up till this year iPhones had to be shipped to Apple Ireland for repairs. (but Macs and iPads could be repaired by authorized, non-Apple labs due to a less-stringent repair policy) Recently the news reported of a specific authorized reseller gaining the option to repair iPhones here, and sometimes even outright replace them -- all authorized by Apple. Maybe this programme made that possible.

system2 8y ago

Even with right to repair, if users cannot find the parts (especially chips) they won't be able to fix anything. Also, they can make it more complicated circuitry to make it harder to fix. No matter what, users are still at the mercy of the manufacturer.

devwastaken 8y ago

They certainly can, but instead they're purposefully making it impossible to get specific board components so that a single chip defect/failure becomes an $800 paper weight https://youtu.be/gmRd9IVE6dc https://youtu.be/gmRd9IVE6dc at 8:30 Louis explains that newer MacBooks, one of the most common issues is unfixable due to isl9240 being unsourceable.

intopieces 8y ago

Anyone who has ever been to Shenzhen’s HQB electronic market will chuckle at the Apple claim that iPhones are “too complex” for non-Apple techs to repair.

sparky_ 8y ago

The grammar mistake in the supposed official document - "Keep doing what your (sic) doing" - is very unlike Apple. Raises a red flag on authenticity in my mind.

mises 8y ago

It's nice to see that Apple is trying to help people repair parts. I personally see nothing wrong with Apple choosing to do this itself and simultaneously saying that it doesn't want the government stepping in.

Proven 8y ago

This is nonsense. I am capable of blowing $20K in one night. Why should I do it? You can't buy something and make up new service demands thereafter, or force a private company to design a product or service according to your requirements. What you may do is vote with your money and not buy what you don't like. The fake right to repair is a nonsense idea... Can't wait for it to become "law" so that I can force Ubuntu to code latest h/w drivers for my 5 year old distro.