3 ms·

I don't see why anyone feels the need to compel Apple to make their phones "repairable" in the first place. If you want that feature, I'm sure Samsung or myriad

by bsmith 7y ago

I don't see why anyone feels the need to compel Apple to make their phones "repairable" in the first place. If you want that feature, I'm sure Samsung or myriad other manufacturers would gladly sell you their handsets instead. Maybe you could make some sort of anti-trust arguments about the probably-a-little-too-tight relationships between wireless carriers and the device manufacturers, but there are a lot of handset makers to choose from and the market can choose who wins.

ajross 7y ago
That logic only works if iPhones cannot be repaired. Obviously they can be. The demands in the various Right to Repair bill drafts never talk about changing the design of the phone, only about requiring the information and parts necessary for repair be available to the public.
- intopieces 7y ago
  >only about requiring the information and parts necessary for repair be available to the public. The parts and information are already available to the public, as noted by the article. The Right to Repair bill would compel companies to provide that information and parts directly.
  - simcop2387 7y ago
    This isn't always true. Take a look at the whole thing with Linus Media Group's iMac screen repair. The screens are not available publicly, only to approved apple repair centers (which didn't even exist at the time of LMG's fiasco). They didn't give details in the video where they finally repair the thing, but strongly hint that they actually ended up getting the replacement part essentially off the black market of apple parts. Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US. [1] final repair video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw [2] first video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw
    - holy_city 7y ago
      >Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US. Apple doesn't "have" customs do anything. Customs enforces the law. Those parts are counterfeits, and importing them is illegal. If they're not off-the-shelf, Apple has exclusive deals with their suppliers and forbids them from selling those parts to anyone else. Whatever you're buying as a "3rd party refurbish part" is either a fake, defective because it failed QA, or excess bulk that Apple didn't purchase. It's usually one of the former. Talk with some people in the device manufacturing biz about this - I've heard stories about suppliers getting customer support calls about QA issues when it turns out the distributor for the parts was selling both legit and counterfeits without the supplier or manufacturer knowing! And this is a tricky issue - if I manufacture something abroad you're damn sure I want the feds to help prevent counterfeits from being imported. Doesn't matter if it's the final product or part of the supply chain. And in as a supplier, you're not going to manufacture something longer than you make money off it, and the repair volumes don't justify anything. That said, I think a middle ground here could be a limits on exclusive deals between suppliers and manufacturers, and stricter "use it or lose it" policies on IP held by suppliers. So if Apple isn't buying batteries from FooBar corp anymore, they should be able to sell the batteries the previously did to repair shops stateside. Nothing nefarious there.
      - genmud 7y ago
        Not sure if you know this or not, but I assume you aren't willingly misrepresenting the situation. People will ship GENUINE/ORIGINAL apple parts, with lets say a cracked piece of glass, but otherwise good screen assembly, back to an OEM to have them replace the glass. When the REPAIRED part is returned to the company who sent them to an OEM, customs will destroy them as counterfeit, even though they aren't counterfeit parts, just repaired. I'm oversimplifying, but if repairing something makes it a counterfeit, then the same logic could be applied to a dell computer that had its HD replaced while overseas and should be destroyed, using that logic.
  - lm2s 7y ago
    It's my understanding that not all of the parts are readily available and that Apple and others actually engage in making it hard to get some parts. This results in some parts having to be extracted from "bad" boards and such.
  - genmud 7y ago
    They most definitely are not available to the public. For example, all the Apple documentation on board layouts are literally stolen and smuggled out. In fact, many of the large companies have exclusive agreements with OEM chip manufacturers to not provide data sheets or technical info about chips, in addition to having an exclusive supply. If cars worked this way, you would never be able to get them repaired anywhere but the manufacturer, but since the manufacturer doesn't replace components, such as the failed alternator, they have to replace the entire "engine assembly".
    - intopieces 7y ago
      >They most definitely are not available to the public. For example, all the Apple documentation on board layouts are literally stolen and smuggled out. And yet >Experts, however, say Apple's and CompTIA's warnings are far overblown. People with no special training regularly replace the batteries or cracked screens in their iPhones, and there are thousands of small, independent repair companies that regularly fix iPhones without incident. This article wants to have it both ways. "Apple should release documentation because repair people need it" and "People repair their stuff all the time without incident." A better argument would be actually to take Apple's side on the "safety" issue and say, "People are already trying to repair their stuff because your OEM repairs are too expensive, so you ought to provide them with docs/parts"
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dwighttk 7y ago
  iFixIt at least occasionally conflates the two... complaining about Apple using glue when they "should" design it to use something else.
dwighttk 7y ago
Me neither... I prefer (most of) the tight design integration that Apple is able to do over the think-pad utilitarianism in my personal devices. The most I've ever done inside a computer is add RAM a few times. If I want to do more I'll build a PC.
return1 7y ago
Can you tell a reason why not? Opening up any technology has proved to be good for innovation in 100% of the times so far. Perhaps we have all missed on some amazing mods of iphones.
paavoova 7y ago
Why should all these devices end up in a landfill just because Apple decided it's in their best interests to design them as disposable, consumerist toys? Since when is servicing your own hardware a "feature" and not simply a right you gained at point of purchase? It's not just phones, it extends to all Apple hardware when they decided to solder components, maintain a component whitelist, etc - now only those with hardware-level knowledge can fix and swap out parts and Apple is encroaching on that too. Likewise and related, why should perfectly fine hardware deprecate artificially just because Apple decides to lock their hardware down preventing third-party software installation? It's unsustainable and an abhorrent corporate practice, IMO.
ken 7y ago
Because there are a dozen or more important issues that regularly make the headlines here around smartphones (security, performance, longevity, privacy, reception, size, repairability, development, etc.) and there's only 2 remaining major smartphone platforms. (Even if you count each Android manufacturer separately, i.e., you stop caring about anything related to software, there's still not enough.) The response to one company doing something undesirable cannot be "just switch to the other one", because that only works once, and then you still have 10 other factors to deal with. Didn't someone here say that in the EU, they only consider a market to have competition if there are at least 4 major competitors? To make matters worse, not only are the two players colluding with each other, in many cases, but they're lobbying the very governments who set the rules by which they're allowed to play. I don't see how one can say that we don't need consumer groups' lobbyists, given how many corporate lobbyists there are. People used to joke about how Apple's one-button mouse was insufficient. Today I've got only one bit of control over which smartphone platform I wish to use and support, and there's way more than one manner in which each of these is sub-optimal for my needs, or society's.

by bsmith 7y ago

ajross 7y ago

That logic only works if iPhones cannot be repaired. Obviously they can be. The demands in the various Right to Repair bill drafts never talk about changing the design of the phone, only about requiring the information and parts necessary for repair be available to the public.

intopieces 7y ago
>only about requiring the information and parts necessary for repair be available to the public. The parts and information are already available to the public, as noted by the article. The Right to Repair bill would compel companies to provide that information and parts directly.
- simcop2387 7y ago
  This isn't always true. Take a look at the whole thing with Linus Media Group's iMac screen repair. The screens are not available publicly, only to approved apple repair centers (which didn't even exist at the time of LMG's fiasco). They didn't give details in the video where they finally repair the thing, but strongly hint that they actually ended up getting the replacement part essentially off the black market of apple parts. Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US. [1] final repair video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw [2] first video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw
  - holy_city 7y ago
    >Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US. Apple doesn't "have" customs do anything. Customs enforces the law. Those parts are counterfeits, and importing them is illegal. If they're not off-the-shelf, Apple has exclusive deals with their suppliers and forbids them from selling those parts to anyone else. Whatever you're buying as a "3rd party refurbish part" is either a fake, defective because it failed QA, or excess bulk that Apple didn't purchase. It's usually one of the former. Talk with some people in the device manufacturing biz about this - I've heard stories about suppliers getting customer support calls about QA issues when it turns out the distributor for the parts was selling both legit and counterfeits without the supplier or manufacturer knowing! And this is a tricky issue - if I manufacture something abroad you're damn sure I want the feds to help prevent counterfeits from being imported. Doesn't matter if it's the final product or part of the supply chain. And in as a supplier, you're not going to manufacture something longer than you make money off it, and the repair volumes don't justify anything. That said, I think a middle ground here could be a limits on exclusive deals between suppliers and manufacturers, and stricter "use it or lose it" policies on IP held by suppliers. So if Apple isn't buying batteries from FooBar corp anymore, they should be able to sell the batteries the previously did to repair shops stateside. Nothing nefarious there.
    - genmud 7y ago
      Not sure if you know this or not, but I assume you aren't willingly misrepresenting the situation. People will ship GENUINE/ORIGINAL apple parts, with lets say a cracked piece of glass, but otherwise good screen assembly, back to an OEM to have them replace the glass. When the REPAIRED part is returned to the company who sent them to an OEM, customs will destroy them as counterfeit, even though they aren't counterfeit parts, just repaired. I'm oversimplifying, but if repairing something makes it a counterfeit, then the same logic could be applied to a dell computer that had its HD replaced while overseas and should be destroyed, using that logic.
- lm2s 7y ago
  It's my understanding that not all of the parts are readily available and that Apple and others actually engage in making it hard to get some parts. This results in some parts having to be extracted from "bad" boards and such.
- genmud 7y ago
  They most definitely are not available to the public. For example, all the Apple documentation on board layouts are literally stolen and smuggled out. In fact, many of the large companies have exclusive agreements with OEM chip manufacturers to not provide data sheets or technical info about chips, in addition to having an exclusive supply. If cars worked this way, you would never be able to get them repaired anywhere but the manufacturer, but since the manufacturer doesn't replace components, such as the failed alternator, they have to replace the entire "engine assembly".
  - intopieces 7y ago
    >They most definitely are not available to the public. For example, all the Apple documentation on board layouts are literally stolen and smuggled out. And yet >Experts, however, say Apple's and CompTIA's warnings are far overblown. People with no special training regularly replace the batteries or cracked screens in their iPhones, and there are thousands of small, independent repair companies that regularly fix iPhones without incident. This article wants to have it both ways. "Apple should release documentation because repair people need it" and "People repair their stuff all the time without incident." A better argument would be actually to take Apple's side on the "safety" issue and say, "People are already trying to repair their stuff because your OEM repairs are too expensive, so you ought to provide them with docs/parts"
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dwighttk 7y ago
iFixIt at least occasionally conflates the two... complaining about Apple using glue when they "should" design it to use something else.

dwighttk 7y ago

Me neither... I prefer (most of) the tight design integration that Apple is able to do over the think-pad utilitarianism in my personal devices. The most I've ever done inside a computer is add RAM a few times. If I want to do more I'll build a PC.

return1 7y ago

Can you tell a reason why not? Opening up any technology has proved to be good for innovation in 100% of the times so far. Perhaps we have all missed on some amazing mods of iphones.

paavoova 7y ago

Why should all these devices end up in a landfill just because Apple decided it's in their best interests to design them as disposable, consumerist toys? Since when is servicing your own hardware a "feature" and not simply a right you gained at point of purchase? It's not just phones, it extends to all Apple hardware when they decided to solder components, maintain a component whitelist, etc - now only those with hardware-level knowledge can fix and swap out parts and Apple is encroaching on that too. Likewise and related, why should perfectly fine hardware deprecate artificially just because Apple decides to lock their hardware down preventing third-party software installation? It's unsustainable and an abhorrent corporate practice, IMO.

ken 7y ago

Because there are a dozen or more important issues that regularly make the headlines here around smartphones (security, performance, longevity, privacy, reception, size, repairability, development, etc.) and there's only 2 remaining major smartphone platforms. (Even if you count each Android manufacturer separately, i.e., you stop caring about anything related to software, there's still not enough.) The response to one company doing something undesirable cannot be "just switch to the other one", because that only works once, and then you still have 10 other factors to deal with. Didn't someone here say that in the EU, they only consider a market to have competition if there are at least 4 major competitors? To make matters worse, not only are the two players colluding with each other, in many cases, but they're lobbying the very governments who set the rules by which they're allowed to play. I don't see how one can say that we don't need consumer groups' lobbyists, given how many corporate lobbyists there are. People used to joke about how Apple's one-button mouse was insufficient. Today I've got only one bit of control over which smartphone platform I wish to use and support, and there's way more than one manner in which each of these is sub-optimal for my needs, or society's.