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What a "peculiar" behavior on Apple's part. The fact that they base their arguments on a moisture paper which seems to be extremely easy to refute and spend mor

What a "peculiar" behavior on Apple's part. The fact that they base their arguments on a moisture paper which seems to be extremely easy to refute and spend more money on lawyers than they would have needed to actually fix this within an established company program just seems... stupid? Whomever is in charge seems not to have learned from this as well.

0_gravitas 7y ago
Because having an established company program that fixes these issues is the last thing apple wants, their main goal is to upsell to the newest product when an old one breaks, hence all the fun planned obsolescence stuff. Why else do you think they make all their products notoriously difficult to repair?
- ishansharma 7y ago
  Ah, the planned obsolescence argument. It used to be invoked all the time with software (updates are making it slower) but Apple just released software updates to fix GPS on several older iPads. Maybe, they are focusing on other things like thinness and light weight which results in making gadgets less repairable instead of a big planned conspiracy.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    > Maybe, they are focusing on other things like thinness and light weight which results in making gadgets less repairable instead of a big planned conspiracy. ... And suing customers like crazy to support a less repairable product strategy.
  - dd36 7y ago
    I recently had to buy Quickbooks 2019 because 2016 would no longer let me import my bank transactions.
  - 0_gravitas 7y ago
    Of course I'm sure that's the only reason why they use special proprietary screws that you can't normally find anywhere else (along with the special screwdrivers themselves) because if there's a shortage of anything, it's small screws that can be used in the production of electronics. Let's not pretend that apple is interested in keeping older (and by older I mean not the current newest) machines alive any longer then their decaying, conveniently irreplaceable, battery lasts. When apple starts making a show of actually putting up not-intentionally-cryptic schematics and supplying the market with the parts necessary to repair their dying machines (batteries would be a good start) I might loosen my tinfoil hat, but you'll have to forgive me for the time being...
    - Zarel 7y ago
      I'm pretty sure those are because they dislike it when people who aren't their employees repair them, because they dislike getting blamed when someone else messes up a repair job and blames them for it. It's the same reason most companies try to prevent third parties from repairing their products. 100% "I don't want to stake my reputation on someone else's repair job".
      - 0_gravitas 7y ago
        And yet if they want people who are their employees to repair them, why do third parties like Rossman get any business? Clearly he and people like him are providing some service that apple isn't, that service so far mainly looks like repairing apple products that apple doesn't seem to want to for one reason or another. I like that "I dont want to stake my reputation on someone else's repair job" also comes with "I want my reputation to mean you will possibly just never actually receive a repair job". Also, that reasoning wouldn't explain things like, oh I dont know, Thinkpads? I've never heard complaints and issues with them like i do apple, especially when it comes to the quality of the machine itself, and they are famously modular and repairable.
        Zarel 7y ago
        I didn't say it was a _good_ reason, or that all companies make it hard for people to repair their products. I'm just saying that if a company _does_ make it hard to repair their products, and you sat in on the meeting where that decision was made, you're going to hear "I'm tired of people trying to repair our products and screwing it up".
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    I mean, it's no accident they're making every effort to make Mac hardware as unrepairable as possible by third parties. And it's not because they want to repair the things themselves.
    - FireBeyond 7y ago
      Right. It's the upsell. MBP with water damage to the battery charging circuitry. Battery is fine. Laptop is fine on AC power. Let's see how much it'll cost... maybe $300ish? Labor, parts? Nope. "That will be $899. Maybe we should talk about getting you into a new MBP instead?"
scott00 7y ago
In any one specific case, fixing a litigious customer's laptop is definitely cheaper for Apple. But by having a policy of fighting legal claims vigorously regardless of merit, they can make it wildly uneconomic for customers to sue, which decreases the probability of getting sued. I suspect the economics of their behavior work quite well overall.
- aczerepinski 7y ago
  The economics might suck for Apple but they can easily afford to pay the lawyers. The customer on the other hand probably has a much tougher time missing work for court sessions.
- dd36 7y ago
  If it’s wildly uneconomic for its customer, it’s also wildly uneconomic for Apple.
  - chipperyman573 7y ago
    It's supposed to be a scare tactic, like how Walmart always sues people who steal more than $20. The point isn't to make it more worthwhile in the one case, it's to scare off 1000 other people who would otherwise do the same.
    - benologist 7y ago
      It's more like a fraud against consumers than a scare tactic. Walmart is being robbed, trace amounts of moisture doesn't mean Apple is being robbed they've just invented that condition and threshold as an excuse to not service warranties. They have a rich history of requiring legal action before respecting consumers rights, even to fix their own mistakes.
  - scott00 7y ago
    Correct, in any specific case. But Apple's playing a repeated game, and any given customer is playing a one-time game. Apple can reap the deterrence benefit in future cases, but the customer doesn't really get any reputational benefit from playing hardball, and so has to evaluate the wisdom of suing or not suing based on the outcome of just the single case at hand.
wpietri 7y ago
It depends on how success is measured. Let's suppose that the UK repair operation is manage separately. Let's call that exec Joe. And suppose further that the person in charge measured by metrics like "doesn't spend any more on repairs per sale than the US operation does", implying that spending less is better. Joe making a rule something like "refuse any warranty repairs if a moisture sensor trips, even if the damage is unrelated" is a pretty easy way to keep repairs down. Some people may sue, sure, but probably not many. And let's assume further, as is common, that Apple's lawyers are all on staff and under their General Counsel. That means they're a fixed cost, and not directly on the budget of the repair operation. That is not one of the metrics Joe is evaluated by. Maybe they won't need to add any new lawyers to handle the extra load; maybe they will. Further, any relationship between repair rules and legal costs will be hard to spot, given that it's delayed by time and filtered through many people. So at worst, Joe might down the road have to face some sort of complicated analysis from the head of legal complaining about increased costs. But he can point to repair cost savings, so it'll be difficult to say whether on net he's making or costing Apple money. I would guess the bigger risk for Joe is not legal expenses but the PR problem from writeups like this or an eventual decline in something like a Net Promoter Score metric as more people feel put off by Apple. Those, however, are also pretty long feedback loops. So Joe gets an immediate reduction in repair costs versus the possibility of a problem a year or three down the road. Many ambitious execs are perfectly fine with that; they're hoping to be in a new position anyway in a couple of years, so it may be the next guy's problem. And really, Joe may not have a problem at all; as this article makes clear, having to sue the company wasn't enough to keep the guy from buying another Apple laptop. That's not a great incentive for anybody to change behavior.
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  Well that's not a good way to run a company - it's basically designed to be customer hostile.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    Capitalism!
  - 7y ago
rasz 7y ago
>seems... stupid? Not when even the CEO lists repairs as one of bigger growth concern https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmd9a5/tim-cook-to-investors-people-bought-fewer-new-iphones-because-they-repaired-their-old-ones https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmd9a5/tim-cook-to-invest...

0_gravitas 7y ago

Because having an established company program that fixes these issues is the last thing apple wants, their main goal is to upsell to the newest product when an old one breaks, hence all the fun planned obsolescence stuff. Why else do you think they make all their products notoriously difficult to repair?

ishansharma 7y ago
Ah, the planned obsolescence argument. It used to be invoked all the time with software (updates are making it slower) but Apple just released software updates to fix GPS on several older iPads. Maybe, they are focusing on other things like thinness and light weight which results in making gadgets less repairable instead of a big planned conspiracy.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  > Maybe, they are focusing on other things like thinness and light weight which results in making gadgets less repairable instead of a big planned conspiracy. ... And suing customers like crazy to support a less repairable product strategy.
- dd36 7y ago
  I recently had to buy Quickbooks 2019 because 2016 would no longer let me import my bank transactions.
- 0_gravitas 7y ago
  Of course I'm sure that's the only reason why they use special proprietary screws that you can't normally find anywhere else (along with the special screwdrivers themselves) because if there's a shortage of anything, it's small screws that can be used in the production of electronics. Let's not pretend that apple is interested in keeping older (and by older I mean not the current newest) machines alive any longer then their decaying, conveniently irreplaceable, battery lasts. When apple starts making a show of actually putting up not-intentionally-cryptic schematics and supplying the market with the parts necessary to repair their dying machines (batteries would be a good start) I might loosen my tinfoil hat, but you'll have to forgive me for the time being...
  - Zarel 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure those are because they dislike it when people who aren't their employees repair them, because they dislike getting blamed when someone else messes up a repair job and blames them for it. It's the same reason most companies try to prevent third parties from repairing their products. 100% "I don't want to stake my reputation on someone else's repair job".
    - 0_gravitas 7y ago
      And yet if they want people who are their employees to repair them, why do third parties like Rossman get any business? Clearly he and people like him are providing some service that apple isn't, that service so far mainly looks like repairing apple products that apple doesn't seem to want to for one reason or another. I like that "I dont want to stake my reputation on someone else's repair job" also comes with "I want my reputation to mean you will possibly just never actually receive a repair job". Also, that reasoning wouldn't explain things like, oh I dont know, Thinkpads? I've never heard complaints and issues with them like i do apple, especially when it comes to the quality of the machine itself, and they are famously modular and repairable.
      - Zarel 7y ago
        I didn't say it was a _good_ reason, or that all companies make it hard for people to repair their products. I'm just saying that if a company _does_ make it hard to repair their products, and you sat in on the meeting where that decision was made, you're going to hear "I'm tired of people trying to repair our products and screwing it up".
- jplayer01 7y ago
  I mean, it's no accident they're making every effort to make Mac hardware as unrepairable as possible by third parties. And it's not because they want to repair the things themselves.
  - FireBeyond 7y ago
    Right. It's the upsell. MBP with water damage to the battery charging circuitry. Battery is fine. Laptop is fine on AC power. Let's see how much it'll cost... maybe $300ish? Labor, parts? Nope. "That will be $899. Maybe we should talk about getting you into a new MBP instead?"

scott00 7y ago

In any one specific case, fixing a litigious customer's laptop is definitely cheaper for Apple. But by having a policy of fighting legal claims vigorously regardless of merit, they can make it wildly uneconomic for customers to sue, which decreases the probability of getting sued. I suspect the economics of their behavior work quite well overall.

aczerepinski 7y ago
The economics might suck for Apple but they can easily afford to pay the lawyers. The customer on the other hand probably has a much tougher time missing work for court sessions.
dd36 7y ago
If it’s wildly uneconomic for its customer, it’s also wildly uneconomic for Apple.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
  It's supposed to be a scare tactic, like how Walmart always sues people who steal more than $20. The point isn't to make it more worthwhile in the one case, it's to scare off 1000 other people who would otherwise do the same.
  - benologist 7y ago
    It's more like a fraud against consumers than a scare tactic. Walmart is being robbed, trace amounts of moisture doesn't mean Apple is being robbed they've just invented that condition and threshold as an excuse to not service warranties. They have a rich history of requiring legal action before respecting consumers rights, even to fix their own mistakes.
- scott00 7y ago
  Correct, in any specific case. But Apple's playing a repeated game, and any given customer is playing a one-time game. Apple can reap the deterrence benefit in future cases, but the customer doesn't really get any reputational benefit from playing hardball, and so has to evaluate the wisdom of suing or not suing based on the outcome of just the single case at hand.

wpietri 7y ago

It depends on how success is measured. Let's suppose that the UK repair operation is manage separately. Let's call that exec Joe. And suppose further that the person in charge measured by metrics like "doesn't spend any more on repairs per sale than the US operation does", implying that spending less is better. Joe making a rule something like "refuse any warranty repairs if a moisture sensor trips, even if the damage is unrelated" is a pretty easy way to keep repairs down. Some people may sue, sure, but probably not many. And let's assume further, as is common, that Apple's lawyers are all on staff and under their General Counsel. That means they're a fixed cost, and not directly on the budget of the repair operation. That is not one of the metrics Joe is evaluated by. Maybe they won't need to add any new lawyers to handle the extra load; maybe they will. Further, any relationship between repair rules and legal costs will be hard to spot, given that it's delayed by time and filtered through many people. So at worst, Joe might down the road have to face some sort of complicated analysis from the head of legal complaining about increased costs. But he can point to repair cost savings, so it'll be difficult to say whether on net he's making or costing Apple money. I would guess the bigger risk for Joe is not legal expenses but the PR problem from writeups like this or an eventual decline in something like a Net Promoter Score metric as more people feel put off by Apple. Those, however, are also pretty long feedback loops. So Joe gets an immediate reduction in repair costs versus the possibility of a problem a year or three down the road. Many ambitious execs are perfectly fine with that; they're hoping to be in a new position anyway in a couple of years, so it may be the next guy's problem. And really, Joe may not have a problem at all; as this article makes clear, having to sue the company wasn't enough to keep the guy from buying another Apple laptop. That's not a great incentive for anybody to change behavior.

Gravityloss 7y ago
Well that's not a good way to run a company - it's basically designed to be customer hostile.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  Capitalism!
- 7y ago

rasz 7y ago

>seems... stupid? Not when even the CEO lists repairs as one of bigger growth concern https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmd9a5/tim-cook-to-investors-people-bought-fewer-new-iphones-because-they-repaired-their-old-ones https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmd9a5/tim-cook-to-invest...