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There should be a law forcing tech companies to sell spare parts at cost + 20% markup. Heck, these companies could even simply use Amazon for handling the logi

There should be a law forcing tech companies to sell spare parts at cost + 20% markup. Heck, these companies could even simply use Amazon for handling the logistics of it. Some companies like Bosch Home Appliances actually sell spare parts in their own online store at very reasonable prices - so it is doable.

senttoschool 3y ago
>There should be a law forcing tech companies to sell spare parts at cost + 20% markup. Why stop there? Maybe force tech companies to sell their products and services at cost + 20% markup. /sarcasm 1. What happens if the company has too many spare parts and wants to sell at 0% markup? Can they do that? 2. What happens if the spare parts factory burns down in an accident? Is the company legally obligated to rebuild the factory? What are the terms for how fast must the company rebuild the factory? Does the company need a backup factory to produce spare parts? 3. How long should the company be obligated to provide spare parts? Should this duration be applied to all electronics?
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Yep, and all parts that can be bough separately should be sold too (so at a chip level, not just "mainboard", "screen assembly", "case", etc.). Same with cars and other devices... with a car, you can get in a minor crash and even without labour, you can get up to a new car price in parts very fast.
- amelius 3y ago
  But then people would build competing phones with M2 chips in them.
  - Xelynega 3y ago
    Oh no, the whole point of the free market...
    - senttoschool 3y ago
      Free market also implies that companies can create and protect moats. This means companies have the freedom to NOT provide compatibility or emphasize repairability.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > Free market also implies that companies can create and protect moats it implies no such thing Free market it does not even imply that the concept of intellectual property exists at all.
        senttoschool 3y ago
        Free market implies that a company can create any service and product they want. It's up the customer to decide if they want to pay for it or not. This means a company like Apple does not have to provide access to its proprietary M2 SoC to anyone who asks. That makes no business sense. What's the point of investing billions to design and mass manufacture SoCs if "free market" says you must give it away?
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > This means a company like Apple does not have to provide access to its proprietary M2 SoC to anyone who asks. This also means that a disgrunted employee that knows how to build M2 SOC can leave and starts their own production. But currently goverment would send armed goons with guns, at taxpayer expense. And US government seizes my private property, if I post to myself earbuds from China that look too much luke airpods under the pretence of 'Counterfeit goods'. You are advocating hypocracy, free market for me but not for thee. I am all onboard for the real free market, where government does not interfere to protect Apple at my expense.
      - zamnos 3y ago
        It's anarchy that says companies can do whatever they want including create and protect moats, sign exclusivity agreements, and do all sorts of anti-competitive things. (Eg: Microsoft licensing deals in the 80's and 90's) In order to have a free market that's actually guided by an invisible hand, it must have competition. A market with monopolists is an unfree market.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    And if intel processors would be sold in stores, people would build competing PCs with intel chips in them. Oh wait, we've been doing that already for a few decades already.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      I'm pretty certain M1/2/.. would not exist in an environment like that. There would be no incentive for Apple to develop it unless they fundamentally changed their business model.
      - amelius 3y ago
        Because before Apple there was no progress in hardware at all?
        qwytw 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure there was and still is. Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Qualcomm, ARM and a bunch of others I don't recall designed or still design competitive products in this area. The thing they all have in common is that they want to make money from it... And well unfortunately the general trend is the less open and more proprietary their products are they more money they make from it (or the higher is their share price) and the more money they have to (potentially) invest into future R&D. ARM which is the most open successful company in the sector is almost literally working for peanuts (relatively to their overall impact) compared to Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm or Intel. I'm not sure how would you solve that? I mean if Apple invested X into designing M1/2 because they expected that they'd earn Y from that. However it turns out they have to make this design available to everyone (well maybe not for free but for a royalty comparable to what ARM gets) erasing their competitive advantage and as a result can only make 0.2Y at most? What would they do? Would they still invest X? 0.5X? 0.1*X? Not design a new chip at all and spend their money on something else? Maybe they wouldn't even have any money to spend in the first place because they wouldn't have been able to maintained massive margins by keeping their Software and HW designs proprietary over the years?
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Price controls never work. The problem here is vertical integration. If you had one company making logic boards, another company making operating systems, then the OS vendor has no reason to lock your device to using some third party vendor's logic boards. The logic board vendor has no reason to lock your device to using some third party vendor's screens. So all the parts are available independently because they're all made by different companies -- and each is a fungible product that can be supplied by multiple vendors.
- irjustin 3y ago
  > Price controls never work. Why do price controls never work? The paragraph behind the sentence doesn't talk about it or i'm struggling to understand the relationship.
  - churchill 3y ago
    They have a long history of creating shortages or long queues wherever they've been tried. The only way to bring down prices is to remove barriers to supply, such as excessive regulation, and to encourage investment. Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation [0] tracks the history of wage & price controls from Hammurabi's Babylon, Diocletian's Rome, Ancient Egypt, and down to modern-day examples. The book has dozens (if I remember correctly) of examples of price controls never working, explained carefully in detail. It's an extremely interesting and carefully argued book with a lot of objective evidence. My comment isn't directly related to the Apple situation but to the failed history of price controls. [0]: https://cdn.mises.org/Forty%20Centuries%20of%20Wage%20and%20Price%20Controls%20How%20Not%20to%20Fight%20Inflation_2.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/Forty%20Centuries%20of%20Wage%20and%20... (PDF)
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The problem with price controls is that you're fixing one variable in an arbitrarily complicated transaction, and the people fixing the price are fallible. So then one of two things happens. If you can transact around the price control, that happens. So Apple signs a contract with Foxconn to pay them a billion dollars and give them a pile of industrial waste in exchange for a pile of new parts. The industrial waste has negative value and Apple wants to get rid of it, but they claim it was worth another billion dollars, so now their "cost" for parts is three times as high because they're de facto including the cost of paying Foxconn to dispose of some industrial waste and then claiming the benefit as a cost. If you try to prohibit that, first of all it hardly ever works because transfer pricing is a pickle, but to the extent that it does, you now have perverse incentives and inefficiencies. Apple used to get away with charging $100 even though their cost is $10, but now that means they can only charge $12 and make $2 since that's 20% of their cost. Unless they can raise their cost by overpaying vendors for equipment or hiring a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them back in. If they pay $10 for that then their cost is $20 and they can charge $24 and make $4. Making $4 is better than $2. But the customer will pay up to $100 if they have to, and if Apple raises their cost to $80+ then they can still charge $100 and make almost $20. "Cost plus" is a massive incentive to be inefficient. So now you want to pick an amount instead of a percentage. But now if you guess to low you get shortages, and even if the price you set is alright today, it might not be tomorrow.
badpun 3y ago
It's practically impossible to determine price though. It can be gamed very easily.
sanitycheck 3y ago
I'm far from being a free-marketeer but when people buy an Apple thing they know what they're getting regarding repairability and they're OK with it. Someone who cares about the availablity of spare parts for a sensible price should buy Dell, (presumably) Lenovo, maybe Framework, etc.
- churchill 3y ago
  Then you are a free-marketeer. Is advocating for choice in the marketplace something to be ashamed of? If people stick to Apple despite their history, they're indirectly saying that the quality of the product is so much that despite the inconveniences, they still consider Apple products a net positive. They can deal with it if they don't want to use competing brands that are quite as good.
- tombert 3y ago
  A part of me agrees, but it does kind of feel like Apple is the trendsetter/gatekeeper for a lot of this stuff. Everyone crapped on Apple for removing the headphone jack, or making non-replaceable batteries...and then quietly started doing all that themselves. I am super happy that companies like Framework are getting some traction, and there's a fairly high likelihood that once my current Macbook breaks that my next laptop will be a Framework, but I also feel like Framework is still kind of a niche outlier; Apple seems to be the "test the limits of what customers will tolerate" company.
  - sanitycheck 3y ago
    I do agree about a lot of the (IMO) backward steps being Apple's fault, and I support legislation on some things - a common charging plug is good (don't care what it is, USB-C is OK) and a common replaceable battery standard would be nice too. The headphone jack... Turns out people didn't care, or Sony phones would be a lot more popular than they are (I like them, I accept I'm not normal.) Framework is a niche outlier, but Dell isn't and you can get service manuals and spares easily for all their business laptops. Maybe people just don't know that? (Don't touch the consumer lines, obviously - and I include XPS in that.)
ljf 3y ago
The 'board' on my dishwasher went - the only solution was to get one from the grey market (and the manufacturer didn't sell them direct to consumers) for nearly £150 - I could get a new dishwasher for £200. It felt crazy to scrap the machine for want of a part that couldn't cost more that £20 to sell me (and £5 to make?)
- iinnPP 3y ago
  This sounds like a climate change problem that should receive a quick solution for the sake of the planet. Amazon is well placed to provide distribution of these parts at reasonable rates. Maybe they can be forced into such in order to continue receiving government contracts. Assuming they wouldn't play nice.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Simply increasing fossil fuel taxes would solve this issue much more cleanly and comprehensively than targeted legislation that can easily be manipulated. Capture more externalities of energy usage into a products' price, and people will be less able to waste money on throwaway products, and hence businesses making long lasting, repairable products will win in the market. Of course, the problem is, people want cheaper, throwaway products so they can consume more.
    - iinnPP 3y ago
      I live in Canada where your suggestion is implemented at least in some capacity. The result has not been great. I believe part of the problem is that many people simply cannot afford to pay more. If we could target both problems at once I can see this working very well. The solution I posted does consider low income people and would have an immediate benefit to everyone except the companies that have created the problem. We could also tax all new goods, except parts. To bring the cost incentive back to reality. Perhaps multiplied on a climate impact rating that would also be tied to repairability. So the cheapest product would definitely be the longest lasting product, which would also be cheapest to repair.
x-complexity 3y ago
> There should be a law forcing tech companies to sell spare parts at cost + 20% markup. That will just force Apple to integrate everything into one single part. "In an attempt to increase reliability, we've soldered & epoxied everything into one seamless part, including the casing. Thanks to this monumentous effort, we've been able to guarantee that part replacements by 3rd party repair services will now always be successful."

senttoschool 3y ago

>There should be a law forcing tech companies to sell spare parts at cost + 20% markup. Why stop there? Maybe force tech companies to sell their products and services at cost + 20% markup. /sarcasm 1. What happens if the company has too many spare parts and wants to sell at 0% markup? Can they do that? 2. What happens if the spare parts factory burns down in an accident? Is the company legally obligated to rebuild the factory? What are the terms for how fast must the company rebuild the factory? Does the company need a backup factory to produce spare parts? 3. How long should the company be obligated to provide spare parts? Should this duration be applied to all electronics?

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

Yep, and all parts that can be bough separately should be sold too (so at a chip level, not just "mainboard", "screen assembly", "case", etc.). Same with cars and other devices... with a car, you can get in a minor crash and even without labour, you can get up to a new car price in parts very fast.

amelius 3y ago
But then people would build competing phones with M2 chips in them.
- Xelynega 3y ago
  Oh no, the whole point of the free market...
  - senttoschool 3y ago
    Free market also implies that companies can create and protect moats. This means companies have the freedom to NOT provide compatibility or emphasize repairability.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      > Free market also implies that companies can create and protect moats it implies no such thing Free market it does not even imply that the concept of intellectual property exists at all.
      - senttoschool 3y ago
        Free market implies that a company can create any service and product they want. It's up the customer to decide if they want to pay for it or not. This means a company like Apple does not have to provide access to its proprietary M2 SoC to anyone who asks. That makes no business sense. What's the point of investing billions to design and mass manufacture SoCs if "free market" says you must give it away?
        ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > This means a company like Apple does not have to provide access to its proprietary M2 SoC to anyone who asks. This also means that a disgrunted employee that knows how to build M2 SOC can leave and starts their own production. But currently goverment would send armed goons with guns, at taxpayer expense. And US government seizes my private property, if I post to myself earbuds from China that look too much luke airpods under the pretence of 'Counterfeit goods'. You are advocating hypocracy, free market for me but not for thee. I am all onboard for the real free market, where government does not interfere to protect Apple at my expense.
    - zamnos 3y ago
      It's anarchy that says companies can do whatever they want including create and protect moats, sign exclusivity agreements, and do all sorts of anti-competitive things. (Eg: Microsoft licensing deals in the 80's and 90's) In order to have a free market that's actually guided by an invisible hand, it must have competition. A market with monopolists is an unfree market.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  And if intel processors would be sold in stores, people would build competing PCs with intel chips in them. Oh wait, we've been doing that already for a few decades already.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    I'm pretty certain M1/2/.. would not exist in an environment like that. There would be no incentive for Apple to develop it unless they fundamentally changed their business model.
    - amelius 3y ago
      Because before Apple there was no progress in hardware at all?
      - qwytw 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure there was and still is. Nvidia, AMD, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Qualcomm, ARM and a bunch of others I don't recall designed or still design competitive products in this area. The thing they all have in common is that they want to make money from it... And well unfortunately the general trend is the less open and more proprietary their products are they more money they make from it (or the higher is their share price) and the more money they have to (potentially) invest into future R&D. ARM which is the most open successful company in the sector is almost literally working for peanuts (relatively to their overall impact) compared to Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm or Intel. I'm not sure how would you solve that? I mean if Apple invested X into designing M1/2 because they expected that they'd earn Y from that. However it turns out they have to make this design available to everyone (well maybe not for free but for a royalty comparable to what ARM gets) erasing their competitive advantage and as a result can only make 0.2Y at most? What would they do? Would they still invest X? 0.5X? 0.1*X? Not design a new chip at all and spend their money on something else? Maybe they wouldn't even have any money to spend in the first place because they wouldn't have been able to maintained massive margins by keeping their Software and HW designs proprietary over the years?

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

Price controls never work. The problem here is vertical integration. If you had one company making logic boards, another company making operating systems, then the OS vendor has no reason to lock your device to using some third party vendor's logic boards. The logic board vendor has no reason to lock your device to using some third party vendor's screens. So all the parts are available independently because they're all made by different companies -- and each is a fungible product that can be supplied by multiple vendors.

irjustin 3y ago
> Price controls never work. Why do price controls never work? The paragraph behind the sentence doesn't talk about it or i'm struggling to understand the relationship.
- churchill 3y ago
  They have a long history of creating shortages or long queues wherever they've been tried. The only way to bring down prices is to remove barriers to supply, such as excessive regulation, and to encourage investment. Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation [0] tracks the history of wage & price controls from Hammurabi's Babylon, Diocletian's Rome, Ancient Egypt, and down to modern-day examples. The book has dozens (if I remember correctly) of examples of price controls never working, explained carefully in detail. It's an extremely interesting and carefully argued book with a lot of objective evidence. My comment isn't directly related to the Apple situation but to the failed history of price controls. [0]: https://cdn.mises.org/Forty%20Centuries%20of%20Wage%20and%20Price%20Controls%20How%20Not%20to%20Fight%20Inflation_2.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/Forty%20Centuries%20of%20Wage%20and%20... (PDF)
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  The problem with price controls is that you're fixing one variable in an arbitrarily complicated transaction, and the people fixing the price are fallible. So then one of two things happens. If you can transact around the price control, that happens. So Apple signs a contract with Foxconn to pay them a billion dollars and give them a pile of industrial waste in exchange for a pile of new parts. The industrial waste has negative value and Apple wants to get rid of it, but they claim it was worth another billion dollars, so now their "cost" for parts is three times as high because they're de facto including the cost of paying Foxconn to dispose of some industrial waste and then claiming the benefit as a cost. If you try to prohibit that, first of all it hardly ever works because transfer pricing is a pickle, but to the extent that it does, you now have perverse incentives and inefficiencies. Apple used to get away with charging $100 even though their cost is $10, but now that means they can only charge $12 and make $2 since that's 20% of their cost. Unless they can raise their cost by overpaying vendors for equipment or hiring a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them back in. If they pay $10 for that then their cost is $20 and they can charge $24 and make $4. Making $4 is better than $2. But the customer will pay up to $100 if they have to, and if Apple raises their cost to $80+ then they can still charge $100 and make almost $20. "Cost plus" is a massive incentive to be inefficient. So now you want to pick an amount instead of a percentage. But now if you guess to low you get shortages, and even if the price you set is alright today, it might not be tomorrow.

badpun 3y ago

It's practically impossible to determine price though. It can be gamed very easily.

sanitycheck 3y ago

I'm far from being a free-marketeer but when people buy an Apple thing they know what they're getting regarding repairability and they're OK with it. Someone who cares about the availablity of spare parts for a sensible price should buy Dell, (presumably) Lenovo, maybe Framework, etc.

churchill 3y ago
Then you are a free-marketeer. Is advocating for choice in the marketplace something to be ashamed of? If people stick to Apple despite their history, they're indirectly saying that the quality of the product is so much that despite the inconveniences, they still consider Apple products a net positive. They can deal with it if they don't want to use competing brands that are quite as good.
tombert 3y ago
A part of me agrees, but it does kind of feel like Apple is the trendsetter/gatekeeper for a lot of this stuff. Everyone crapped on Apple for removing the headphone jack, or making non-replaceable batteries...and then quietly started doing all that themselves. I am super happy that companies like Framework are getting some traction, and there's a fairly high likelihood that once my current Macbook breaks that my next laptop will be a Framework, but I also feel like Framework is still kind of a niche outlier; Apple seems to be the "test the limits of what customers will tolerate" company.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  I do agree about a lot of the (IMO) backward steps being Apple's fault, and I support legislation on some things - a common charging plug is good (don't care what it is, USB-C is OK) and a common replaceable battery standard would be nice too. The headphone jack... Turns out people didn't care, or Sony phones would be a lot more popular than they are (I like them, I accept I'm not normal.) Framework is a niche outlier, but Dell isn't and you can get service manuals and spares easily for all their business laptops. Maybe people just don't know that? (Don't touch the consumer lines, obviously - and I include XPS in that.)

ljf 3y ago

The 'board' on my dishwasher went - the only solution was to get one from the grey market (and the manufacturer didn't sell them direct to consumers) for nearly £150 - I could get a new dishwasher for £200. It felt crazy to scrap the machine for want of a part that couldn't cost more that £20 to sell me (and £5 to make?)

iinnPP 3y ago
This sounds like a climate change problem that should receive a quick solution for the sake of the planet. Amazon is well placed to provide distribution of these parts at reasonable rates. Maybe they can be forced into such in order to continue receiving government contracts. Assuming they wouldn't play nice.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Simply increasing fossil fuel taxes would solve this issue much more cleanly and comprehensively than targeted legislation that can easily be manipulated. Capture more externalities of energy usage into a products' price, and people will be less able to waste money on throwaway products, and hence businesses making long lasting, repairable products will win in the market. Of course, the problem is, people want cheaper, throwaway products so they can consume more.
  - iinnPP 3y ago
    I live in Canada where your suggestion is implemented at least in some capacity. The result has not been great. I believe part of the problem is that many people simply cannot afford to pay more. If we could target both problems at once I can see this working very well. The solution I posted does consider low income people and would have an immediate benefit to everyone except the companies that have created the problem. We could also tax all new goods, except parts. To bring the cost incentive back to reality. Perhaps multiplied on a climate impact rating that would also be tied to repairability. So the cheapest product would definitely be the longest lasting product, which would also be cheapest to repair.

x-complexity 3y ago

> There should be a law forcing tech companies to sell spare parts at cost + 20% markup. That will just force Apple to integrate everything into one single part. "In an attempt to increase reliability, we've soldered & epoxied everything into one seamless part, including the casing. Thanks to this monumentous effort, we've been able to guarantee that part replacements by 3rd party repair services will now always be successful."