Apple Will Fight 'Right To Repair' Legislation (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple is planning to fight proposed electronics "Right to Repair" legislation being considered by the Nebraska state legislature, according to a source within the legislature who is familiar with the bill's path through the statehouse. The legislation would require Apple and other electronics manufacturers to sell repair parts to consumers and independent repair shops, and would require manufacturers to make diagnostic and service manuals available to the public. Nebraska is one of eight states that are considering right to repair bills; last month, Nebraska, Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Kansas, and Wyoming introduced legislation. Last week, lawmakers in Illinois and Tennessee officially introduced similar bills. According to the source, an Apple representative, staffer, or lobbyist will testify against the bill at a hearing in Lincoln on March 9. ATT will also argue against the bill, the source said. The source told me that at least one of the companies plans to say that consumers who repair their own phones could cause lithium batteries to catch fire. So far, Nebraska is the only state to schedule a hearing for its legislation.

Comments

Re:the real reason theyre arguing it.

[coastwalker]

Apple are a cult purchase for the masses. The truth is that they have been making excess profits for rather a long time and are no better and in some respects worse than other companies. They do not allow battery replacement because their designs sacrifice repair-ability in order to enhance the appearance of their devices. It also means that they make a fat profit on repairs. I hope they lose this court case as it will benefit the consumers they are gouging.

Re:the real reason theyre arguing it.

[dgatwood]

You're full of it. It has nothing to do with brand consumption. The truth is that the tradeoff for cheap, reliable, waterproof and sort of shock resistant is to make things with glue and not with screws.

Maybe for the watch, but not for the phone. There's nothing glued in the iPhone other than the battery. The case has snap tabs and screws holding it together, and all the complex parts are fastened in place using screws. There's absolutely no good reason for the battery to be glued in there, either. They could just as easily:

• Use compressible foam to hold it in place so that it doesn't rattle. Manufacturers have been doing that in battery compartments for most of a century.
• Bond it to a thin, stiff plastic layer and fasten that in with screws from the top so that it hangs suspended by glue in the middle of the battery compartment area.
• Bond it to a thin, stiff plastic layer that slides into a tiny track from one end. Bond the plastic layer to the bottom or top part of the case, allowing you to slide it out the bottom without even removing the back. Connect it with a couple of small spring contacts on the end of the battery.
• Glue it to the back part of the case (or a portion thereof), and offer that entire piece as a replacement part.

It's the height of laziness to say, "We can't make it this small without holding everything together with glue." It isn't that they can't make them easy to repair, nor is it that it would make them much more expensive or bigger or anything else. The reality is that Apple doesn't want their products to be easy to repair.

I'll illustrate why this is the case with a story. My parents recently took their iPhone 5s to Apple for repairs because its battery life had turned to crap. Apple looked at the device and said that they couldn't repair it because the battery was bulged, and it would be dangerous to remove it (because it is glued in). They wanted... either two or three hundred dollars to replace what was approximately a $30 battery.

Why would Apple want to make it easy to replace that $30 battery when they can glue the battery in place and use that as an excuse to cheat their customers out of hundreds of dollars, then take the defective hardware, ship it somewhere, rip the battery out in spite of the safety concerns, glue a new one in, and make even more money selling that refurbished phone to some other poor sucker whose battery dared to swell up? No, the irreparability of these devices means big money for Apple and they know it. IMO, these laws can't come soon enough and don't go far enough.

It should be illegal to glue a battery into any device, period, full stop.