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Apple Is Lobbying Against Your Right To Repair iPhones, New York State Records Confirm (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Lobbying records in New York state show that Apple, Verizon, and the tech industry's largest trade organizations are opposing a bill that would make it easier for consumers and independent companies to repair your electronics. The bill, called the "Fair Repair Act," would require electronics companies to sell replacement parts and tools to the general public, would prohibit "software locks" that restrict repairs, and in many cases would require companies to make repair guides available to the public. Apple and other tech giants have been suspected of opposing the legislation in many of the 11 states where similar bills have been introduced, but New York's robust lobbying disclosure laws have made information about which companies are hiring lobbyists and what bills they're spending money on public record. According to New York State's Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Apple, Verizon, Toyota, the printer company Lexmark, heavy machinery company Caterpillar, phone insurance company Asurion, and medical device company Medtronic have spent money lobbying against the Fair Repair Act this year. The Consumer Technology Association, which represents thousands of electronics manufacturers, is also lobbying against the bill. The records show that companies and organizations lobbying against right to repair legislation spent $366,634 to retain lobbyists in the state between January and April of this year. Thus far, the Digital Right to Repair Coalition -- which is generally made up of independent repair shops with several employees -- is the only organization publicly lobbying for the legislation. It has spent $5,042 on the effort, according to the records.
Time to get the grassroots campaigns going. Repair Cafe fixers and clients, every member of every hackerspace, repair shops of all kinds, independent repair contractors, a large number of Slashdotters, and just average citizens who are tired of getting the shaft - all of them together could probably kick in enough money for some serious bribes. (Because let's face it - lobbying is essentially bribery). It might succeed in thwarting this loathsome, sleazy corporate assault on decency and fairness; but even if it doesn't, it will at least cost the bastards still more money for still bigger bribes, and will result in more news coverage that may convince more people to get behind the next campaign to tell the corporate bastards to fuck off with their 'you no longer own things, you only rent them' bullshit.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If you follow any of the multitude of people working in the repair industry through their social media, you would know that your argument holds no water.
They already do all of the research, repair and diagnosis (quite effectively) while being handicapped by lack of first party software and tools or documentation (or sometimes they manage to find illegal versions on the webs) and then after they have managed to do all of this (sometimes apple cant even do these physical repairs) and they manage to do it at an affordable price to the consumer, they risk being sued for using the tools they had to obtain illegally.
There is zero reason for these company's not to make this material available other than greed.
When i buy something I own and can do whatever i want with it.
If that means fix it or pay to have it fixed in a country where it is illegal to deny you the right to service it or have it serviced, there is no reason for the OEM's to cut the legs out from under the local repair shops by denying them manuals and diagnostic software that already exists.
GREEDY A$$HATS!
"Apple kicks dogs and steals from your grandmother!"
You're trying to be sarcastic, but in spirit if not in fact, your statement is pretty much true and accurate.
Exactly what types of broken states of a phone are you requiring a company to publish guides to fix...
Let's see... broken screens, busted speakers and microphones, (yes, it happens, and it's happened to me), failed backlights, broken cases, damaged earphone jacks, (for the 'pre-bravery era iPhones), cracked solder connections, cranky power and volume buttons, and probably a few others I haven't thought of.
...and make parts available for?
For all of the above problems - and in addition, chips as well. You seem to think the expertise to repair these things doesn't exist outside the hallowed halls of corporate repair centres. You're mistaken.
Electronic devices have come a lot farther than a car engine that you could demand be user-serviceable, and these laws are misguided attempts to make them so.
They don't need to be user serviceable, they just need to be serviceable by repair people who aren't members of the corporate empires that are trying so desperately to control their products even after they've been purchased. 'Cause, you know, you can have a monopoly in the service markets, just as you can have a monopoly in any other market, and monopolies are a BAD THING.
Don't make a company the villain for objecting to things that are nice in (ancient) principle, but unworkable in reality.
It's the companies who have made themselves the villains, in oh so many ways. Among them is objecting to things that are nice in (modern) principle, and entirely workable in reality.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The schematic for the TV set was inside the box. You pulled tubes and took them to the store to be tested. The companies made money hand over fist, and independent repair shops did OK too.
The companies that made those old TV sets *did* eventually go into decline, and in some cases Chapter 11. That had nothing to do with independent repair shops. It had everything to do with other countries making things more cheaply under an open trade policy, and other companies being more innovative.
So. Go ahead Apple. Try to lock yourself into the top spot. Go ahead. We dare you. Oh, and Cupertino? Rochester, NY and Detroit, MI might have some lessons to teach you. Enjoy your spaceship. These are the good ol' days.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You're being given another source of (potentially more lucrative) aftermarket repair product sales, such as controller chips, processors (many shops can reflow these on no problem) headphone jacks, charge ports, etc.
You can charge money for the access to the documentation.
There's so much money to be made that if I were a SMART manufacturer, I'd be sitting here opposing anyone that opposed this law, and going ahead and doing this anyways, and start eating straight into the sales of Apple, Verizon, etc.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The problem is, components like USB ports (or Lightning connectors) can break, and if the port is a proprietary part used only by Apple or Samsung, there IS NO second source for replacement port connectors to solder on. Quite a few Android devices in particular had SERIOUS problems with broken USB ports (especially when the device was used by toddlers or pre-teens).
Also, VERY FEW 'bricked' devices are irreparable via JTAG... but if a mfr. is allowed to declare a model 'eol' and refuse any future service requests, while simultaneously refusing to release their JTAG utilities & rom images, you'd be fucked unless someone leaked the tool to XDA & the mfr. didn't throw DMCA takedown notices at them. (Motorola comes to mind as one of the more aggressive mfrs. determined to keep their software tools out of 'unauthorized' hands).
The iPhones are now being cryptographically paired on an internal component level. This is being done in the name of "security", which is bullshit
If you're talking about the fingerprint scanner, it's not bullshit, it really is for a very good security reason.
I work on Android Security, at Google, and this is something that we want to do as well, but for complicated reasons haven't been able to do, not even in the Pixel devices. And we want to do it not because we're copying Apple but because it's addresses a real security issue. Let me explain:
The security of fingerprints derives not from the secrecy of fingerpints (they're not secret, you leave them everywhere, including all over the surface of your phone, which is very convenient for phone thieves), but from the difficulty of preventing a fake fingerprint from being "scanned".
The simplest way to fake a fingerprint scan is to disconnect the scanner and feed the digital fingerprint data in directly. This is really, really easy to do, given a little expertise and some very inexpensive equipment. The fingerprint scanner connects to the device via a standard SPI bus, so you just have to connect some other processor to the bus and feed in the bitmap of the fingerprint (which you photographed from the surface of the phone).
The way to defeat this attack is to have the fingerprint scanner attach a cryptographic message authentication code (signature, if you will) which is produced with a key known to the CPU that will do the matching. This requires that the scanner and CPU be "paired" by arranging to share a key between them for producing and verifying these MACs. Further, it can't be too easy to pair a different scanner because then the attacker could just do that.
So, the pairing of fingerprint scanners to SoCs really is for security. I have no idea what the motivation for fighting this bill is, and it may well be the brazen attempt to extract more money by disallowing third party repair that you claim it is, but that's not the case for the fingerprint scanner pairing.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This is offtopic and I'll accept appropriate moderation for it but... every time I see your sig I spend the next few minutes trying to correlate head injuries with raises I've received. Every time... I conclude that you're right.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.