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The Right To Repair Movement Is Forcing Apple To Change (vice.com)
The executive director of Repair.org says Apple has "decided to be nicer to consumers in order to stop them from demanding their right to repair," according to Motherboard. Slashdot reader Jason Koebler shared this article:
It's increasingly looking like Apple can no longer ignore the repair insurgency that's been brewing: The right to repair movement is winning, and Apple's behavior is changing. In the last few months, Apple has made political, design, and customer service decisions that suggest the right to repair movement is having a real impact on the company's operations...
Apple has repeatedly made small concessions to its customers on the issues that Repair.org and the larger repair community have decided to highlight. The question is whether these concessions are going to be enough to satiate customers who want their devices to be easily repairable and upgradable, and whether the right to repair movement can convince those people to continue demanding fair treatment.
The article notes that at least 12 U.S. states are still considering "fair repair" laws, which would force Apple to sell replacement parts to both independent repair shops and the general public.
Apple has repeatedly made small concessions to its customers on the issues that Repair.org and the larger repair community have decided to highlight. The question is whether these concessions are going to be enough to satiate customers who want their devices to be easily repairable and upgradable, and whether the right to repair movement can convince those people to continue demanding fair treatment.
The article notes that at least 12 U.S. states are still considering "fair repair" laws, which would force Apple to sell replacement parts to both independent repair shops and the general public.
This better hit Sony. I repair laptops and there absolutely are no spare parts for Vaio laptops because Sony refuses to sell them to anyone, One of my customers got a screen repair quote of $800 from Sony for their $850 Vaio. Thankfully it was also used in a Toshiba so I got the exact screen on ebay. But HDD caddied, plate covers, USB off-boards, forget it.
So long as company takes its stuff back for recycling, internal design of a product is between them and their customers.
A corporation is a legal construct whose very right to exist depends on the goodwill of the government, which in theory means The People. Once upon a time, in order to form a corporation at all, you had to demonstrate that there was a public interest. These days, you just fill out a form, and pay a fee.
Recycling is a bare minimum requirement. The best form of "recycling" is reuse. And often, before you can reuse something, you have to repair it. Not to get all hippie dippy or anything, but repair and reuse is by far superior to recycling any time there's not a dramatic energy savings involved in an upgrade. The phone upgrade cycle is particularly needlessly wasteful — the power consumption is relatively irrelevant here, but phone power consumption is actually increasing so that cannot be a counterargument here in any case. But computers in general have reached a point where even relatively gutless machines are useful for years if they can be kept going, and even desktops haven't had a drop in power consumption in some years, either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's actually quite a bit more insidious than anything Apple has done.
Microsoft: Uses standard manufacturing process that just so happens to make a device a bitch to open and impossible to re-close without a standard manufacturing device.
Apple: Creates a non-standard screw with no technical manufacturing advantages for the sole purpose of preventing 3rd parties from opening their device. Uses trademark and patent law to protect the design. Sues producers of the tools to prevent them from falling into the hands of repairers.
You must have been smoking some seriously good stuff to have come up with your sentence. At least MS's design had a technical and manufacturing advantage. But you are right about one thing, the bias is ridiculous. Fuck Apple.