Apple: iPhones Are Too 'Complex' To Allow Unauthorized Repair (vice.com)

Jason Koebler writes: Apple's top environmental officer made the company's most extensive statements about the repairability of Apple hardware on Tuesday: "Our first thought is, 'You don't need to repair this.' When you do, we want the repair to be fairly priced and accessible to you," Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of policy and social initiatives said at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. "To think about these very complex products and say the answer to all our problems is that you should have anybody to repair and have access to the parts is not looking at the whole problem."

Apple has lobbied against "Fair Repair" bills in 11 states that would require the company to make its repair guides available and to sell replacement parts to the general public. Instead, it has focused on an "authorized service provider" model that allows the company to control the price and availability of repair.

Comments

Whaaaaaat?

[slashmydots]

Apple is lying and exaggerating about something to make more money? WHAAAAAAAT? This is my surprised face. The only thing that will stop them is laws, the end. We need right to repair laws and that's that.

Obvious BS detected...

[Timothy2.0]

Apple has lobbied against "Fair Repair" bills in 11 states that would require the company to make its repair guides available and to sell replacement parts to the general public. Instead, it has focused on an "authorized service provider" model that allows the company to control the price and availability of repair.

I can understand wanting only authorized techs working on their product, but it's a MASSIVE leap to go from that to lobbying in 11 states against "Fair Repair" bills.

And then there's this

[fyngyrz]

I have a 2009 Mac Pro. It's a 12/24 core, 3 GHz-ish, 64 GB machine, lots of monitors. It's really pretty quick and there's certainly nothing wrong with it.

Apple, however, has made the next version of the OS unavailable to it, which in turn will make it slowly become incompatible with new software, etc.

I suspect that the whole "you aren't allowed to repair your iPhone" debacle is based on the same basic policy, which I would sum up as "screw you, customer, buy from us again or go without."

Particularly because the idea that no one but Apple's authorized money generators can repair an iPhone is patently absurd.

Re:And then there's this

[drinkypoo]

This is, of course, the history of the Macintosh. From the very start, Jobs didn't want anyone opening the case, and he didn't even want it to have any expansion beyond serial ports. He explicitly wanted the user to have to buy a new computer if they wanted to upgrade, producing revenue for Apple.

This is literally only business as usual for Apple, ever since the Mac.

Re:And then there's this

[michelcolman]

Now that wouldn't be so bad if they would not flat out refuse to repair your device.

I had a broken screen on my iPhone 5, which was otherwise just fine. I brought it in, the price would be about 150 euros which is a lot (you can easily get a replacement non-original screen for less than half the price) but I didn't want to risk getting an inferior screen, possibly even containing malware, so I went through the official channel. A bit later I got a call saying they had diagnosed my phone and found a problem with the battery as well. They "had to" repair that, too, and since it was going to be too expensive, I might as well get a replacement refurbished phone for more than 300 euros.

I insisted that my two year old battery was just fine (not quite lasting as long as when it was new, but sufficient for me) and only wanted a new screen, but no, they flat out refused. Apple only delivers devices in perfect working order with a three month warranty, so they could not just repair the screen, end of discussion.

I ended up getting a fake screen from some grubby repair shop after all. Works like a charm, by the way. And the battery still works just fine.

Re:And then there's this

[mfnickster]

"He explicitly wanted the user to have to buy a new computer if they wanted to upgrade"

Well, no. Apple offered 512K logic board upgrades to purchasers of the original 128K Macs.

Against Steve's wishes, though.

Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn't have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.

Steve had left by the time the Mac II came out, and it was Gassee's call to allow expansion slots.

I will say the Power Mac 7500 I bought in 1995 was supremely expandable, and easy to open the case and work inside it. I upgraded the RAM, hard drive, CPU (to a G3) and optical drive. I got a lot of miles out of that Mac!

Lovely

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

"Just when you thought we want to rob you once, we actually want to rob you twice."

-- Apple Care

Bad service design is not the same as complexity

[An dochasac]

Look at the teardown videos of their competitors. For example the 2015 Blackberry Priv, has a curved screen with display to the edge, wireless Qi charging, magnetometer, gyro, gps, barometer, QWERTY slide-out keyboard.., The teardown to replace the battery takes about 1 minute. Pulling out the main board keyboard, and everything until you get to the screen, another 5. But then the tech mentions that it is also possible to replace the curved screen from the front in about 5 minutes. And compared to cars, appliances, commercial technology, home entertainment systems, sewing machings, my 1999 Pismo... the Priv isn't easily repairable.

Apple simply chooses planned obsolescence over serviceability. And so I've chosen not to buy into their environmentally wasteful products.

Mitutoyos on your desk but no where to go

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't even *read* the comments here but I predict they'll be:
* 12 angry luzers complaining about Apple
* 6 fandroids complaining about Apple
* 2 people wondering where the headphone jack is
* 1 person who actually thinks they can repair the unit on their own
* and 20,000 silent iPhone readers rolling their eyes

Obligatory viewing

[Sebby]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...