Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by BeauHD on from the hands-off-approach dept.

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.

18 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. Whaaaaaat? by slashmydots · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Whaaaaaat? by olsmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You are completely mangling the way most free marketers would think about this. The better way is to let anyone hang a shingle as an iPhone repair specialist. Maybe they'll be able to fix them, or maybe they'll be too complex and unrepairable. If the former, the shop will be successful and prosper. If the latter, and they permanently screw up enough phones, people will go elsewhere to an authorized repair center and the shop will close.

    2. Re:Whaaaaaat? by srichard25 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "The only thing that will stop them is laws, "

      What???? How about people just stop buying products from companies that adopt anti-consumer policies? Apple doesn't have a monopoly on smart phones.

      We don't need a law for everything.

  2. Obvious BS detected... by Timothy2.0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Obvious BS detected... by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      No, it really isn't. If those fair repair bills pass, then the law will explicitly prohibit only permitting authorized techs to work on their product. Lobbying against those bills is the only reasonable response for a company which doesn't want anyone repairing their products without their permission.

      The root problem is that unrepairable products are literally destroying our biosphere. They're made intentionally unrepairable so that the user has to buy a new computer in order to expand it, like Jobs tried to do with the original Macintosh. In spite of his efforts, the engineers gave the machine some expansion capacity because they knew than an unexpandable computer was bullshit.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. Then I guess they're too complex for me own by darthsilun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And I'll just have to buy something else instead.

    Problem solved.

  4. And then there's this by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:And then there's this by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re: And then there's this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ubuntu Linux runs great on my old MacBook pro. All the drivers work, even for my Wacom graphics tablet. Linux seems to be a great way to extend the useful life of aging computers.

    3. Re: And then there's this by msauve · · Score: 5, Insightful
      He's talking about an OS upgrade, what do the "policies of all other hardware manufacturers" have to do with it?

      But, to the point, the Win10 requirements:

      Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
      RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
      Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS
      Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
      Display: 800x600

      The GP has a "a 2009 Mac Pro. It's a 12/24 core, 3 GHz-ish, 64 GB machine".

      So, it looks like Windows is doing a better job of supporting Apple hardware than MacOS is.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    4. Re:And then there's this by michelcolman · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:And then there's this by mfnickster · · Score: 5, Informative

      "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!

      --
      "Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
    6. Re:And then there's this by epine · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Adding a hard drive would also void the warranty because "why would you want to add a hard drive". This attitude actually drove away a lot of Apple fans from Apple forever, and led to the disenchantment which drove Jobs away from Apple.

      I was one of those people with enough dosh in my foolish youth to spring for the original fat Mac (something just shy of CDN $4000 with printer and external floppy as I dimly recall), which within less than two years became a decorative boat anchor after I priced an internal hard drive upgrade at CDN $1500, which instead I spent, as I now recall it, on an entire crappy 80286 clone, which was ugly and clunky, but far more useful to me as a software developer.

      What first drove me absolutely ape-shit about my double-floppy fat Mac was that whenever it needed something from an unmounted floppy, it would by (some inscrutable logic) pop one of the two mounted floppies—almost always the disk it would seconds later request that I reinsert.

      I knew my workflow, the machine didn't, yet it figured it should choose which disk to auto-eject, and I shouldn't even have my own button. I never had a development workflow that required less than three floppies.

      Soon I had installed permanent paperclips in both floppies so I could override this outrageously unhelpful behaviour, whose mother was a sentient elevator servicing a hamster high rise, and whose father was a talking toaster who smelled of elderberries.

      It drove me APE FUCKING SHIT.

      And you're quite right. I've never gone back to the Apple fold.

  5. Bad service design is not the same as complexity by An+dochasac · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:It doesn't go far enough. by mccalli · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why? No-one's forcing anyone to buy an iPhone. Buy an Android phone instead if that's what you'd like.

  7. Re: Bollocks by Entrope · · Score: 5, Funny

    It takes Courage (tm) and money -- lots of money -- for Apple to create innovations like edge-to-edge screens, splash resistance, HDR displays in a mobile form factor, and OLED screens in phones. It's only fair for Apple to charge more than Android devices to deliver the kind of inventions that they do.

  8. i agree with those stating apple is lying by strstr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have repaired Samsung android and LG android phones. I have studied the guides. I have replaced screens.
    I have also repaired by myself dell studio XPS and alienware laptops from replacement of the CPU, GPU, heatsink fan, and mobo, and more.

    basically every device I've seen is self repairable, designed to open up like nothing, and each component is generally separate easy to remove and replace. this includes the screen, mobo, camera lense, camera itself, cases, bezel, glass on the screen, etc.

    one can actually remove just the glass from the screen of most devices easy, and replace it when shattered, re-using the LCD/touch sensor.

    on eBay or other site, one can order brand new or refurb every component of every phone.

    basically you choose your difficulty level. either you want to replace a shattered screen entirely by ordering a whole new LCD/screen kit, or you attempt to remove the old glass and re-glue on new glass to save some bucks. or you order a new mobo/CPU combo. you just drop in the component removing the old. you re-assemble the phone and you're good. if you break anything during the process you just order a new one of those too.

    Apple claims this is somehow too difficult for individual people to do..? why is that? what's it to Apple if you fuck up your phone or something or do low quality repair? the phone is already damaged and used up anyway!

    it's so easy a cave man can do it.

    https://www.obamasweapon.com/

  9. Re:Well, it's the same with cars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... brake-pad exchange or fixing a ding costs ...

    Let's use a car analogy: Have you taken your car in and the mechanic has said that you've driven it for 2 years, you have to buy another car? No: Because car manufacturers promise to make parts for 10 years. Your phone manufacturer doesn't and it's obvious why: That increases warehousing expense and cannibalizes latest-model sales. Allowing authorized Apple 'mechanics' isn't just more expensive than do-it-yourself repairs, it allows Apple to stop manufacturing legacy parts. Apple is justifying their luxury-tax philosophy so that idiots like you don't notice the real problem.

    If Apple really wanted to avoid burdensome legislation they would manufacture legacy parts for their authorized 'mechanics'. But they've decided fighting the government over (generous) consumer entitlements is cheaper than repairing old phones.