I don't think the GP meant that to be a problem. What I got from it was "even if safety concerns are legitimate, trained professionals often do the work."
For general public, I am not do sure. There‘s a reason why I‘m not attempting replacing the battery in my 2015 mbp or in an iphone. I just don‘t want to cause the damage but I can imagine random people not even waiting until the battery is fully discharged before going in.
Yet there are any number of equally dangerous activities the average citizen can participate in if they like. There are 100 things in your home that can kill you if you decide to start fiddling. Why are Apple products any different? Why should Apple own the repair aspect? Does Maytag tell me that only a Maytag authorized repair shop is allowed to service my water heater?
This article is literally about Apple lobbying to make it harder for independent operations to repair their devices. They won't sell people parts. What does that say to you?
Whether or not you can work around Apple not shipping parts is irrelevant. They are actively trying to make it harder to source parts and fix your devices.
I guess that would be relevant if they were trying to retrieve all spares back. Them not wanting make sourcing spares easier does not mean they own the repair aspect.
The difficulty of sourcing parts is _directly_ related to how much ownership one has over repairability. If the sourcing of parts becomes overly difficult or impossible, one effectively loses the ability to repair the device how they wish.
Whataboutism, whataboutism. Major argument on HN to drop the conversation. It's a comparable example. You know, like a relevant case showing that things are possible without supplier support. Some people here behave like they are totally square headed. Do not deviate an inch away from an example or you get accused of whataboutism. Geez.
> There are also FAR fewer Teslas out there than there are iPhones and iPads.
Which ultimately makes sourcing iPhone / iPad parts even easier.
But irrelevant. That one entity is doing something bad in no way means that it's OK for another entity to do the same thing.
Besides, the right to repair movement is not focusing on computer products. It's covering a wide variety of products, including Teslas and (perhaps the most egregious) farm equipment.
Yeah, it‘s irrelevant because it in the negative context. If it was towards something positive, it would be then relevant. Seen so many examples of this here. But hey, I‘m doing „whataboutism“ again. Meh.
Why would we hope that in the future they didn't get better at shutting down 3rd party repairs instead of making them support that case?
There are more of us then there are of them. Break it down to the smaller case. Imagine 7 of us are in a lifeboat and 1 person has most of the food and the rest of us have a handful of dinner mints and candy bars. Do we vote to make the one guy share the food or do we hope our candy bars last us until we get rescued.
If necessary not only will we eat his food eventually the rest of us might decide to eat him.
It shouldn't be so hard to understand the problem.
Let me give you an example.
Apple develops a product with components that are doing the same thing as standard components that are ready available at the market. But instead of using those readily available components they make some twist on it just to ruin compatibility. Then they forbid the company that made that component to sell it to anyone but Apple. That basically gives Apple a monopoly on repairing the device. You talk about sourcing parts, but in this case no one can source parts except Apple unless they salvage parts from other devices which is not always viable.
Well, as long as Tesla is the only one, it's not a big deal if you can live without a Tesla. But people are naturally concerned that it might lead to a change in the way others do business if it is not regulated.
They made that problem with the batteries for themselves.
I have owned a couple of different mac laptops, and the ones from 2011 and earlier used to have a built in bracket on the battery that stabilised it and made it trivial to fasten and unfasten with screws.
The brackets did not take up all that much space, but apparently it was worth it to them to save a few minutes in manufacturing and a few seconds in assembly and just use adhesives directly against the unibody for fastening and stabilising.
But ultimately it does not stop those who want to try. I don‘t see a problem. Will this right to repair revocation put those who attempt in prison? What‘s the underlying problem.
Look, I bought a new car. It comes with cameras in the bumper. It made replacing a damaged bumper inherently more difficult for an average Joe. It doesn't mean though that it is impossible to replace it without visiting an authorised service centre. Same logic.
The "spare" parts come from donor boards that are obtained via unsanctioned back channels. Authorized repair shops are generally not allowed to actually fix anything. Instead they tell you it can't be fixed, your data is gone, please buy a new device.
The 2011 ones were even easier than that. You pressed a lever then half the bottom case came off, exposing the hard drive and battery. The battery came off by just pulling a plastic tab, the hard drive had a couple screws iirc. The 2012 one that I'm typing on now requires unscrewing the bottom case, but still everything is right there behind a couple obvious screws and you can upgrade RAM/HDD/battery/replace disc drive with second hard drive in 20 minutes if you are working slow. I knew it was the beginning of the end when the 2013 macbook shipped with soldered RAM.
The problem is that only Apple approved people can repair and can order parts. Keep in mind that there are not Apple stores in all locations around the world where there are plenty of third party repair shops.
> And the parts? Just went to iFixit, they‘re all there to buy. I‘m sure anybody serious about fixing these things professionally can source the parts.
Even Apple had the famous episode of releasing an update that bricked phones with replacement parts that weren't sanctioned. They reversed it after much public outcry.
For less common hardware the situation is just as bad. Agriculture equipment has been a pain point for many to get repaired, as the parts are much harder to find and the limited number of certified repair shops can be pressured to stop servicing equipment deemed end of life by the manufacturer
At least try to understand the issue, even if you don't agree.
Maybe it's OK to you to live in a world where you car can only be repaired by the dealer. "No big deal!" A valid opinion.
But that's fine until they want to charge you $2000 for something you can do yourself. Thank god the dealer will sell you the part and you can do that. Let me do it even if you don't want to.
It seems to me that an iPhone is a lot easier to repair than a car. Sure you need to be careful about the gluing if you want to retain the aesthetics, but replacing the motor in your car is also a pretty extensive operation requiring extremely expensive tooling and if you aren't careful you'll end up hurting the aesthetics just the same. Of cause you could then redo the paint job, but at that point, aren't we really in the realm of cost/tools/effort where doing a decent repair job on an iPhone is still much easier?
I'm not exactly dexterous, and I replaced the screen and battery on my iPhone and it went really well. You need to be a bit slower than you would repairing a car, but I really don't see it as harder.
>replacing the motor in your car is also a pretty extensive operation requiring extremely expensive tooling
Well SOMEONE's dad didn't have a small collection of junker vehicles in the yard to pull parts from growing up. Shoot, I know multiple people (including Dad) who rebuilt their Volkswagen Beetle engine in their unlucky girlfriend's living room (yes that unlucky girlfriend is now my mother) with hand tools. If you think working on cars requires expensive tooling, you just don't know enough rednecks! lololol
I remember my mothers look of shock when my hand me down car started back up after three months of engine and transmission parts slowly spreading across the garage floor.
I knew a biker who had a beautiful girlfriend he was thinking of marrying. Every winter he tore his motorcycle apart in the living room and rebuilt it with incremental improvements. His buddy said to him, Will she let you overhaul your bike in the living room every winter? So he asked her. She said, Hell no!
"Rebuild" is kind of a vague term that doesn't specify exactly what is done and what condition the engine was in.
Have you tried to find a mechanic who will rebuild a worn out engine and give a reasonable warranty on the work in your town? If a local professional can't make that work these days economically, it tells you something.
I see ads for cars that had a "rebuild" a few thousand miles ago and need serious work already.
Its still an absolute bitch even with all the right tools. You get one rusted nut in a tight spot where you can't fit the breaker bar then go ahead and add 4+ hours of cussing and fighting with the car to your job.
Replacing a motor requires hand tools and a motor lift. That's it. Upgrading or modifying might take special tools like an ECU programmer, but a straight mechanical replacement is just a bunch of screws and bolts.
The motor in your car rarely goes bad compared to the oil and brake pads. Those things are purposely made easy to change, and Apple could design their phone so that the failure-prone parts were swappable just as well.
Both of those typically require jacking up the car (and getting under it for the oil change), which strikes me as much more dangerous for a novice than the risk associated with puncturing a phone battery. Never mind the added risk of an amateur doing either of those car jobs incorrectly.
Many cars are designed nowadays for "topside oil changes" (as a factory recommended procedure).
You stick a vacuum line down the dipstick hole, suck out all the oil, replace the filter, fill the oil, put the dipstick back in. I didn't trust it the first time, so I sucked the oil out and then removed the drain plug to see how much oil I was missing; it was less than a shot glass worth.
Brake jobs don't require putting your body under the rotor/hub, making the risk of serious injury low. You could use jackstands, but I generally don't as I don't have my head or limbs in a crush area.
I would love to find a car that I could replace the filter from the top. Easily the most annoying part of the oil change is getting under the car into a position to find the oil filter conveniently located in a dark crevasse against the firewall with just enough space to make it an absolute bitch to get the tool over the filter. Maybe my car just sucks though.
I think most Mercedes and modern Porsche are topside oil filters, probably others now. My wife's CR-V has a backside filter but that can reached from the right side without jacking the car by turning the wheels full left lock.
One tip: To aid removal next time, use Dow DC-4 silicone grease on the filter gasket (rather than motor oil or nothing) and the oil filter gasket just needs a little crush; lots of people over-tighten filters, making them needlessly hard to remove. Contact plus a half turn will put about 1/32" of crush on the gasket which is enough to seal.
I think top-mounted oil filters have been a common feature on German cars for a long time. Even though mine has a top mounted filter, I find changing the oil to be one of the least interesting common DIY car maintenance items. It has big mess potential, requires a stop at a shop anyway to drop off the used oil, and doesn't really save much money.
> It seems to me that an iPhone is a lot easier to repair than a car.
In my short 55 years on the planet I've heard of 4 friends of friends[1] who died or were badly injured by having cars slip off a jack and fall on them.
[1] AKA friends coworker didn't show up one Monday. Friend recently had to dash across the street to jack a car back off of his neighbor.
Yeah never heard of anyone seriously hurt messing with ordinary consumer electronics. You would think if that were a possibility then UL etc would refuse to certify.
My wife and I signed up for their iPhone as a service plan. It’s really the best way if you want to do a new iPhone every year. But if they start dropping crappy iPhones I may change my mind.
Reminds me of the difference between the Apple II and the very Jobs-ian Macintosh. One you could get into and upgrade without even a screwdriver. The other took two special tools and would happily zap you to death if you touched the wrong part, even unplugged.
Some of that had to be unavoidable due to the integrated display, though. CRTs inherently deal with dangerous voltages.
I don't think of Jobs as having been against repairability directly; rather, his singular pursuit of elegant designs resulted in a lot of other desirable features—repairability being a big one—getting steamrolled.
Ignoring many of the more pragmatic requirements of a design in favour of superficial aesthetics is not elegance.
Elegant design is solving as many requirements as possible with as few elements as possible.
A claw hammer is elegant, macs are not.
Weight + slimness (the primary drivers of unrepairable Mac designs) yield pragmatic benefits in laptops and especially in phones. There are superficial aesthetic qualities to slimness also, to be sure, but you cannot just brush away the benefits in ease of use and portability.
Well the parent comment was referring to the apple macintosh, which is what I was also referring to. Though that does seem to be Apples general design policy 'make it look nice' to the exclusion of all else.
Hey it sells though! I've literally seen a regular non technical person, when asked what kind of computer they want to buy, answer "I want a red one!"
People will hurt themselves because of the difficulty in repairing the device, not because everyone trying to repair an iPhone (or other Apple device) is incompetent.
Of course you are more exposed to injury when you need to simultaneously use a heat gun and 1-2 other tools just to get started fixing a cracked display on an iDevice...
Edit: Speaking from experience here. Used to purchase broken iPhones in college, fix them, and sell them for a profit. The latest generations are miles away from the repairability of the first several generations.
Following media coverage of Apple lobbying in those two states, the company has been much quieter. Rather than lobbying on its own behalf, the company has relied on CompTIA, an organization funded by tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung, to testify against the legislation at hearings and meet with lawmakers.
The in-person meetings in California came a few weeks after CompTIA and 18 other trade organizations associated with big tech companies—including CTIA and the Entertainment Software Association—sent letters in opposition of the legislation to members of the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. One copy of the letter, addressed to committee chairperson Ed Chau and obtained by Motherboard, urges the chairperson “against moving forward with this legislation.
I am shocked and ashamed that CompTIA would lobby against right to repair. To think that they are viewed as a high and mighty standards organization in the IT world - it's sickening to think that people worshiping them are essentially boot-licking - a term that I try to avoid using, but in this instance, unfortunately seems accurate.
CompTIA Security+ is basically a minimum requirement for any DOD-related IT contract at Leidos Inc., and probably for most other large IT contractors along the Washington DC-area "beltway" too. So yes-ish depending on whether or not US government IT is a "serious" thing in your opinion. On the other hand, you have nuclear missile systems using floppy disks as recent as 2017, so I guess it's a bit of a toss-up.
Usually, if a place seems to filter on CompTIA stuff they don't get anywhere close to the places I filter for employed work or contract work. If you as a company or government department can't figure out how to do a job right (hint: it doesn't have anything to do with CompTIA) it's not a place I'd want to be.
You're referring to DoD 8570, which requires all contract and active duty IT personnel pass the test for one of a number of junk certs as baseline infosec training.
The retail price for CEH doubled once they became an approved vendor...go figure.
It smells to me like the article is mixing up CTIA (the wireless industry trade organization) and CompTIA, but Motherboard doesn't really cite adequate sources to tell for sure.
I'm the author of this article—both CTIA and CompTIA are lobbying against these bills, but CompTIA is the most actively outspoken.
If you are a member of CompTIA or certified by them or have any thoughts about them please reach out to me (my Twitter DMs are open: twitter.com/jason_koebler ... are Signal numbers allowed on here?), because I'm working on a deeper investigation about the group's shift from a certifications body to a lobbying arm of big tech.
I'm CompTIA A+ certified. It cost me $0 (paid for by an employer when I was 16) and I think I overpaid.
I'm not sure that they have shifted away from being a certification body, they still issue a lot of certifications. I don't think they are considered very valuable certifications though.
There is nothing in the guidelines that says you can't post a cell number, I think you're good.
I was certified as well, anybody could do this sort of thing it's just a scam to take money away from you so you can get a shitty IT job somewhere. Interesting that they lobby extensively though - I had no idea.
Apple's arguing that some people will hurt themselves no matter what they put in the documentation. If that's true, this legislation really would put them between a rock and a hard place, because you bet I'm suing Apple if a battery blows up while I'm trying my best to follow their official directions.
That's why there's such a thing as limited liability. Guitar amps are a good example - they're extremely dangerous if you're not careful. But manufacturers have provided repair manuals for decades, and I highly doubt any of the people who have hurt themselves because they forgot to discharge the rectifier caps successfully sued the manufacturer because they were being stupid.
I really like how Fender is shipping the schematic with their amp (I hope they still do it).
That being said, guitar amps, specially tube amps are indeed extremely dangerous, not only the caps, but also the 300, 400 and sometimes 500 volts DC around the tubes. You need to be extremely cautious when handling these, specially if they are powered and opened (to check voltages in various points of the circuit for example).
That being said, I've not seen a lot of guitarists actually opening and servicing their amp themselves, even if the circuits tend to be quite simple and easy to maintain/repair (few components, no SMD).
Agreed. Taken to its logical extreme, imagine someone insisting that some new revolutionary surgical procedure's tooling and instructions should be made public because people "are gonna try to do it themselves, anyway." No bueno.
Yep, if the battery is such a danger then the government needs to step in and mandate some safety packaging on mandate no glue may be used to secure a battery and it must have a safe way to replace it. People are putting these things up to their heads and if its a repair danger then it is obviously a danger in other situations.
> Apple tells lawmakers people will hurt themselves if they try to fix iPhones
"Are you threatening me?" -- The Great Cornholio
Seriously: That sounds like a... well, like a threat. Like they're willing to employ active measures to enforce Do Not Repair, and then say "I told you so!" when one of their designs just happens to draw blood if you attempt to open the case without specific foreknowledge and specialized tools.
I'm handy but not a trained technician. For example, I've replaced a starter in a 2003 Honda Odyssey, repair appliances around my house, etc. I used an iFixit kit to replace the battery and screen in an iPhone SE. It took me about an hour following their guide. The hardest part was getting the old battery unglued from the case. I was careful to follow their warnings about fully discharging the old battery. Nothing burst into flames.
Was it potentially dangerous? I suppose... but so is using power tools. Frankly I'm more worried about fire every time I charge one of my 18650 flashlight batteries.
This is BS from Apple, and further it's paternalistic.
Thanks to the work by ifixit its possible for anyone to replace an iPhone battery but without the hard work from a 3rd party there is no way you would be able to replace a battery.
You have to know exactly which screws to remove, the direction to lift things, the connectors to discounted and when to apply force because lifting the battery requires a huge amount of heat and force.
If Apple provided the same jigs, repair tools, and documentation that the Apple stores use wouldn't that reduce the likelihood of injury?
Nobody is suggesting Apple provide these for free, but right now Apple will even block third parties from trying to provide equivalent jigs, tools, and documentation.
I’m all for Apple providing support for third-party repair shops. I’m against Apple being forced to allow actual end-users to open up and “repair” their phones, because the latter is not going to end well. I shouldn’t be allowed to open up my own phone, but I should be able to take it to a third-party repair shop with access to Apple tools and training materials.
You’re allowed to open up your phone today. Nobody is saying the police should knock down your door because you opened your phone. What’s at stake right now is if you open your phone, you void your warranty and Apple will not provide any more support for you. Which seems perfectly justified to me; iPhones are sufficiently complicated that end users will absolutely damage or destroy their phones by opening them up.
The distinction I’m drawing is between end users and third-party repair shops. Users need to have a way to get support, and Apple Stores aren’t available everywhere, or aren’t necessarily offering repairs as cheaply as a third-party shop could. Third-party repair shops should be able to repair iPhones without voiding warranty, as long as they use Apple-supplied parts and with access to Apple-supplied training materials. But end users shouldn’t.
Every single case of third-party screen replacement for iPhones I've personally ever heard of has resulted in disaster down the road for the person who got their screen replaced. And that was before the edge-to-edge iPhone X screen.
Apple uses highly specialized and expensive equipment for screen replacements (at least for the iPhone X screen). Even if third-party shops had the ability to buy the same equipment, I don't think they'd want to pay for it.
They don't provide good support now. Basic component failures become full board/assembly replacements for $$$. There's also a big leap from that to "shouldn't be allowed to open".
This is also a battle that has been lost once before. Desktop computer manufacturers used to put tamper-evident stickers on their cases stating that you would void your warranty if you opened your case. Congress made the industry BTFO on that one.
Opening a desktop tower is vastly different from opening a tightly-packed complex piece of equipment like the iPhone. Even if you do nothing else besides open and close it, you still may have compromised the water resistance of the device, or gotten dust in there.
You can do whatever you want with your hardware, but the question is whether Apple should be on the hook for providing repair service afterwards.
I do not see where, in the proposed legislation[1], the requirements on Apple to honor or not honor warranties due to mishaps occurring during self-repair is changing. It seems like whatever they are (legally) doing today, they can continue to do.
What the legislation does do is require them to provide technical parts and details. Currently, my understanding is that Apple is strong-arming shops into either losing access to parts and knowledge (you don't become an Apple Authorized repair, and thus, lose access), or forcing them to lose business (you join, but Apple forces you to send them business as a condition and limits the types of repairs you, as a repair shop, can do).
My personal opinion is, if damage occurs during a repair: if it was due to error on the manufacturer's part, then it's under warranty. If it was your error, then it's not.
I am honestly surprised that HN's reaction to "Apple should provide tools and training to third-party shops" is to be downvoted. I have yet to see a single person explain why an end user should be opening up their own iPhone and mucking about with it and then expecting Apple to provide warranty repairs afterwards.
I didn't downvote, but I don't see a bright line between me using the right tools and procedures to fix my phone vs having a third party repair service do it. I also don't think that a repair service is going to be more qualified in general than I am at the tasks I'm likely to undertake. (I'm no Louis Rossman, but I'm a fairly skilled electronics hobbyist; I haven't broken anything while servicing it in quite a while.)
If Apple is going to support a phone after a third-party repair (which I'm not sure I necessarily agree with), they should do it after I remove and reinstall a screw equally well.
You don't have access to Apple-supplied parts and especially don't have access to Apple-supplied training. Even if Apple did make this publicly available, the overwhelming majority of people are not remotely qualified to follow along, and making this available to end users just ensures that people will damage their own devices.
If you want to risk damaging your device, that's fine, but it just doesn't make sense to demand that Apple then turn around and provide warranty service to a phone that was damaged by an unqualified user opening up their device and mucking with it.
Apple should support a phone after a third-party repair if the third party uses Apple parts and is qualified to do so using Apple training materials. The alternative is that Apple should be on the hook for providing at-cost first-party repair within a reasonable distance of their entire customer base around the entire world, but Apple doesn't seem to want to operate enough stores to adequately service the repair needs of all of their customers.
Injured myself a few times trying to separate some of the new devices that are glued together (looking at you, Google Pixel). My Amazon Kindle's screen died trying to get the plastic bezel off it too. :(
Right to repair + repairability legislation is the double-punch we need. Apple is probably concerned that the latter will be the next step after we get the right to repair things, but we really need it.
For both I did. The Google Pixel screen cracked because the safe space for prying it apart is so tiny. Kindle guides aren't as good as phone guides and didn't explain the risk of pulling apart the display layers when wedging apart the bezel. :(
I'm torn on repairability. The iphone would be worse by some metrics if it had to be designed in such a way that it would be repairable (size, for instance).
So long as I can determine repairability (by looking at the service manual or similar) then I'm fine letting people decide for themselves what they want to buy.
The only other argument I could see for a "repairability" law would be from an environmentalist standpoint, but I would want that law to allow a less-repairable item that was sufficiently recyclable.
In America at least I think the repair debates as a matter of law are off the mark overall. What I think is at the actual root of the problem for most people (and for the market), and what I'd really like to see legally, would be adaptive mandated warranty periods that better match the common sense expectation of how long a device should reasonably last. Say 1 year per $200 up to a max of 5 years for a napkin example, though it may be that a non-linear curve with monthly resolution would work better. But the core market issue really is the same old story about externalities and information asymmetry: manufacturers know failure rates far better then consumers, are in far more of a position to make money on the tradeoffs, and the total cost isn't reflected in the sticker price. While for something super bargain basement there is an understanding that durability may be less, I think most people feel like a premium, ~$1k+ computer should be expected to last a good 4-6 years, and if not then the manufacturer should repair or replace it at no additional charge, including a reasonable amount for shipping (COTUS at least). How exactly a manufacturer chooses to hit that should be up to them, but that's what the standard result should be.
So in the case of Apple, if they still wanted to make expensive to repair 1st/certified-3rd party only devices they could, but they'd have to eat all the expenses of that. No foisting it off onto an unlucky 0.1% or 1% or 2% or 7% or whatever of customers, it should be their job to get it right. If it makes the retail price too expensive, then they'll naturally have to figure out how to lower the failure rate or decrease the repair cost. Extended warranties should never be a thing except for special extra commercial services (onsite repairs, specific SLAs, advance replacement and so forth).
I've never actually owned a phone that stopped working for any reason other than negligence on my part. Maybe I'm just particularly negligent, but I always either lose them, drop them, or get them wet long before their natural life expires.
Part of the reason is that the repair or replacement cost doesn't bother me enough for it to be worth putting it in a case (which is a privilege of being a well-paid software engineer; I understand not everyone can afford to have the same priorities).
But at any rate, if I were more price-conscious, repairability would matter much more than a longer warranty, since with repairability I could fix problems that are my own fault just as well as ones due to normal lifespan issues.
My first smartphone was iPhone 4S which I bought at 2012. Its WiFi started to work very bad exactly after 1 year of use, so warranty was not applicable. I found repair guy who replaced WiFi module for something like 10% of this phone initial cost. I used it for around 5 years and recently switched to iPhone 8. It still works now without any issues except degraded battery and software.
Well, charging cables of course were broken after one or two years, that's problem for all Apple devices I've owned so far. Not a big problem, Chinese cables are cheap and of better quality anyway.
I have a samsung galaxy nexus from 2011 that works fine. I don't use cases or anything, although I have replaced the battery twice which is easy since the back of the phone just pops off and the battery slides out. I have switched to a moto g5+ because I wanted a newer version of android and the galaxy nexus wasn't receiving software updates anymore.
Right to repair is about more than just getting a reasonable functionality for one's money. It is about "actually owning" whatever device or machinery.
I want to be able to do "anything" to the physical object that I own. I know that interferes with economic calculations involving selling two more or less similar objects for substantially different prices when the manufacturer determines two different submarkets exist (one small, high end market and one low-end mass market usually, gaming versus AI in the case of GPUs).
I know this interferes with maximum profits which might make some manufacturers more reluctant to invest. My heart bleeds for them[/s].
I doesn't really interfere with most of that because most people don't have (and never will have) the capability to apply themselves to such a scenario. This is more for lock-in purposes and cost saving. Having technical documentation out there is very costly, as is having parts logistics for consumers, especially if it's not your core business.
I'm sure there is a large percentage of unethical reasons, but most of the stuff you read about is just lawyer departments lawyering and have little to do with reality (but sady does make rules within the reality of hard- and software). Most of the directions a lawyer department get are the kind of "make this happen, figure out how". It's not an engineer that makes something and then call the in-house counsel asking to make it really hard for everyone else in the world to touch his design; engineers are unlikely to care about that and more likely to want to share and engage with like-minded people.
> I doesn't really interfere with most of that because most people don't have (and never will have) the capability to apply themselves to such a scenario.
But they can hire someone who does. Car maintenance is a pretty much perfect analogy. So it does affect everyone, even the least technically inclined.
> Having technical documentation out there is very costly
How expensive is it to provide the ability to download PDFs?
> as is having parts logistics for consumers, especially if it's not your core business.
The manufacturer itself doesn't have to do this. It would be sufficient to allow third parties (such as, perhaps, the company that the manufacturer is buying the parts from) do it. That sort of thing would be in their core business.
Very expensive, you have to check every single file, every single release, revision and part, you have to censor IP, you have to run everything by lawyers and PR departments etc. That is the way of the commercial enterprise. You could suggest they not do that, but that is likely to bite them in the ass down the road.
No company is sharing their internal versions with the outside world. Making the versions for design, manufacture and internal testing alone is basically a multi-million department's work.
I suppose one of the things a lot of people don't take in to account that what you see as a consumer is just the tip of a very large iceberg behind it. This is the unfortunate way most of the countries that rely heavily on secrets/IP/law to function work. It's mostly a side-effect, because the protection also allows for a good position when dealing with other enterprises. Downside is that consumers suddenly are very much out of their league.
> Very expensive, you have to check every single file, every single release, revision and part, you have to censor IP, you have to run everything by lawyers and PR departments etc. That is the way of the commercial enterprise.
Every company I've worked for (and my own companies) has managed to do that exact thing in an economical way. The bulk of the work is in the initial creation of the document. From there on, only the changes have to be vetted.
I suppose it depends on the scope, size and IP involved. I do remember it being much faster and easier a while back when I was working with a smaller organisation.
It's hard to switch back and forth between larger and smaller contexts, I guess the real point is that it's not always easy to see how hard/easy it is from the context where the problem is. Even een combination of occam's razor and hanlon's razor doesn't always give a direction on which to think or research.
Are you mostly referring to companies in a specific country, or multinationals?
> adaptive mandated warranty periods that better match the common sense expectation of how long a device should reasonably last.
Warranties are not really substitutes for being able to repair your own stuff, though, depending on your use case.
I personally find warranties less than useful, because to get a warranty repair, I'm going to have to go without the device for days and go through added hassle and often expense.
Then, what happens when the warranty period, even if reasonable, expires? Once again, you're on your own.
The next step is probably hermetically sealed phones. With the headphone port gone and wireless charging, just seal the thing up at the factory, filled with dry nitrogen.
I don't see why anyone feels the need to compel Apple to make their phones "repairable" in the first place. If you want that feature, I'm sure Samsung or myriad other manufacturers would gladly sell you their handsets instead.
Maybe you could make some sort of anti-trust arguments about the probably-a-little-too-tight relationships between wireless carriers and the device manufacturers, but there are a lot of handset makers to choose from and the market can choose who wins.
That logic only works if iPhones cannot be repaired. Obviously they can be. The demands in the various Right to Repair bill drafts never talk about changing the design of the phone, only about requiring the information and parts necessary for repair be available to the public.
>only about requiring the information and parts necessary for repair be available to the public.
The parts and information are already available to the public, as noted by the article. The Right to Repair bill would compel companies to provide that information and parts directly.
This isn't always true. Take a look at the whole thing with Linus Media Group's iMac screen repair. The screens are not available publicly, only to approved apple repair centers (which didn't even exist at the time of LMG's fiasco). They didn't give details in the video where they finally repair the thing, but strongly hint that they actually ended up getting the replacement part essentially off the black market of apple parts.
Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US.
>Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US.
Apple doesn't "have" customs do anything. Customs enforces the law. Those parts are counterfeits, and importing them is illegal.
If they're not off-the-shelf, Apple has exclusive deals with their suppliers and forbids them from selling those parts to anyone else. Whatever you're buying as a "3rd party refurbish part" is either a fake, defective because it failed QA, or excess bulk that Apple didn't purchase. It's usually one of the former. Talk with some people in the device manufacturing biz about this - I've heard stories about suppliers getting customer support calls about QA issues when it turns out the distributor for the parts was selling both legit and counterfeits without the supplier or manufacturer knowing!
And this is a tricky issue - if I manufacture something abroad you're damn sure I want the feds to help prevent counterfeits from being imported. Doesn't matter if it's the final product or part of the supply chain. And in as a supplier, you're not going to manufacture something longer than you make money off it, and the repair volumes don't justify anything.
That said, I think a middle ground here could be a limits on exclusive deals between suppliers and manufacturers, and stricter "use it or lose it" policies on IP held by suppliers. So if Apple isn't buying batteries from FooBar corp anymore, they should be able to sell the batteries the previously did to repair shops stateside. Nothing nefarious there.
Not sure if you know this or not, but I assume you aren't willingly misrepresenting the situation.
People will ship GENUINE/ORIGINAL apple parts, with lets say a cracked piece of glass, but otherwise good screen assembly, back to an OEM to have them replace the glass. When the REPAIRED part is returned to the company who sent them to an OEM, customs will destroy them as counterfeit, even though they aren't counterfeit parts, just repaired.
I'm oversimplifying, but if repairing something makes it a counterfeit, then the same logic could be applied to a dell computer that had its HD replaced while overseas and should be destroyed, using that logic.
It's my understanding that not all of the parts are readily available and that Apple and others actually engage in making it hard to get some parts. This results in some parts having to be extracted from "bad" boards and such.
They most definitely are not available to the public. For example, all the Apple documentation on board layouts are literally stolen and smuggled out.
In fact, many of the large companies have exclusive agreements with OEM chip manufacturers to not provide data sheets or technical info about chips, in addition to having an exclusive supply.
If cars worked this way, you would never be able to get them repaired anywhere but the manufacturer, but since the manufacturer doesn't replace components, such as the failed alternator, they have to replace the entire "engine assembly".
>They most definitely are not available to the public. For example, all the Apple documentation on board layouts are literally stolen and smuggled out.
And yet
>Experts, however, say Apple's and CompTIA's warnings are far overblown. People with no special training regularly replace the batteries or cracked screens in their iPhones, and there are thousands of small, independent repair companies that regularly fix iPhones without incident.
This article wants to have it both ways. "Apple should release documentation because repair people need it" and "People repair their stuff all the time without incident."
A better argument would be actually to take Apple's side on the "safety" issue and say, "People are already trying to repair their stuff because your OEM repairs are too expensive, so you ought to provide them with docs/parts"
Me neither... I prefer (most of) the tight design integration that Apple is able to do over the think-pad utilitarianism in my personal devices. The most I've ever done inside a computer is add RAM a few times. If I want to do more I'll build a PC.
Can you tell a reason why not? Opening up any technology has proved to be good for innovation in 100% of the times so far. Perhaps we have all missed on some amazing mods of iphones.
Why should all these devices end up in a landfill just because Apple decided it's in their best interests to design them as disposable, consumerist toys? Since when is servicing your own hardware a "feature" and not simply a right you gained at point of purchase? It's not just phones, it extends to all Apple hardware when they decided to solder components, maintain a component whitelist, etc - now only those with hardware-level knowledge can fix and swap out parts and Apple is encroaching on that too.
Likewise and related, why should perfectly fine hardware deprecate artificially just because Apple decides to lock their hardware down preventing third-party software installation?
It's unsustainable and an abhorrent corporate practice, IMO.
Because there are a dozen or more important issues that regularly make the headlines here around smartphones (security, performance, longevity, privacy, reception, size, repairability, development, etc.) and there's only 2 remaining major smartphone platforms. (Even if you count each Android manufacturer separately, i.e., you stop caring about anything related to software, there's still not enough.) The response to one company doing something undesirable cannot be "just switch to the other one", because that only works once, and then you still have 10 other factors to deal with.
Didn't someone here say that in the EU, they only consider a market to have competition if there are at least 4 major competitors?
To make matters worse, not only are the two players colluding with each other, in many cases, but they're lobbying the very governments who set the rules by which they're allowed to play. I don't see how one can say that we don't need consumer groups' lobbyists, given how many corporate lobbyists there are.
People used to joke about how Apple's one-button mouse was insufficient. Today I've got only one bit of control over which smartphone platform I wish to use and support, and there's way more than one manner in which each of these is sub-optimal for my needs, or society's.
>”The issue is that many of these companies operate in a grey area because they are forced to purchase replacement parts from third parties in Shenzhen, China”
Buying parts that "got lost" from the official supply chain at some point, are knock-offs of unknown quality or legality (where patents etc apply), ...
Lots of parts in such devices that aren't standard components that you can just buy from the maker or an intended distributor. Recycled parts might be legally clean, but how do you know that's what the parts you're buying are?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadSo the safety angle becomes even more silly.
>Why should Apple own the repair aspect?
And received a response:
>But they are [sic] not
Whether or not you can work around Apple not shipping parts is irrelevant. They are actively trying to make it harder to source parts and fix your devices.
I guess that would be relevant if they were trying to retrieve all spares back. Them not wanting make sourcing spares easier does not mean they own the repair aspect.
> There are also FAR fewer Teslas out there than there are iPhones and iPads.
Which ultimately makes sourcing iPhone / iPad parts even easier.
But irrelevant. That one entity is doing something bad in no way means that it's OK for another entity to do the same thing.
Besides, the right to repair movement is not focusing on computer products. It's covering a wide variety of products, including Teslas and (perhaps the most egregious) farm equipment.
There are more of us then there are of them. Break it down to the smaller case. Imagine 7 of us are in a lifeboat and 1 person has most of the food and the rest of us have a handful of dinner mints and candy bars. Do we vote to make the one guy share the food or do we hope our candy bars last us until we get rescued.
If necessary not only will we eat his food eventually the rest of us might decide to eat him.
The brackets did not take up all that much space, but apparently it was worth it to them to save a few minutes in manufacturing and a few seconds in assembly and just use adhesives directly against the unibody for fastening and stabilising.
Look, I bought a new car. It comes with cameras in the bumper. It made replacing a damaged bumper inherently more difficult for an average Joe. It doesn't mean though that it is impossible to replace it without visiting an authorised service centre. Same logic.
And the parts? Just went to iFixit, they‘re all there to buy. I‘m sure anybody serious about fixing these things professionally can source the parts.
You'd be surprised. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkPUoUJPJAQ
For less common hardware the situation is just as bad. Agriculture equipment has been a pain point for many to get repaired, as the parts are much harder to find and the limited number of certified repair shops can be pressured to stop servicing equipment deemed end of life by the manufacturer
Maybe it's OK to you to live in a world where you car can only be repaired by the dealer. "No big deal!" A valid opinion.
But that's fine until they want to charge you $2000 for something you can do yourself. Thank god the dealer will sell you the part and you can do that. Let me do it even if you don't want to.
Well SOMEONE's dad didn't have a small collection of junker vehicles in the yard to pull parts from growing up. Shoot, I know multiple people (including Dad) who rebuilt their Volkswagen Beetle engine in their unlucky girlfriend's living room (yes that unlucky girlfriend is now my mother) with hand tools. If you think working on cars requires expensive tooling, you just don't know enough rednecks! lololol
He ended the relationship right then and there.
Have you tried to find a mechanic who will rebuild a worn out engine and give a reasonable warranty on the work in your town? If a local professional can't make that work these days economically, it tells you something.
I see ads for cars that had a "rebuild" a few thousand miles ago and need serious work already.
You stick a vacuum line down the dipstick hole, suck out all the oil, replace the filter, fill the oil, put the dipstick back in. I didn't trust it the first time, so I sucked the oil out and then removed the drain plug to see how much oil I was missing; it was less than a shot glass worth.
Brake jobs don't require putting your body under the rotor/hub, making the risk of serious injury low. You could use jackstands, but I generally don't as I don't have my head or limbs in a crush area.
One tip: To aid removal next time, use Dow DC-4 silicone grease on the filter gasket (rather than motor oil or nothing) and the oil filter gasket just needs a little crush; lots of people over-tighten filters, making them needlessly hard to remove. Contact plus a half turn will put about 1/32" of crush on the gasket which is enough to seal.
In my short 55 years on the planet I've heard of 4 friends of friends[1] who died or were badly injured by having cars slip off a jack and fall on them.
[1] AKA friends coworker didn't show up one Monday. Friend recently had to dash across the street to jack a car back off of his neighbor.
Yeah never heard of anyone seriously hurt messing with ordinary consumer electronics. You would think if that were a possibility then UL etc would refuse to certify.
I don't think of Jobs as having been against repairability directly; rather, his singular pursuit of elegant designs resulted in a lot of other desirable features—repairability being a big one—getting steamrolled.
Of course you are more exposed to injury when you need to simultaneously use a heat gun and 1-2 other tools just to get started fixing a cracked display on an iDevice...
Edit: Speaking from experience here. Used to purchase broken iPhones in college, fix them, and sell them for a profit. The latest generations are miles away from the repairability of the first several generations.
The in-person meetings in California came a few weeks after CompTIA and 18 other trade organizations associated with big tech companies—including CTIA and the Entertainment Software Association—sent letters in opposition of the legislation to members of the Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. One copy of the letter, addressed to committee chairperson Ed Chau and obtained by Motherboard, urges the chairperson “against moving forward with this legislation.
I am shocked and ashamed that CompTIA would lobby against right to repair. To think that they are viewed as a high and mighty standards organization in the IT world - it's sickening to think that people worshiping them are essentially boot-licking - a term that I try to avoid using, but in this instance, unfortunately seems accurate.
The retail price for CEH doubled once they became an approved vendor...go figure.
Hooray for quality journalism?
https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/201...
(pdf) https://api.ctia.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/coalition-le...
If you are a member of CompTIA or certified by them or have any thoughts about them please reach out to me (my Twitter DMs are open: twitter.com/jason_koebler ... are Signal numbers allowed on here?), because I'm working on a deeper investigation about the group's shift from a certifications body to a lobbying arm of big tech.
I'm not sure that they have shifted away from being a certification body, they still issue a lot of certifications. I don't think they are considered very valuable certifications though.
There is nothing in the guidelines that says you can't post a cell number, I think you're good.
"This is dangerous to disassemble so we shouldn't have to provide instructions, tools, and documentation on to how to safely disassemble it."
Or
"Normal people can't repair these things, so we shouldn't be required to help normal people repair these things."
Those are exactly the arguments why Apple should provide documentation, parts, and tools! So people don't get hurt!
That being said, guitar amps, specially tube amps are indeed extremely dangerous, not only the caps, but also the 300, 400 and sometimes 500 volts DC around the tubes. You need to be extremely cautious when handling these, specially if they are powered and opened (to check voltages in various points of the circuit for example).
That being said, I've not seen a lot of guitarists actually opening and servicing their amp themselves, even if the circuits tend to be quite simple and easy to maintain/repair (few components, no SMD).
packaging improve for the battery component so that it is not a risk or that such items not allowed to be taken into areas where they may be a risk.
heck they could even be regulated as such they be replaceable without disassembling the phone if Apple cannot render them safe otherwise.
"Are you threatening me?" -- The Great Cornholio
Seriously: That sounds like a... well, like a threat. Like they're willing to employ active measures to enforce Do Not Repair, and then say "I told you so!" when one of their designs just happens to draw blood if you attempt to open the case without specific foreknowledge and specialized tools.
Was it potentially dangerous? I suppose... but so is using power tools. Frankly I'm more worried about fire every time I charge one of my 18650 flashlight batteries.
This is BS from Apple, and further it's paternalistic.
You have to know exactly which screws to remove, the direction to lift things, the connectors to discounted and when to apply force because lifting the battery requires a huge amount of heat and force.
If anyone should be lobbying against it, it should be ifixit...
Nobody is suggesting Apple provide these for free, but right now Apple will even block third parties from trying to provide equivalent jigs, tools, and documentation.
I’m all for Apple providing support for third-party repair shops. I’m against Apple being forced to allow actual end-users to open up and “repair” their phones, because the latter is not going to end well. I shouldn’t be allowed to open up my own phone, but I should be able to take it to a third-party repair shop with access to Apple tools and training materials.
The distinction I’m drawing is between end users and third-party repair shops. Users need to have a way to get support, and Apple Stores aren’t available everywhere, or aren’t necessarily offering repairs as cheaply as a third-party shop could. Third-party repair shops should be able to repair iPhones without voiding warranty, as long as they use Apple-supplied parts and with access to Apple-supplied training materials. But end users shouldn’t.
Apple uses highly specialized and expensive equipment for screen replacements (at least for the iPhone X screen). Even if third-party shops had the ability to buy the same equipment, I don't think they'd want to pay for it.
I did thousands of laptop repairs in my early 20s with essentially no training and no support (tooling) behind me.
Once you buy something it should be yours to fool with. For good and bad.
This is also a battle that has been lost once before. Desktop computer manufacturers used to put tamper-evident stickers on their cases stating that you would void your warranty if you opened your case. Congress made the industry BTFO on that one.
You can do whatever you want with your hardware, but the question is whether Apple should be on the hook for providing repair service afterwards.
What the legislation does do is require them to provide technical parts and details. Currently, my understanding is that Apple is strong-arming shops into either losing access to parts and knowledge (you don't become an Apple Authorized repair, and thus, lose access), or forcing them to lose business (you join, but Apple forces you to send them business as a condition and limits the types of repairs you, as a repair shop, can do).
My personal opinion is, if damage occurs during a repair: if it was due to error on the manufacturer's part, then it's under warranty. If it was your error, then it's not.
[1]: AFAICT, this is AB 1163, which is not cited nor mentioned in TFA: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...
If Apple is going to support a phone after a third-party repair (which I'm not sure I necessarily agree with), they should do it after I remove and reinstall a screw equally well.
If you want to risk damaging your device, that's fine, but it just doesn't make sense to demand that Apple then turn around and provide warranty service to a phone that was damaged by an unqualified user opening up their device and mucking with it.
Apple should support a phone after a third-party repair if the third party uses Apple parts and is qualified to do so using Apple training materials. The alternative is that Apple should be on the hook for providing at-cost first-party repair within a reasonable distance of their entire customer base around the entire world, but Apple doesn't seem to want to operate enough stores to adequately service the repair needs of all of their customers.
Right to repair + repairability legislation is the double-punch we need. Apple is probably concerned that the latter will be the next step after we get the right to repair things, but we really need it.
So long as I can determine repairability (by looking at the service manual or similar) then I'm fine letting people decide for themselves what they want to buy.
The only other argument I could see for a "repairability" law would be from an environmentalist standpoint, but I would want that law to allow a less-repairable item that was sufficiently recyclable.
So in the case of Apple, if they still wanted to make expensive to repair 1st/certified-3rd party only devices they could, but they'd have to eat all the expenses of that. No foisting it off onto an unlucky 0.1% or 1% or 2% or 7% or whatever of customers, it should be their job to get it right. If it makes the retail price too expensive, then they'll naturally have to figure out how to lower the failure rate or decrease the repair cost. Extended warranties should never be a thing except for special extra commercial services (onsite repairs, specific SLAs, advance replacement and so forth).
Part of the reason is that the repair or replacement cost doesn't bother me enough for it to be worth putting it in a case (which is a privilege of being a well-paid software engineer; I understand not everyone can afford to have the same priorities).
But at any rate, if I were more price-conscious, repairability would matter much more than a longer warranty, since with repairability I could fix problems that are my own fault just as well as ones due to normal lifespan issues.
Do other people have different experience?
How long would an iPhone last without abuse?
Well, charging cables of course were broken after one or two years, that's problem for all Apple devices I've owned so far. Not a big problem, Chinese cables are cheap and of better quality anyway.
Well, I have. Specifically a Nexus. No experience with iPhones though.
My laptops and servers last even longer. I tend to get well over a decade out of them.
I want to be able to do "anything" to the physical object that I own. I know that interferes with economic calculations involving selling two more or less similar objects for substantially different prices when the manufacturer determines two different submarkets exist (one small, high end market and one low-end mass market usually, gaming versus AI in the case of GPUs).
I know this interferes with maximum profits which might make some manufacturers more reluctant to invest. My heart bleeds for them[/s].
I'm sure there is a large percentage of unethical reasons, but most of the stuff you read about is just lawyer departments lawyering and have little to do with reality (but sady does make rules within the reality of hard- and software). Most of the directions a lawyer department get are the kind of "make this happen, figure out how". It's not an engineer that makes something and then call the in-house counsel asking to make it really hard for everyone else in the world to touch his design; engineers are unlikely to care about that and more likely to want to share and engage with like-minded people.
But they can hire someone who does. Car maintenance is a pretty much perfect analogy. So it does affect everyone, even the least technically inclined.
How expensive is it to provide the ability to download PDFs?
> as is having parts logistics for consumers, especially if it's not your core business.
The manufacturer itself doesn't have to do this. It would be sufficient to allow third parties (such as, perhaps, the company that the manufacturer is buying the parts from) do it. That sort of thing would be in their core business.
No company is sharing their internal versions with the outside world. Making the versions for design, manufacture and internal testing alone is basically a multi-million department's work.
I suppose one of the things a lot of people don't take in to account that what you see as a consumer is just the tip of a very large iceberg behind it. This is the unfortunate way most of the countries that rely heavily on secrets/IP/law to function work. It's mostly a side-effect, because the protection also allows for a good position when dealing with other enterprises. Downside is that consumers suddenly are very much out of their league.
Every company I've worked for (and my own companies) has managed to do that exact thing in an economical way. The bulk of the work is in the initial creation of the document. From there on, only the changes have to be vetted.
It's hard to switch back and forth between larger and smaller contexts, I guess the real point is that it's not always easy to see how hard/easy it is from the context where the problem is. Even een combination of occam's razor and hanlon's razor doesn't always give a direction on which to think or research.
Are you mostly referring to companies in a specific country, or multinationals?
Mostly multinationals and US based companies.
Warranties are not really substitutes for being able to repair your own stuff, though, depending on your use case.
I personally find warranties less than useful, because to get a warranty repair, I'm going to have to go without the device for days and go through added hassle and often expense.
Then, what happens when the warranty period, even if reasonable, expires? Once again, you're on your own.
I'd much rather just fix the thing myself.
Maybe you could make some sort of anti-trust arguments about the probably-a-little-too-tight relationships between wireless carriers and the device manufacturers, but there are a lot of handset makers to choose from and the market can choose who wins.
The parts and information are already available to the public, as noted by the article. The Right to Repair bill would compel companies to provide that information and parts directly.
Along with this Apple has a history of having customs destroy third party refurbish parts when being brought into the US.
[1] final repair video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw
[2] first video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwDvz47lNw
Apple doesn't "have" customs do anything. Customs enforces the law. Those parts are counterfeits, and importing them is illegal.
If they're not off-the-shelf, Apple has exclusive deals with their suppliers and forbids them from selling those parts to anyone else. Whatever you're buying as a "3rd party refurbish part" is either a fake, defective because it failed QA, or excess bulk that Apple didn't purchase. It's usually one of the former. Talk with some people in the device manufacturing biz about this - I've heard stories about suppliers getting customer support calls about QA issues when it turns out the distributor for the parts was selling both legit and counterfeits without the supplier or manufacturer knowing!
And this is a tricky issue - if I manufacture something abroad you're damn sure I want the feds to help prevent counterfeits from being imported. Doesn't matter if it's the final product or part of the supply chain. And in as a supplier, you're not going to manufacture something longer than you make money off it, and the repair volumes don't justify anything.
That said, I think a middle ground here could be a limits on exclusive deals between suppliers and manufacturers, and stricter "use it or lose it" policies on IP held by suppliers. So if Apple isn't buying batteries from FooBar corp anymore, they should be able to sell the batteries the previously did to repair shops stateside. Nothing nefarious there.
People will ship GENUINE/ORIGINAL apple parts, with lets say a cracked piece of glass, but otherwise good screen assembly, back to an OEM to have them replace the glass. When the REPAIRED part is returned to the company who sent them to an OEM, customs will destroy them as counterfeit, even though they aren't counterfeit parts, just repaired.
I'm oversimplifying, but if repairing something makes it a counterfeit, then the same logic could be applied to a dell computer that had its HD replaced while overseas and should be destroyed, using that logic.
In fact, many of the large companies have exclusive agreements with OEM chip manufacturers to not provide data sheets or technical info about chips, in addition to having an exclusive supply.
If cars worked this way, you would never be able to get them repaired anywhere but the manufacturer, but since the manufacturer doesn't replace components, such as the failed alternator, they have to replace the entire "engine assembly".
And yet
>Experts, however, say Apple's and CompTIA's warnings are far overblown. People with no special training regularly replace the batteries or cracked screens in their iPhones, and there are thousands of small, independent repair companies that regularly fix iPhones without incident.
This article wants to have it both ways. "Apple should release documentation because repair people need it" and "People repair their stuff all the time without incident."
A better argument would be actually to take Apple's side on the "safety" issue and say, "People are already trying to repair their stuff because your OEM repairs are too expensive, so you ought to provide them with docs/parts"
Likewise and related, why should perfectly fine hardware deprecate artificially just because Apple decides to lock their hardware down preventing third-party software installation?
It's unsustainable and an abhorrent corporate practice, IMO.
Didn't someone here say that in the EU, they only consider a market to have competition if there are at least 4 major competitors?
To make matters worse, not only are the two players colluding with each other, in many cases, but they're lobbying the very governments who set the rules by which they're allowed to play. I don't see how one can say that we don't need consumer groups' lobbyists, given how many corporate lobbyists there are.
People used to joke about how Apple's one-button mouse was insufficient. Today I've got only one bit of control over which smartphone platform I wish to use and support, and there's way more than one manner in which each of these is sub-optimal for my needs, or society's.
What is the grey area, here?
Lots of parts in such devices that aren't standard components that you can just buy from the maker or an intended distributor. Recycled parts might be legally clean, but how do you know that's what the parts you're buying are?