There’s a thriving market for unofficial, aftermarket iPhone parts, and in China, there are entire massive factories that are dedicated to producing these components for repair shops unable to get ahold of parts that have been produced by Apple.
The entire Apple device repair ecosystem is fascinating, complex, and oftentimes confusing to consumers given the disconnect between Apple, Apple Authorized Service Providers, third-party factories, and independent repair shops, so we thought we’d delve into the complicated world of Apple repairs.
Just as for cars, all repair and spare parts information should be publicly available to third party repair shops. The fact that this even has to be a shady business to begin with is preposterous.
Is it time to stop trying to repair handhelds, & instead sending them to a bulk-based recycling project, to be re-built into new things?
Plastic, doped silicon, plain metal. Is there anything else your iThing or damnDroid contains?
I like to think we have the technology to sort out those 3 basic materials, then sort them into their subsets. We did it in the 1940’s, as we sorted out uranium isotopes. Why can’t we reproduce the process today?
It’s about entropy. “disorder”.
So far, you need more energy to separate each metal in a phone than mining these metals. When all the world mines will be depleted, these material will be taken from landfill. Or mining asteroids will be a thing and Earth will slowly accumulate more and more trash.
With free energy, it could be possible to put everyting in a plasma torch and recover raw alumimium, silicium, phosphorus, carbon…
Or we would have figured out how to do the asteroid mining in space and all we’d have to do is send the much smaller package of mined stuff to earth and leave the much larger remains of the asteroid in its orbit.
Failing that (mining in microgravity), we could trash the moon instead and send the mined stuff from the moon.
But I think what Treza meant is a scenario in which it might still be cheaper to simply mine more asteroids and just dispose old stuff on Earth / trash it.
True.
But we could still trash the moon.
I assume by “free”, you mean too cheap to meter.
I don’t think we’ve built or are building enough nuclear and renewable energy sources to make that a serious possibility in the next 25 years
Nuclear fission as it exists today doesn’t really have the potential to become that cheap, it can at best be roughly comparable to coal etc. The one who said “too cheap to meter” line probably meant fusion; we’ll see how that one goes.
Actually, the “too cheap to meter” line was one of the hollow promises being made by governments such as the UK government to drum up public support for reactors which were intended to publicly produce power and privately produce bomb materials such as plutonium.
Source: “The public was promised electricity that would be too cheap to meter” in a BBC documentary I saw on the core fire that occurred at Windscale.
Well, yes, the line was immediately appropriated by pushers of nuclear fission (and just to be clear, I am one too
– I very much prefer it to coal… it pains me that my place still doesn’t have any nuclear power plant / almost ready one was scrapped in Czernobyl hysteria: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Å»arnowiec_Nuclear_Power_Plant …and so most of my energy comes from coal, we even have the largest in the world brown coal power plant 
). But it does seem it was originally said thinking about fusion (which of course then turned out to be much harder than anticipated):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Early_years
Sadly cars might be going the same way, I did not know about Tesla repairs till I saw this short documentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAMczraBIM
I think it’s funny how people are always trying to compare phone repair to cars. I had the computer on my car go out and there is no manual that told me how to get the correct capacitor or resistor to fix the computer. I had to replace the entire board.
Yes and sometimes you have to replace the entire logic board on an iphone. But there actually are several serviceable parts inside. There is a youtube video of a guy living in China that built an iphone from parts alone. Really cool video if a bit long. Search for “strange parts”.
What might be also strange is how the vid ended up on Youtube, since it’s blocked in China…
Except repair shops can get the specs for just about every part in your car, so that any reputable repair shop can repair your vehicle. It’s not the same for Apple devices, though others in the industry do release schematics, and even sell tools to service their hardware. It’s weird, honestly, that folks are willing to just eat up whatever the biggest most popular companies tell them this way, without any kind of knowledge or thought.
Just try to get a part from Tesla, it’s near impossible.
Having “10 people” to handle all worlwide repair division is what companies tend to do in increasing their profit margins.
It’s not only Apple here.
Still waiting for the day when you can go in a shop, tell the equipment is not working and get a new one.