As Apple continues to fight legislation that would make it easier for consumers to repair their iPhones, MacBooks, and other electronics, the company appears to be able to implement many of the requirements of the legislation, according to an internal presentation obtained by Motherboard.
According to the presentation, titled “Apple Genuine Parts Repair” and dated April 2018, the company has begun to give some repair companies access to Apple diagnostic software, a wide variety of genuine Apple repair parts, repair training, and notably places no restrictions on the types of repairs that independent companies are allowed to do. The presentation notes that repair companies can “keep doing what you’re doing, with … Apple genuine parts, reliable parts supply, and Apple process and training.”
This is, broadly speaking, what right to repair activists have been asking state legislators to require companies to offer for years.
At this point, Apple’s fight against right to repair is basically just out of spite and pettiness. Apple must be such a sad, sad place to work.
The “consumable” culture in full swing. Apple do not want you to replace the battery on your old iPhone 6, they want you to buy a new iPhone. By cutting out independents they can set repair prices to make repairs uneconomical.
BTW Tesla (“the Apple of cars”) is doing a similar thing, with Model S cars getting totalled by insurance companies over wheel arch dents because the car is very hard to repair and in addition Tesla body shops charge an arm and a leg for repairs. And then there are traditional automakers charging thousands of dollars for a DPF (with third-party replacements costing hundreds) because it’s a new kind of part and there is no “reference price” for buyers to compare.
It will get a lot worse before it gets any better…
But but but… then my iPhone won’t be thin enough to serve as a self-defense weapon! How dare you! And I won’t have to buy a new Macbook when the keyboard dies, the horror!
*sarcasm*
A horrible place to work for sure. I really feel bad for their Engineers.
Apple was always an anti-customer business making flimsly products and preventing repairs at the same time. It’s just that Steve Jobs was better at saving face.
For example, Jobs would ‘ve never allowed an update that slows down iPhone 6 phones like Tim Cook did (thus confirming years of urban legends), he would just let the phones shutdown from voltage drops (after all, he did let the iPhone 3GS overheat and become inoperable). Then the “genius bar” people would offer battery replacement repairs at such a price that would make people buy a new phone.
Then there is the butterfly keyboard thing. Jobs would have had it engineered to last just long enough so the problems don’t raise a fuss, much like he did with early SuperDrive optical drives.
So, those engineers, assuming they are reasonably smart, always knew what employer they were working for.
My problem is that every company lately seems to have this anti-repair attitude: “We ‘ll tell you how much something costs to repair, nobody else, and it’s not gonna be cheap”
They didn’t always used to be cheap. The Apple of the II series and the Macintosh (1980-1995 roughly) made some damn quality equipment.
This is a bit part of the reason I went through the pain (serious, deep pain) of switching to Windows last year. After the GPU died (or more likely, a tiny $3 transistor) on my MacBook Pro, and I found out it would cost over $600 for Apple to repair it, I decided to get something serviceable.
The other part of course is that I got a device with a touch screen, 2 full usb ports and an additional USB-C port, an HDMI port, and completely upgradeable storage and RAM – for less than half the cost of a similar MacBook Pro (with less, non-upgradeable storage). Yep – for the same price as 1 15″ MacBook Pro, I could get two of these Yoga 730s and still had enough left over for ice cream. And they have a better GPU on top of all that. The only down side is it runs Windows… Significant for sure.
And, I already modified it – I replaced the horrible broadcom wifi module it came with with a faster and more stable Intel model. I couldn’t do that with my old MacBook Pro, which absolutely did drop WiFi regularly, and couldn’t hold a connection to a Bluetooth device for years (until Yosemite I think).
Why is it a terrible place to work? I don’t get the logic there. Most engineers just have their heads down doing what they love. You can’t live or die off of every small policy your company sets. Life is nothing but compromise.