Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
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Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#2Apple is really undoubtedly the king of making their products impossible to repair. This doesn't bother me much since I have long abandoned apple. What bothers me is that everyone follows their bad example.
Not only is a modern phone impossible to open, everything is glued in. Even laptops are like this. I have even seen other manufacturers stop using underfill in their phones, just like apple. Probably to make broken phones useful as refurbs. This is leads to phones where chips come off easier (remember apples touch-ic issues and bend gate. That chip didn't have underfill, no proper soldering materials) and an increase in flexion damage.
A right to repair doesn't mean much if everything is glued and soldered into place anyway, and with everyone following apple I doubt anything will get better in that regard.
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#3I mean this seems very reasonable from Apple's perspective. They're trying to avoid their brand being tarnished by bad repair shops with questionable repair skills cutting corners with cheap and unsupported parts. Given how large the resale market is for Apple products I would even say that this is an extremely positive policy because as long as the machine boots you can be pretty darn sure your MacBook is just like you would get from an Apple store.
However, I think there's a happy middle ground here for people that want to use those cheap and unsupported parts. When the OS boots just make sure the user is made aware that they're running on unsupported hardware and recommend taking it to an authorized Apple repair shop if they want fix that.
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#4Apple is really undoubtedly the king of making their products impossible to repair. This doesn't bother me much since I have long abandoned apple. What bothers me is that everyone follows their bad example. Not only is a modern phone impossible to open, everything is glued in. Even laptops are like this. I have even seen other manufacturers stop using underfill in their phones, just like apple. Probably to make broke…
You're not familiar with the Surface Book or Surface Pro manufacturing then. Everything is glued in and there's not even screws in the bottom.
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#5I understood the “kill switch” to be a “warranty (i.e. AppleCare) void” switch more than a literal kill switch.
You can, with enough work, make any computer—even one that’s not from Apple—into a working Mac. But there’s no amount of effort you can go to that will make Apple suddenly decide to offer warranty coverage on your Hackintosh.
I imagine the point here would be to effectively treat computers cobbled together out of externally-sourced Apple compatible parts (i.e. parts where the computer doesn’t “know” it’s not a Mac) as equivalent to Hackintoshes from a warranty standpoint.
This is partially justified—as it stands, a repair shop can actually take 50% of the parts from a Mac, replace them with compatible parts, then build a new computer from the 50% of parts you took out and other compatible parts, and end up delivering two Macs that would both be considered to be under warranty. (Not that they have AppleCare registrations, but that they’re under legally madated first-year warranty coverage in many jurisdictions.) The software Apple has developed circumvents this problem.
You might not agree with it, and it might have some other negative consequences... but what other solution is there to this particular problem? (I mean, besides eating the repair costs of—and even assuming legal liability for!—these “faux” Macs.)
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#6I mean this seems very reasonable from Apple's perspective. They're trying to avoid their brand being tarnished by bad repair shops with questionable repair skills cutting corners with cheap and unsupported parts. Given how large the resale market is for Apple products I would even say that this is an extremely positive policy because as long as the machine boots you can be pretty darn sure your MacBook is just like…
Repair shops have also parts from other products, so say an old Macbook is unfixable but some parts are salvaged like say a screen, this parts are original Apple parts. Same for phones there are original parts too in the repair shops not only third party.
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#7Given Apple's strong stance on privacy and not making backdoors for encryption, etc-- could they possibly be trying to prevent supply chain interdictions from the likes of the NSA? [1]
Or be trying to detect things like we saw this week? [2]
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/18/the-nsa-cisco-and-the-issu...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#8I mean this seems very reasonable from Apple's perspective. They're trying to avoid their brand being tarnished by bad repair shops with questionable repair skills cutting corners with cheap and unsupported parts. Given how large the resale market is for Apple products I would even say that this is an extremely positive policy because as long as the machine boots you can be pretty darn sure your MacBook is just like…
In your first paragraph, if you swap Apple for John Deere, do you still believe what you wrote?
The general consensus around right to repair that was discussed during the John Deere incident favored users. But now that Apple is (planning on) doing the same thing, it's reasonable?
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#9I mean this seems very reasonable from Apple's perspective. They're trying to avoid their brand being tarnished by bad repair shops with questionable repair skills cutting corners with cheap and unsupported parts. Given how large the resale market is for Apple products I would even say that this is an extremely positive policy because as long as the machine boots you can be pretty darn sure your MacBook is just like…
>I mean this seems very reasonable from Apple's perspective. They're trying to avoid their brand being tarnished by bad repair shops with questionable repair skills cutting corners with cheap and unsupported parts. Given how large the resale market is for Apple products I would even say that this is an extremely positive policy because as long as the machine boots you can be pretty darn sure your MacBook is just like you would get from an Apple store.
Apple's stance on "right to repair" is exactly about that. Introducing third parties into the ecosystem would drive down secondary market value for their products in a Gresham's law kind of way.
Re: Apple’s repair kill switch hasn’t been activated yet
#10I understood the “kill switch” to be a “warranty (i.e. AppleCare) void” switch more than a literal kill switch. You can, with enough work, make any computer—even one that’s not from Apple—into a working Mac. But there’s no amount of effort you can go to that will make Apple suddenly decide to offer warranty coverage on your Hackintosh. I imagine the point here would be to effectively treat computers cobbled together…
There is a difference between voiding the warranty and effectively bricking the device though.