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Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

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Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#41

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly in…

Repairability and device thinness are by no means mutually exclusive IMO.

When LTT did a review of the Framework laptop for example they also did a size comparison with a similarly specced Dell laptop and found that the framework both thinner and sturdier than the Dell laptop, next to being obviously more repairable ¯\_( ツ )_/¯

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#42

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly in…

> If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product.

This, a million times. I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product.

And because many of us are hackers/makers/programmers/tinkerers, one of those priorities is the ability to have all of the above, but also unfettered access to the internals to modify it as we please.

It’s like… this car is perfect for my needs in every way, and far and above the best in its class. But I want it to run on hydrogen, so if they could just do that, it’d be perfect. Why are they forcing me to run on electric?

Dude, don’t buy it?

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#43

> We are hearing reports that Apple is continuing their hostile path of pairing parts to the phone, requiring activation of the back glass after installation. On the other hand, this makes stealing an iPhone more and more pointless, as more and more parts cannot be parted out and sold. After activation lock was added, thieves started parting out screens and batteries to sell them and get at least some value out of an…

That goal could presumably also be accomplished by enabling the owner to check a "stolen" box in their iCloud and after that all serialized parts of that phone go on a blacklist. An iPhone checks every day or something if any of it's parts are blacklisted and refuses to work if true. To prevent a massive attack on Apple by corrupting the blacklist, the phones would only perform this check if any of the factory parts…

Your plan has serious a flaw. Imagine this timeline:

1. steal iphone A

2. split it into parts

3. install parts into iPhone B

4. parts not yet marked stolen, they work, check passes

5. Iphone A marked stolen

...

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#44

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly in…

Apple has proven with this iPhone (as have other manufacturers) that these goals don't need to be mutually exclusive. You can have wild products designed in all manner of ways (with satellite connectivity!!!), they just need to be user-servicable. That's not an unreasonable request for a company with 200 billion dollars sitting in their R&D coffers. Right-to-repair regulation isn't about stifling innovation, it's abo…

An organization only has so much mental capacity to focus on challenges. Having a required repair-ability goal would hinder the pace of innovation.

It might be worth the hit, but naive to think such an accomplishment is without innovation cost.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#45

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly in…

Third parties are perfectly capable of making replacement parts that match the OEM parts in functionality and quality. This has no effect on integration. The other parts of the phone don't care who manufactured the part, unless they were programmed to, as long as they are functionally equivalent. The user certainly doesn't care who manufactured the part as it does not effect the user experience.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#46

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly in…

I think this is kind of a strange position to take when the article is demonstrating you wouldn’t even notice the increased repairability as a consumer. What tight integrations were lost in Apple’s redesign?

Increased repairability != enough repairability, as per the comments here. Beyond the article, Apple products still aren’t as repairable as the Right to Repair Movement would like, because people still have to peruse thousand-page highly technical manuals and buy specialized equipment if they wanted to fix certain parts of their Apple devices.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#47

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly in…

> I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish.

No one should have the "right" to create products that turn to garbage when any part of it breaks. A clean planet is more important than "great user experiences". The second thing that they did it only for profit, is ergonomics of new repairable iphone any worse?

Also "software locked" parts should be banned by EU regulators.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#48

I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way. I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly in…

If any company can figure out how to do it and be a tight integrated product that works amazingly, it's Apple.

Let's not forget, this is also about reducing e-waste and it's not an option anymore to dump new phones because one part broke and you can't repair yourself.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#49
This has got to be one extremely expensive toolchain and supply chain redesign to do, but since they have done it a few times before (instead of incremental changes) I suppose the money department has worked out when it is feasible to do that kind of thing while keeping the people in charge happy.

I'm curious to see if this is a 'test' to see if this doesn't have too many downsides, I imagine ingress area increasing this much might be a point of worry (well, there are flexible seals for that now), and instead of having a one-way stack you now have a two-way stack so tooling and workstations around that (even if we just think in terms of assembly and rework) are going to be a PITA to convert or completely replace.

Either this will be a success and allow for the architectural change to be applied to other products, or it's a medium-success in which this only works for specific parts/antenna/power envelope configurations and we won't see this design in other form factors.

What does itch a little is iFixit whining about the parts needing be a signed set to work together. Nobody has come up with a better integrity protection method, and no-protection isn't an option either for the ecosystem. Besides, instead of having a 'safe' and 'unsafe' option for which practically no user will ever be able to make an informed decision, you can simply choose not to buy it if this is a feature you seriously despise.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#50
post #39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they’re super difficult to use I can't read the link as it's paywalled: but my understanding of the Apple tools is that they're hilariously over-engineered; not that they're hard to use.

"hilariously over-engineered" read: "not crap"

I mean I can take pictures underwater with a freakin phone. I guess you could call that "over engineering" but I also understand that means maintaining that type of device integrity would require some heavy lifting to service the device after it's been sealed up.
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