-- guessing - three things - 1) better margins on repair kits than hiring folks to replace screens all day - 2) difficult to assess if a screen/part is apple genuine or not at the store when dealing with trade-in/warranty returns - 3) apple genuinely cares about their environmental impact --
Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
51–60 of 590 posts
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#52Apple started offering home repair kits for iPhone this year, but they’re super difficult to use: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/technology/personaltech/a... There’s speculation that offering the kits is an attempt to head off right-to-repair legislation. But seeing this redesign, I wonder to what degree the repair program is incentivizing repairability within apple’s corporate structure. Now that “profit/loss pe…
> 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.
They just seem engineered to a different market, their own repair techs. Bulky doesn’t matter, expensive doesn’t matter. Being absolutely completely foolproof when used by non-expert techs with a few weeks training and having as little risk of damaging the device at possible does matter.
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#53I’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 have been of the same opinion (and I guess I still am, albeit less strongly). However, user wants aside, easily repairable products are better ecology-wise.
I want Apple to be allowed to create any device they want, but I think iPhone and Mac repairability can be currently improved without noticably hurting features. Prioritizing it would be the right trade off to do. In that case they should go for it (as they apparently decided to do).
Even without fighting for regulation, we can still celebrate companies when they decide to create repairable products with long term software support and complain about them when they don't.
A regulation that I would like to see would be to perhaps force 'makers' to sell genuine spare parts to anyone (same goes for Tesla and others).
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ...
I did actually think of that but decided it would be a net good.
People would learn to buy from trusted sources (which would probably work in Apple's favour) and also it would out the thieves in a rather unfortunate way for them, so they'd probably get the reputation they deserve rather quickly.
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#55I’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.
3rd parties are very much not able to match. Just do a side by side of screen quality and battery life. That is what upsets a customer more than anything - but they never know exactly why.
(Old 3rd party repair shop; thousands of data points)
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#56I’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…
There are substantial externalities to commercializing products that cannot be repaired. Fantastic amounts of non-biodegradable waste, overconsumption of nonrenewable material resources, and of course financial loss to consumers and opportunity cost to the secondary market. "Just choose not to buy the product" is only sensible if choosing not to buy the product fully insulates you from the effects of its existence.
Regulation places the cost of those externalities and/or the responsibility to prevent them back in the lap of the manufacturer.
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ...
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Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#58This 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…
I disagree that integrity protection is necessary across many components of the phone.
There should be integrity protection on the SoC, and then all other components should be untrusted.
Sure, that means someone can proxy the fingerprint sensor or put on a fake screen that shows a fake consent dialogue. But I think that is an acceptable risk - after all, you can never protect against someone making an entirely new device that just happens to look like an iPhone.
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#59I’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 va…
> 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.
Just because a product is a runaway success does not mean it's also not a potential environmental disaster waiting to happen. Cars were also a runaway success. So were plastic bags and straws. So was snake oil and so are various sugary fizzy drinks that destroy your health.
We can't just leave everything to the free market and the uninformed preferences of the consumers and watch everything around us burn because $THING is successful because $CORPORATION advertises it and consumers love it, otherwise we end up in the dystopian Idiocracy scenario of "Brawndo is what plants crave because it has electrolytes and is the no. 1 thirst mutilator".
That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us.
Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're conflating multiple issues. Having the right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair. I think we've gone too far down the road of not owning anything we buy, and thus having no rights to use things outside of narrow legal agreements nobody even reads.
Making the device easier to repair is also desirable, both for Apple and for third parties, because these things break all the time and need to be repaired. It saves everyone time and reduces waste.