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Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

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Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#171

Apple Care + is going to become an insane profit center and an absolute no brainer when purchasing a new Apple device. This puts Apple’s recent “no limit to accidental repairs” policy update in perspective. When I saw that I said, “well I guess this is how they are going to use their cash reserves, because no way will this be net profitable” To boot, I always wondered why it was so cheap - $200 for AC+ then $29 per s…

$200 per year plus $30 per repair is still a lot. How often do you smash your phone?

Generally insurance is never positive-EV for the buyer unless peace of mind is considered, and to that I say, it's cheaper to find peace with the risk of breaking your phone.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#172

Odd article considering everything is still software locked to the phone. Sure it's easier to repair, but if you get your parts from anywhere else than apple's program directly, a lot of features will stop working. Hugh Jeffreys made a video interchanging parts on two brand new iphone's and it disabled a lot of things including auto-brightness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2WhU77ihw8

I think that what you are saying is valid, but this should still be celebrated as a win for consumers. You don't have to see something as all good or all bad.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#173
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You are at liberty to buy other products and leave these to those who are happy about the security considerations.

Dont worry I do, the problem is all the other companies play "Follow the Apple"

The solution is never just "dont by apple if you do not like it" the solution is highlighting why it is bad, and getting people to pressure companies like Apple to change.

Right to Repair is movement, and it is winning. Part of right to repair includes resistance to parts serialization, and/or ensuring that approving new parts that are serialized is free and open to all end users not locked down to only "Authorized repair"

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#174

Really happy to see this write up. I’m probably in the tank, but I genuinely believe that Apple strives to do right by its customers, and to be a good company. it’s not a nonprofit, and I don’t expect them to act like one. Sometimes I feel like people enjoy piling on because they are the big dog. Again, please don’t mistake this comment for a blindness to some of its operations. But it’s nice to see them get credit f…

> Apple strives to do right by its customers, and to be a good company

Meanwhile, millions of people accidentally turn on iCloud without understanding the consequences, due to Apple’s UI decisions.

Apple need to do way more than this to show that they really strive to be good.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#175

> Forget satellite SOS and the larger camera, the headline is this: Apple has completely redesigned the internals of the iPhone 14 to make it easier to repair. HN:

There’s another comment already moving the goalposts: “sure it’s more repairable now but what about the closed software????”.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#176

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…

Imho you're missing the point, or at least, you've stated a valid conclusion but the point lies below.

Sure, by tightly integrating you are getting material benefits (size, consumption, optimization, etc). But by doing this, you go further down into high-tech, which means complexity and energy intensive build/repair/dispose [1]. At this point i'm reformulating your tradeoff, in which you choose the material benefits.

Now, one part of the right-to-repair movement comes from "low-tech" underpinning and objects the material benefits. Indeed, the point of a smartphone is not to crunch some machine instructions, it's to communicate with friends/family/world, interact with network services etc. Crunching code is just a byproduct of reaching this goal. It's even the same with supercomputers which one could think as performance-oriented: their goal is not to do the peta-flops, it's to solve some simulations at a given precision level. Nothing is built just for fun (or should): if you build a tool you better have a problem. And if you forget the goal, your tool will most likely be garbage. This is the objection of the r2r/lowtech movement: it's an assertion that a lot of high-tech has lost the sight of it's actual use and hence is hindering progress more than anything else.

This is a direct opposition with the pov which is widespread in modern western tech thinking that "if you build the tool they will use it". Obviously this pov has some depth to it, it's not completely nonsense (in the sense that creative and explorative processes are useful, i know i'm myself doing research in foundations of math). But this pov is also very extreme, and is in fact a corner-stone of the offer-driven production that is hegemonic today (with market economies). This same offer-driven production is also posing many social problems because of the need for aggressive marketing, problems with long-term stable availability of basic goods, with the focus on big/fast/shiny. We've gone too far into that direction and that a part of the reason for the pollution and resource exhaustion crisis (being themselves big parts of the climate and biosphere crisis going on rn).

The position of r2r/lowtech is obviously not to go to the other extreme which would be completely planned production based on somehow knowing what needs to be done (which we already see cannot really work and is very conservative by nature). But there has to be a balance. My position: the bulk of the energy-intensive and stable mass-manufacturing of basic known-to-be-useful-and-desirable goods should be done by planning, with open standards, user-groups, cheap repair, and some fraction of the resources should be reserved to the free-for-all market-driven exploratory research. Obviously this poses a couple problem with the fat cats running mass-manufacturing and other commodity services.

Hope this was a balanced explanation of the position.

[1] The matter will be ordered on a smaller scale so: (1) to build it you need to put a lot of energy into putting everything in order (entropy!); (2) to repair you both have to diagnose a complex thing and then act on it precisely; (3) to dispose of properly you need to put a lot of energy into separating everything again (entropy again!). Here i say "energy" in a large sense, this energy might be embodied as direct energy put into the process but also as human time, dependency on high-tech tooling (hence cost), etc. Another concept linked to this is "capital intensity".

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes it easier for my technicians when customers lie by omission when they have had their device repaired someplace else and they bring it back to us for repair. It's not until we get into the repair and find out someone has stripped screws that can't be removed without extraction tools and replaced LSI's. It's also nice for consumers who get their devices stolen strictly for parts. Preventing someone from basi…

The other thing is that Apple is trying to make things harder for people with large amounts of resources (think nation states) to exfiltrate data by using pwned components. Like when you take it into a repair shop, how do you know that the replacement part isn't compromised? If I was replacing the front facing FaceID complex I sure as hell would want verifiable Apple gear and it to be paired to the phone. Why would I…

Do you actually believe that nation states with shitton level funding can't waltz in and out of an original iPhone?

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#178
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Care only costs $200 per phone. One person replacing a $1,000 phone wipes out five people's worth of revenue.

Phones are automatically dismounted in a special factory. It doesn’t cost $1000.

It doesn't cost Apple $1000 to make a new phone, but they miss out on $1000 of revenue if that person would otherwise buy a new iPhone.

But maybe the person doesn't buy a new one. The cost of the consumer replacing a years-old iPhone is the used price. Personally I would never buy a used iPhone from eBay or something anymore, since there are too many gotchas with SIM locking and whatnot, but Apple also sells older models at a discounted price.

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#179

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 )_/¯

[deleted]

Re: Apple’s iPhone 14 Redesign for Repair

#180
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does coincide with Apple changing Applecare+ to cover an unlimited number of incidents. Their motivation was simply to streamline their own internal repairs?

That "unlimited" thing only impacts a very small number of devices. It is a better headline than reality. Previously you could have two accidental damage incidents PER YEAR, which means four for a standard Applecare+ 24 months plan. How many people, realistically, had over four accidental damage incidents in a two-year period wherein they benefit from this "unlimited" change? As I said, it is good marketing, a very n…

How many people, realistically, had over four accidental damage incidents in a two-year period

My wife. Mostly because of the Minnesota State Fair.

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