Apple backs national right-to-repair bill, offering parts, manuals, and tools

If we're going to draw an equivalency between the two, then we should also take care to recognize that corporations are sociopaths.

This is how the automotive industry has managed 3rd party repairability, and it’s served them well. It’s almost less about the parts themselves (gears/shafts/bearings can measured and machined and fasteners can generally be found off the shelf), and more about the the components not having interchange part numbers, or official service manuals with torque specifications. It’s an entire market separate from official channels of part acquisition.

I’m dealing with a consequence of an “assembly” now. I have a GTI with VW/Audi 6-speed manual transmission of type 02Q. If you looked at all VW/Audi vehicles with a standard/manual over the last 25 years, it’s going to be a 02M, 02Q, or 0FB - all of these sharing roughly 80% of their parts with one another. But, it’s an assembly, so you cannot find individual replacement gears, pinion bearings, synchro rings, shift forks, etc from OEM, everything is aftermarket. If you’re having transmission problems that cannot be fixed with new seals, input bearings, sensors, or fluid change, you need to get a whole new transmission according to VAG.

My first gear synchro ring is busted and instead of buying $40 3-inch diameter piece of stamped brass, VAG wants me to drop $5000+ for the part. The labor would be less for the swap than doing the repair, but they would rather make me spend money on the part so they can sell the old one to a remanufacturing company and they can sell me the trans for $3000. I can go to a salvage yard and get one for $400 or pick and pull (and hate myself for trying to wrestle it out) for $250.

Parts pairing isn’t inherently bad but it could be done in a way that is consumer friendly. Are you seriously telling me that apple can release the iCloud lock on the phone when you go to sell it but they can’t release the lock on the parts? It’s that simple. Tether the iCloud lock to the parts themselves. If I have findmy turned on and the parts are harvested they are completely useless, they simply won’t work at all. If I have it turned off they work perfectly.

This is arguably a superior system to the current one where the parts can be harvested from an iCloud locked phone and they kind of work. I can harvest a screen from an iCloud locked iPhone 15 today and it will still work. The faceid won’t work, the true tone won’t work, the front camera won’t work, and the auto brightness won’t work, but night shift will work and the screen itself will work.

And frankly as someone who does repairs as a side job it is a matter of time until the parts pairing is circumvented in some way. It likely won’t be easy and will require a sketchy $2-400 box from china along with very good microsoldering skills to move whatever bga nand ic apple has on the lcd flex to the replacement. But they’ve cracked it for every other iPhone to date including the 14 pro max. A lot of repair shops won’t do that because the hardware is pricey and the skills required are pretty intense.

This is a regulatory failure imo. I am 100% sure if apple had their way once you signed into iCloud the phone would be forever linked to you. The only reason that is not the case is because the first sale doctrine says we (in America at least) have a right to resell the things we buy. But that doesn’t explicitly say anything about the individual components of the things we buy and that hasn’t been legally tested afaik so here we are. Or maybe I’m wrong here, I’m not a lawyer at all

And that doesn’t touch upon their supply chain hostility. I do repair as a side business so I don’t really mess with phones much because I don’t want to do lcd swaps all day. I have a day job and really just want stuff I can do 1-3 nights a week and maybe on the weekend and more of the diagnosis and microsoldering work that I find challenging and enjoyable. As a result I do laptops and consoles a lot more. MacBooks are frustrating because there are several situations in which I simply cannot get chips.

Apple buys them all? Or forces TI or whoever to not sell them to digikey/mouser/etc. LCD panels are the same. This is more complicated and gets into the complexity of oem vs 3rd party which may not be economically feasible anymore with modern electronics fabrication. So then should there be regulatory requirements that apple or Samsung or whoever can’t control 100% of a certain chip, lcd panel, whatever so that I as an independent entity can still provide cheap component level repairs of your MacBook?

Sigh. The sad part is this industry will likely be obsolete in 5-10 years (the idea of component level repairs kind of already is) but it doesn’t have to be. This isn’t an “automation made my job obsolete” situation. This is a “powerful companies don’t like a lack of control” situation. As a result, we lose an industry that could potentially create a lot of local small business and jobs. It’s okay, apple and Samsung need that money more anyway I guess

You can argue it's questionable from many perspectives – I can be a lot more unfiltered about this – but it tells you how specific of a context large American publicly traded companies work in. If that makes the idea of the large American publicly traded company problematic, that's a reasonable conclusion.