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

arstechnica.com

11–20 of 165 posts

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

#12

I think at this point it makes sense. I imagine most consumers aren’t interested in repairing themselves, but aren’t super interested in going to some random local repair shop. At this point they have their consumers hooked on visiting the Apple Store. Not really a net loss for them, plus it gives off the appearance of being consumer friendly.

Yep. They probably see the writing on the wall for right to repair and want to get ahead of it while just casually taking the lead in the iphone repair market

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

#13
Cynically this could be one of those laws that the big producers like Apple have a competitive advantage over smaller companies that do one-off production runs with contract manufacturers.

When you are at the scale of Apple, you could have a whole team designing your right-to-repair compliant processes, and lobbyists to ensure the law as passed is most favorable to your implementation.

It also fits in nicely with Apples general SKU-minimization philosophy (though they've been loosening up there). It is a lot easier to stock parts/manuals/tools for 3 phone SKUs per year which you continue to sell for 2 years than for 25 Samsung Galaxy somethings.

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

#14

Where's the catch? I refuse to believe there isn't one with apple.

The individual components are coded to the device/can't hot swap identical parts and have it just work.

Hugh Jeffreys demoed it with a laptop and phone

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

#16
post #5

When can I buy parts at a reasonable cost?

which parts aren’t at a reasonable cost?

Changing the glass on the top of the screen of an iPhone SE (currently trading at 170€ on back market) costs between 90 and 110€ here in France, even if the screen itself is not broken.

I hope we'll gradually see decent alternate compatible parts, with a better self-fixability.

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

#18
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which parts aren’t at a reasonable cost?

Changing the glass on the top of the screen of an iPhone SE (currently trading at 170€ on back market) costs between 90 and 110€ here in France, even if the screen itself is not broken. I hope we'll gradually see decent alternate compatible parts, with a better self-fixability.

When was the iPhone SE you are using released?

How much does it cost to replace a similar part on an Android phone released the same year?

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

#19
post #14

Where's the catch? I refuse to believe there isn't one with apple.

The individual components are coded to the device/can't hot swap identical parts and have it just work. Hugh Jeffreys demoed it with a laptop and phone

Apple's self repair program lets you link the parts to your device with a phone call, so that's moot

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

#20

Why wouldn't they, they are the sole provider of the parts, manuals, tools, the software is so locked down you have to ask for their blessing to install them. You can't go to rock auto and get parts for your MacBook Pro.

It's still a step in the right direction. Right now, some repair shops (e.g. Louis Rossmann) have had to buy broken laptops and scavenge components in order to make repairs.

Even that often isn’t possible with the most recent Apple devices. Even genuine parts often can’t be used (or work only in a degraded mode) unless authenticated by Apple’s System Configuration tool. That means you can’t swap many parts, even between identical devices, and expect them to work properly.

Presumably this news means that Apple is making the configuration tools more widely available to third parties, but I’ll bet they will only authenticate parts supplied directly by Apple, not parts scavenged from other devices!

(There is perhaps some logic to all this: it makes phones less desirable to thieves if they can’t be broken down and resold for parts)

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