IFixit: Self Repair Program makes M1 MacBooks less repairable

Were you upgrading the hard drive in a 2014 mac mini?

Sure, for a small battery pack like that, but an EV's battery pack is made of self contained replaceable cells. It would be perfectly possible to replace the individual cells and save the exterior casing and any internal electronics. But the official dealer process is almost certainly going to replace the entire thing as a single unit.

My point was't "density has a repairability cost", it was that sometimes for the sake of ease, repeatability or reliability a manufacturer may decide to bundle individually replaceable components into a single module that will be replaced as a whole unit as part of the repair process and that can be a reasonable decision. We see this all the time with cars. Transmissions are rebuildable, but usually you just replace the whole thing. Same with alternators. Engines are absolutely rebuildable, but if you blow yours, the dealer will almost certainly just replace it wholesale. Wiring harnesses can be patched, but the service manuals will tell you to replace the whole thing. A single switch in your steering wheel controls might be broken, but likely the entire control cluster will be swapped. These things don't make the car "less repairable", nor does the fact that the manufacturer's manual only tells you how to replace the whole thing, and won't sell you anything other than the whole part mean you can't piece it together yourself or that they're somehow hindering you from repairing your car.

Likewise, the battery being bundled with the top case is a choice made for a reason. I suppose we can assume it's because Apple is trying to make it unrepairable, but that flies in the face of the fact that they need to make repairs themselves. It's clear apple can make it separable (see the Macbook Air repair options), and the article in question even says Apple plans on doing the same for the other Macbooks. so it really feels like a lot of this is complaining that Apple hasn't gone out of their way to tool up an entirely new set of assemblies outside of what they provide their own in house repair people, and assuming this is do to maliciousness rather than simply doing the most reasonable thing which is opening up their own official processes and parts to the public.

And yes, Apple can do it and has even said they’re going to do it. So at this point, it’s just a matter of guessing for why they don’t do it now. And that could be any number of reasons, including easier manufacturing or in a surprise twist maybe easier repair. Look at the ifixit instructions and look at the spacing available to access the pull tabs for the adhesive around the various frame parts. It’s entirely reasonable to think that Apple did some math on battery repair frequency; on that fact that even when an M* systems battery is at the 80% mark where it’s eligible for repair that it will still be near or over 100% of the old intel laptop runtimes when new; evaluated the chances of those adhesive tabs breaking or having the battery or top case damaged while removing one or the other and decided that bundling the two together and eating the cost on battery repairs was the easier option for their repair people. Because ultimately Apple’s priorities likely are ease of manufacture first, ease of store based repair second and ease of user based repair third. Because even with really easy user based repair, I would venture to say close to 90% of people will still have Apple do it for $200. And I say that based both on the fact that Apple used to offer various DIY repair options for older models* and people have their mechanic or AutoZone replace their car batteries for them even though that’s literally just 2 bolts.

* I worked for an Apple authorized repair place in the G5 iMac days, in which for example the power supply was “user replaceable” and for which Apple offered customers DIY repair options on them. I can count on one hand, with fingers to spare, the number of customers who took us up on the option to order the part and do it themselves, even if having us do it meant longer turn around times. On the whole people don’t DIY repairs for things, and so engineering and manufacturing for that use case is probably a worse decision than engineering and designing for your own people and while those people might benefit from DIY friendly features, if that makes manufacture harder or more expensive, then that’s still likely a net negative trade off.