Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup • Hacker News Board

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#81

Post by littlestymaar » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 9:54 AM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #75

kuzehanka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in…

I am on the fence. On one side I would love if it were possible to repair your phone whenever wherever. On the other hand, let me tell you a personal anecdote. After my wife’s iPhone got stolen we wanted to buy another one for cheaper. We chose to buy it from a big retailer in here. The phone was marked as renewed and under warranty. It cost a bit less as a refurb from Apple would. When we got it it was immediately a…

> Now, if somebody who does not know how an iPhone should look and behave

If you don't know exactly how an iPhone should look and are not annoyed by the thickness difference, how is it a problem ? You paid less for a slightly less good product that's good enough for you, and if the product is not good enough for you (like in your case) you returned it and good a refund. That sounds pretty good for me!

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#82

Post by sjwright » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

temporaryvector wrote: post #32

sjwright wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was Apple's push to USB-C flawed? Isn't the drop in repairability of electronics being pushed more by the shrinking of components than by the assumption of corporate greed? Why are competitors removing their headphone jacks? Why are competitors copying Apple's "anti-features" as you'd describe them? Are you sure it's because they actually hate repairability? Are you sure their competitors covet the relative unrep…

Corporations are optimization machines, they optimize for short-term profits, greed is no the correct term to use here. There are two ways competitors are incentivized to copy Apple, the first one is because of Apple's mind-share and "fashionable" status, they might be convinced that by copying some of the features they will be able to ride on coattails of Apple's success to get some success of their own. Combined wi…

Many of Apple's customers are also fans of Apple, therefore Apple must be held to a higher standard than everyone else?

Competitors secretly really want to implement user-hostile features but Apple must jump first so they can follow like lemmings?

None of what you wrote makes any sense to me.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#83

Post by mister_hn » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:08 AM UTC

People hasn't understood yet that even if they pay over $1500 for a phone, they're still not the owner of that hardware. And this concept is already deep integrated in Smart TVs or all other IoT gadgets around there. Fortunately, we have still some choices, concerning PCs, but on the Apple side, the war is lost

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#84

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:17 AM UTC

0ld wrote: post #77

kuzehanka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in…

> Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible. You wouldn't believe it, but that's almost exactly how it works with bmws since around 15 years. The unofficially replaced battery won't…

[deleted]

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#85

Post by kuzehanka » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:22 AM UTC

0ld wrote: post #77

kuzehanka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in…

> Imagine you take your BMW to a non-BMW-authorised repair shop and they swap your battery to a perfectly good one for 1/5th the price. But now you have a permanent warning light on your dashboard that there's something wrong with your battery. This situation is actually impossible. You wouldn't believe it, but that's almost exactly how it works with bmws since around 15 years. The unofficially replaced battery won't…

3rd party repairers have the ability to do this for you because they have BMW-compatible programmers. Because BMW must release make that possible for them. By law.

It's also there for a reason: the charging system needs to be told that the battery was changed and what type of battery it was changed to. Otherwise it charges it the wrong way. Unlike Apple batteries, the car batteries are dumb and can't tell the car about themselves.

The warning light won't come on just because you replaced a battery. It'll come on a few days later if you replaced a battery and didn't tell the system about it so now the battery is performing poorly because it was being charged incorrectly.

3rd party manufacturers, by law, have access to the programming tools required to do this for you. Apple holds the equivalent of these programming tools away from everyone and aggressively sues anyone that manages to obtain them or reverse engineer them.

I guess a better analogy would have been '3rd party repair shops installs genuine BMW battery but is unable to register it because the tools to do so are held hostage'.

https://oppositelock.kinja.com/replacing-bmw-batteries-yes-i...

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#86

Post by rland » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:26 AM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #71

ChickeNES wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know if it has OEM parts. I think this is lost on the HN audience. There's a lot of people out there being scammed by counterfeit parts, recycled parts, shoddy repair jobs, and straight up cobbled together FrankenPhones. Not to mention the danger in using lithium batteries from unknown provenance.

...which is caused by making batteries irreplaceable to start with. If a phone's battery is user-repleacable, the user could buy it from Apple or any other reliable manufacturer. Now they have to go to either Apple or some third-party show who may use problematic batteries.

If the battery was user replaceable, how would that improve the issue? If anything, it would make it worse from the standpoint of Apple’s customers getting a subpar product.

Batteries are the worst possible offender when it comes to counterfeits. If you’re not getting them straight from the source, it’s basically the wild west. I don’t order them online any more because it’s a 50/50 chance of getting a significantly worse product, even from reputable vendors (ahem amazon)

I think Apple is nudging their consumers towards getting an official replacement and honestly it makes perfect sense why they would do that in light of the market offerings.

Imagine an iPhone with a user replaceable battery. 30% of customers are gonna order the replacement from Apple anyway. 20% are going to order a mid high priced good battery from Anker. And 50% are gonna get swindled by an Alibaba drop shipper. The end result: the iPhone winds up behaving like a commodity android phone to the consumer.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#87

Post by kuzehanka » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:29 AM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #75

kuzehanka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. That's exactly what Apple are doing. Out of all the ways they could harm the consumer in this situation, that message is by far the most effective. Stop defending them. Stop giving them benefit of doubt. Stop misconstruing their malice for incompetence. Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that they'll go to extreme lengths to harm consumers and prevent 3rd party repair. That message destroys the consumer's trust in…

I am on the fence. On one side I would love if it were possible to repair your phone whenever wherever. On the other hand, let me tell you a personal anecdote. After my wife’s iPhone got stolen we wanted to buy another one for cheaper. We chose to buy it from a big retailer in here. The phone was marked as renewed and under warranty. It cost a bit less as a refurb from Apple would. When we got it it was immediately a…

The phone knows that the battery is a genuine Apple component, because the battery cryptographically identifies as one. What it's detecting is that a genuine Apple battery was installed in the phone, but not by Apple.

It displays the warning to scare the user and make them mistrust the 3rd party repairer. The only way to make that warning go away is to use a secret-sauce Apple programming tool that they withhold from 3rd party repairers and sue anyone that manages to reverse engineer it.

They are not doing this to protect you. They're doing this to make you distrust 3rd party repairers, or to make you avoid the nag warning, and go to their overpriced store instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlvlgmjMi98

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#88

Post by mschuster91 » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:30 AM UTC

craigsmansion wrote: post #76

mschuster91 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already went through all of this with cars and car mechanics. The only difference with electronics is that people have been convinced that their smartphone, laptop and electronics in general are somehow arcane magic. With cars there is a key difference: car service people usually are required to complete a multi-year long education with proper certifications (at least in Germany), and they get proper service man…

Those key differences don't really hold up, and it's mainly dealerships that use "spare parts from the manufacturers", and they would like nothing better than customers being forced to use their services, but they can't. The main body of car repair customers have a choice ranging from non-dealership shops to cousin Vinnie with the range of quality and cost that goes with it. It's up to the customer. Batteries degrade…

> The main body of car repair customers have a choice ranging from non-dealership shops to cousin Vinnie with the range of quality and cost that goes with it. It's up to the customer.

> As are cars crashes, but somehow having third party repair options hasn't had much of an impact on that.

Yes, because technicians are certified and trained, and because safety relevant parts are (no matter if first party or after market!) certified and tested. The relevant list in Germany is at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvzo_2012/__22a.html.

Of course, sometimes there are problems with car parts (e.g. the airbag mass recall), but counterfeit/uncertified parts generally don't end up in cars - vs. in the mobile/electronic industry where this is more routine than absolute exception.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#89

Post by tonyedgecombe » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:34 AM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #33

Lots of Apple apologists in this thread. (1) They deliberately design new proprietary adapters, eschewing already popular and capable standards, in new devices - to sell you more shit (2) They remove support for existing standards (e.g. headphone jacks) - to sell you more shit (3) They file lawsuits against third-party repair providers who do a demonstrably better job than first-party repairs - to sell you more shit…

Lots of Apple haters too, you have to look hard for reasoned arguments.

Re: Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup

#90

Post by deergomoo » Mon, Aug 12, 2019, 10:54 AM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #33

Lots of Apple apologists in this thread. (1) They deliberately design new proprietary adapters, eschewing already popular and capable standards, in new devices - to sell you more shit (2) They remove support for existing standards (e.g. headphone jacks) - to sell you more shit (3) They file lawsuits against third-party repair providers who do a demonstrably better job than first-party repairs - to sell you more shit…

> They deliberately design new proprietary adapters, eschewing already popular and capable standards, in new devices

They have one proprietary connector across all of their products that they sell, and that’s Lightning. Lightning is seven years old, was launched at a time when the alternative would be the god-awful microUSB connector, and all rumours point towards it being phased out completely for USB-C in the next couple of years.

The hyperbole helps no-one.