Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup (opens in new tab)

Personally, I've replaced many components on iPhones through the ages. Often the replacement parts I've ordered have been sub-standard and that was the risk I've accepted as I was purchasing from unknown sellers. Sometimes the parts have been on par with the original components and I've been very pleased with my purchase.

The right to repair should be protected. When I am no longer able to fix my own purchases then I no longer feel I own the device.

This is especially true given Apple present themselves as an environmentally conscious brand. Often people don't have the opportunity to get parts replaced by Apple directly, or they don't have the means. Ensuring there are options for everyone promotes reuse and recycling. Additionally it limits the extent that a given company can build in planned obsolescence.

However. My opinion is that in purchasing a second hand device I want to know which components are from the OEM. This is especially important for components that are not easily validated, i.e. the battery. I can then take the risk of price vs quality at face value.

I get the impression here that people are very vocal about one side or the other, but I feel there is a balance to be made.

People who want to economize on parts and labour damage the brand. They're poor people, or at least people not wealthy enough not to care about these things; they shouldn't be associated with the Apple brand. Apple does not aim at the bottom of the market.

People who want open hardware that they can poke at damage the brand. Apple sells an integrated, hassle-free experience. An open market is chaotic and uncontrolled, and antithetical to the brand promise.

That message destroys the consumer's trust in 3rd party repair shops. It says battery health issue. Are sure you put in a real Apple battery? Did you even change my battery at all?

Outright locking the battery out would cause backlash and possible legal action. This 'technically works but will nag you forever unless you pay Apple to run a program to clear the message that they refuse to share with 3rd parties' solution is genius. Evil genius.

Imagine the car equivalent of this situation. 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. There are laws that require carmakers to release repair manuals to 3rd party repairers and honour warranty after 3rd party repairs. Tech companies are shitting on their users because equivalent laws don't exist for electronic goods.

That's not what the message is. It's really weird that everyone keeps getting this wrong given there's a screenshot of it in the iFixit post.

https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2019/08/07170827/iphon...

Last I checked apple did not make parts available to third party repairers, at least without signing on to some draconian anti-consumer agreements. If they were really interested in protecting consumers from counterfeits then they'd be doing more to make genuine apple parts available and doing less to limit third party repairs.

The whole point is more towards the fact that it actually means:

"We don't know (or don't care) if you have a certified Apple battery or a (crappy) third part one, all we know is that it has been changed by non-Apple-Authorized personnel, so we are giving you this warning message as a lesson"

That very next paragraph, which you omit in your "quote".

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.

But the message is triggered even if you insert an Apple part. So you would want to know if the phone was blessed by an apple genius when you buy/sell ? It's surprising the lengths people go through to defend these asinine decisions. I don't even care about Apple, but the problem is that everyone will follow suit since the rest of the industry lacks any sort of vision/spine.

That's something they could display without disabling the entire battery monitoring screen though. They could do that for every single part of the phone but instead they remove functionality if you don't do things the apple approved way. If I open two identical iPhones and swap their batteries there shouldn't be any degradation in the phone but Apple has decided there should be and that I can't see the battery info any more under any circumstances unless I go through them.

It's not an excuse for Apples policy to fight "the right to repair" etc. but it's less worse than I thought.

Of course if you own new Apple products you are completely screwed when in need of repairs and no store is in sight.

That's why I still like to use the MBP from 2012 (the one with all the great ports that can be repaired still). They've done a really shitty job in the development of their devices and lost a lot of pro-users like me who won't buy the new series of devices anymore.

When they don't act on this they'll lose a fair amount of customers completely, once their cool old devices aren't usable anymore. It's their decision while governments are too afraid to do the right thing and force all companies to allow people to repair and use resources efficiently.

It should be mandatory in a world that counts it's remaining days because their ancestors just burned through the resources we have without thinking about consequences.

But we'll see if there are enough smart people who are powerful enough to fight this crap. Mother Earth won't care if we'll be here in some centuries and it will recover without us.

The error is displayed even if you put in a genuine apple battery.

> "When a battery gets closer to the end of its lifespan, the amount of charge and the ability to provide power reduces. As a result, a battery may need to be charged more and more frequently and your iPhone might experience unexpected shutdowns."

This is dishonest. Because you put in a battery from a third party, you are making the user believe that it is near the end of its lifespan. I know the language says "may" but then most users are not language lawyers. Any layman is gonna read this as: Oh shit, my battery is almost completely degraded... I need to replace this.

A better thing to do would be to say "This battery is not a genuine battery installed by an authorized technician and may not perform as well"

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.

  > They remove support for existing standards (e.g. headphone
  > jacks) - to sell you more shit

Moving away from Apple means significantly lower development costs, and more time on universal platforms.

I'm not sure why someone would buy an Apple product outside the Fashion statement, but they have set the industry back from a software POV.

Fact is, if Apple can fix their devices, then so can a third party without much problem, it's not that hard and most of it doesn't really take any skilled labor. Apple would be better served by releasing repair manuals and selling parts (like car manufacturers have been doing) if they're afraid of having their reputation ruined by third party repairmen. That, of course, is not their concern, a third party repairman ruining someone iPhone in no way affects Apple's reputation, and it's better for Apple's business since it helps their propaganda efforts against third-party repair. Apple and other electronics manufacturers of course are not going to spend any effort supporting third-party repair until they're forced to by legislation.

For what it's worth, I think the right to repair side needs to do a better job of delivering their message. While focusing dispelling the notion that electronics repair is hard is pretty important to undo decades of propaganda on the matter, currently the environment is the hot button issue, and throwing away repairable objects isn't all that great, particularly if it's an easy fix like changing a battery. Repair needs to be included explicitly into the 3 R's somehow, either by making it into 4 R's (Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle, for example) or by including Repair into the umbrella of Reduce.

> Apple could, by all means, make the process easier, cheaper, and more idiot-proof, but that would require engineering efforts.

This is a bit silly. Not only are they already spending lots of money on (purposefully) engineering in repair-hostile way, they also have very high markup on their hardware. Let's not feel bad for poor Apple in this case.

As for third party repair, it isn't Apples fault if a third party repairs a phone incorrectly. What does this argument even mean? If your busy fixes your car wrong you don't sue the car manufacturer. If you go to a repair shop and they mess up you don't sue the manufacturer. So why would it be any different for phones or any electronic?

The the problem is folks inexperienced with repairing devices like yourself have been convinced by apple that "many (most likely the majority) ... will make mistakes".

That's like saying every 3rd party auto repair shop should be shut down in favor of dealer mechanic shops. When in reality, the corporate greed policy based on making money - not repair electronics or cars - are often the driving decision makers in repair work. That is to say, they actually do worse work at authorized shops. A lack of competition tends to do that.

You obviously haven't heard of botched Windows updates.

The Right to Repair is MUCH more than your right to fix your broken electronic as a hobbyist. It is largely about large companies participating in anti-competitiveness. The frequent example given is with John Deer tractors. Lots of John Deer equipment has lock downs and require authorization to do anything but the most basic repairs. This is a big change for your average farmer who is frequently repairing their own equipment (it is essentially a requirement to be a mechanic to be a farmer). They frankly don't even have access to authorized repair shops within hundreds of miles. This is why Apple sends lawyers out to fight court cases in small towns in Nebraska and Arkansas. But this kind of behavior is not limited to Apple and John Deer, it is highly prolific and affects things that are in the background.

You should care about the right to repair not because you want to fix your own stuff. You should care because it is about large companies abusing their power and acting in anti-competitive ways. This is about anti-trust.