Automatically bricking every device the second the warranty expires is a trade off, because you're "protecting" the user from out-of-warranty repairs. Does that mean it's justified?
Real trade-offs are the epitome of customer choice. Both of the alternatives are available and you choose the one you want. That choice is impaired when products are bound together, so that you can't make your choices independently.
Forcing people into these trade-offs is the evil to be prevented. It's the reason anti-trust laws prohibit tying.
I didn't say trade-offs justify Apple's behavior. But unless proposed alternatives are superior in every regard, we cannot claim that Apple should have done so, or that they have secret motives. Your proposed alternative for third-party repairs is likely to require trade-offs that Apple is not willing to make.
> It excuses nothing because it excuses anything.
We have a bigger problem that excuses anything: current economic model. Under this model, actors act the way they do, not because acting so is right, but because they can. Apple can afford to limit third-party repair options, so they do.
Regulations only make it a cat-and-mouse game. Actors now do whatever they can within the new limits. And, they are very clever in finding new ways of doing what they can, which people call “malicious compliance”.
This is what makes it a weasel word. Nothing is ever superior to something else in every regard. To use this as the standard is to assume that an ulterior motive is never possible, even when there is an unambiguous perverse incentive and the company's rationalization is weak and transparent.
> Your proposed alternative for third-party repairs is likely to require trade-offs that Apple is not willing to make.
Which is why it should be the customer and not Apple who chooses whether to make them that way, and the customer should not be forced to make such otherwise-independent choices together.
> Regulations only make it a cat-and-mouse game.
The premise of a cat-and-mouse game is that the cat is unwilling to eat the mouse.
If the law says that you have to allow competing stores and the company flaunts the law, the next law could say that the same company is not allowed to both make the device and exercise any control over any store, prohibiting the company from operating one themselves. Penalties don't have to be limited to money, they could require the release of internal documentation and source code to facilitate adversarial interoperability. They could simply break the company into a dozen smaller pieces.
Regulations are often terrible because they create inefficiencies which raise prices and, when applied to smaller entities, can destroy them and cause market consolidation. And regulators often pass rules without ever checking up on their actual effects. But "regulations are often wasteful and ineffective" absolutely does not mean that the regulators have no ability to mess up your business -- that is, in fact, the hardest thing to avoid because it happens so easily by accident. The last thing you want is to do anything to cause them to want to crawl inside you and lay eggs.
