
Internal Documents Show Apple Is Capable of Implementing Right to Repair - kaboro
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3mqna/internal-documents-show-apple-is-capable-of-implementing-right-to-repair-legislation
======
beamatronic
I was recently upgrading a 2008 MacBook. Upgraded the hard drive and the
memory. It was so easy. It is an absolute joy to service this machine. It also
has many useful ports and an awesome battery indicator on the side.

~~~
smacktoward
I'm old enough to remember the days of the "cheese grater" Power Mac/Mac Pro,
when Apple would explicitly call attention to how expandable and user-
serviceable a case they'd designed for it.

How times change!

~~~
noir_lord
I still think that the "cheese grater" was the pinnacle of apple desktop
design (and I've never owned a mac), I just love it - enough that I damn near
bought a broken one to use to build my new PC in the end laziness won and I
went corsair but it's still an amazing piece of industrial design.

~~~
weaksauce
That machine was a engineering beauty. very well thought out.

~~~
noir_lord
It really was, it still looks better than the vast majority of modern PC cases
with better build quality, the bigger ones all seem to be some variant of "How
many RGB's can we shove in this" with flimsy plastic and sharp edges.

I went with one of these in the end
[https://www.corsair.com/ca/en/Categories/Products/Cases/Carb...](https://www.corsair.com/ca/en/Categories/Products/Cases/Carbide-
Series%E2%84%A2-100R-Silent-Edition-Mid-Tower-Case/p/CC-9011077-WW) because
it's a box to put bits in, no fuss, no muss no RGB.

~~~
weaksauce
my last computer i built i went with a fractal design case and couldn't be
happier really. they make excellent cases. the drives are not in the main
chamber so it is a completely void airflow design for the major components and
all the routing is done nicely. really great design. That corsair one looks
pretty nice for a standard layout case though.

[https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-
ser...](https://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-
series/define-s)

edit: also it's laid out to be super silent and if you pair it with the right
components it is quite.

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kevinherron
I guess I believe in this "right to repair" movement, but only so far as to
ensure that if you're capable of taking your device apart and putting it back
together without breaking anything that you don't automatically void some
warranty.

I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take
apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.

I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end
of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and
properly recycled at no cost to the user.

~~~
voxic11
I think you are misconstruing the aims of the right to repair movement. Its
nothing to do with forcing companies to make it "easy" to repair, but rather
about preventing companies from including "features" which serve no purpose
besides preventing third party repair.

An example would be a tractor that is designed to be cheaply serviceable, but
has a feature which disables any replaced parts until a message signed by the
the original equipment manufacturer and authorizing the replacement part has
been received.

~~~
kevinherron
You're right, I remember this initially, but many discussions about right to
repair get hijacked and center around topics like iFixit and their blatantly
self-serving anti-Apple campaigns.

~~~
isoskeles
As self-serving as it is, iFixit is doing a social good IMO. If it weren't for
them, I would have spent more money replacing or having someone else repair my
iPhone. So I don't care if they make money off of it, they save me more money
in the long-run, and they prevent a larger number of phones and other devices
being cycled through the economy before necessary. If that means punching up
at Apple, so be it. Apple can take the hit.

Planned obsolescence is a very shitty and cynical strategy on the part of
manufacturers, and anyone fighting against it is on the right side.

~~~
saagarjha
> iFixit is doing a social good IMO

Agree.

> anyone fighting against it is on the right side

Don't. For example, Louis Rossmann recently kicked up a storm when he claimed
that Apple used the customs to seize his "genuine" battery shipments (which
was widely reported in the media and gave him significant publicity), except
it turned out that he left out the fact that the parts were unauthorized:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9pow06/louis_rossman...](https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9pow06/louis_rossmann_admits_to_using_parts_from_a/).
Self-serving PR stunts that consist of misinformation and depend on the
subsequent media outrage don't help "the right side".

~~~
mindslight
That reddit post you linked to also does its best to avoid focusing on the
actual situation. There's no such thing as an "unauthorized" battery. If
factories are producing batteries with a default Apple logo (ie to Chinese
standards), and he's instructing them to cross it out, that also seems
completely legitimate.

~~~
saagarjha
> That reddit post you linked to also does its best to avoid focusing on the
> actual situation.

No, it doesn't. In fact, I think it's pretty explicit in making the situation
clear:

> First of all, let me start by saying, I am not defending Apple's terrible
> stance towards Right to Repair.

> I think Apple's R2R policy is awful - It sucks that once the device you buy
> is on the "obsolete" list, you can no longer get 1st party service from
> Apple. Not only that, but there are no legal ways to obtain parts. IMO this
> is something all of us should be putting pressure on Apple to change. I'd
> love it if there was a law on the books that forced companies to make spare
> parts for products available to customers for x amount of years after the
> warranty expires. That would allow people to continue using the devices they
> buy.

> In closing, I'm going to continue supporting Louis, iFixit, and their
> attempts to secure our rights to repair the products we own.

But it is also very obvious that Louis Rossman was clearly dishonest.
Actually, I don't quite understand your argument:

> If factories are producing batteries with a default Apple logo (ie to
> Chinese standards), and he's instructing them to cross it out, that also
> seems completely legitimate.

How is this "completely legitimate"? Apple is (quite understandably) annoyed
that some factories decided to make batteries that Louis could peddle as
genuine Apple batteries, when it's clear that they are in fact not these at
all (they're _crossing out the logos to pass customs_ , for heaven's sake). Of
course they're going to be seized, because they're _counterfeit_ : Apple
probably wasn't even involved here. I'm surprised he has the gall to try to
make this a huge PR issue by claiming that Apple was trying to stop him from
repairing Macs with genuine batteries that he bought when he knows they're
just shady batteries from China he's trying to bring into the country.

------
danet
That is why I'm holding to my 2011 ThinkPad T420 for dear life. I replaced
keyboard 3 times ($30-$40 off ebay), changed HDD to SSD, and replaced CD-ROM
with another SATA drive bay.

Not having USB3 is annoying, the CPU is a little slow and the batteries aren't
what they used to be, but the things still works and gives me no problems.

I would like to get something smaller and lighter but all the affordable light
laptops come with at most 8GB of not upgradable memory, whereas mine has 12GB
and upgradable to 16.

What I ended up doing is getting a desktop computer for anything that needs
performance and every time I look at anything apple, it just looks like I'm
about to get on a treadmill of shelling out a couple of thousand dollars every
year without the ability to own, upgrade or repair any of my devices.

~~~
enobrev
I've been building my desktop (and now servers) for 25 years. The idea of
taking my computer in to a store to fix a drive or ram or worse, buying a new
one because of a hardware issue is absolutely foreign to me.

I had hoped laptops would be just as easy to tweak and build by now but it
seems the world favors the apple way.

I'm going to keep building. It's _far_ less expensive. I can tweak my system
to fit my needs and adjust as my needs change. And I have a solid
understanding of the most used tool in my life.

Also things like PC part picker make it so much simpler than it used to be
that I barely even need to think about it any more.

------
smush
So I admit being pessimistic about actually getting Right to Repair laws
passed. Lawmakers keep being told that 'it stifles innovation' and since they
often have as limited understanding of technology as I do as to the innards of
political wheel-greasing they often fall for that tripe.

Are there any known Right to Repair statutes (US or Int'l) or bills that show
signs of life?

~~~
ghaff
Massachusetts passed Right to Repair as a ballot measure (which Tesla
basically flaunts by making manuals extremely expensive to rent). But note
that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to repair
without special tools and knowledge."

~~~
smush
> But note that right to repair does not automatically equate with "easy to
> repair without special tools and knowledge."

I'm okay with that. I just don't want businesses to be able to deny access to
their manuals, threaten to void warranties for 'abuse' for performing an
action that their authorized techs do all the time without any adverse effect
on the hardware, or remotely kill software used in the hardware because
someone replaced some atoms arranged in a less than ideal manner with some
other atoms arranged in a more ideal manner without paying the business
themselves to do it.

------
devwastaken
They certainly can, but instead they're purposefully making it impossible to
get specific board components so that a single chip defect/failure becomes an
$800 paper weight [https://youtu.be/gmRd9IVE6dc](https://youtu.be/gmRd9IVE6dc)
at 8:30 Louis explains that newer MacBooks, one of the most common issues is
unfixable due to isl9240 being unsourceable.

------
benologist
With over 200 billion in savings the only thing they can’t do is be honest
about what you are repairing for the third time!

------
intopieces
Anyone who has ever been to Shenzhen’s HQB electronic market will chuckle at
the Apple claim that iPhones are “too complex” for non-Apple techs to repair.

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smileybarry
This is probably already used for countries where Apple has no local presence.
Here in Israel there are no Apple labs, so up till this year iPhones had to be
shipped to Apple Ireland for repairs. (but Macs and iPads could be repaired by
authorized, non-Apple labs due to a less-stringent repair policy)

Recently the news reported of a specific authorized reseller gaining the
option to repair iPhones here, and sometimes even outright replace them -- all
authorized by Apple. Maybe this programme made that possible.

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sparky_
The grammar mistake in the supposed official document - "Keep doing what your
(sic) doing" \- is very unlike Apple. Raises a red flag on authenticity in my
mind.

------
mises
It's nice to see that Apple is trying to help people repair parts. I
personally see nothing wrong with Apple choosing to do this itself and
simultaneously saying that it doesn't want the government stepping in.

------
system2
Even with right to repair, if users cannot find the parts (especially chips)
they won't be able to fix anything. Also, they can make it more complicated
circuitry to make it harder to fix. No matter what, users are still at the
mercy of the manufacturer.

------
xoa
I really dislike the "Right to Repair" movement because I see it as a lobbyist
(iFixit pushes it heavily for example since they make money off it) & niche
driven push that is both wasting a real chance to get at some actual critical
problems and generating new ones of its own. The two big issues are reasonable
life span as part of the purchase price, and questions about ownership vs
security.

1\. For the first, most people do not care about "right to repair", what they
want is a more roughly a "right to have repaired for a reasonable time period
related to the cost of the item in question." Ie., it's a standard Free Market
pricing issue: they want general use case reliability to be internalized into
the pricing shown up front. So for example, if someone spends $100 on a
bargain basement phone, maybe it only gets a year. If they spend $500-1000 on
a phone, there is a sense that it should last a good 4-5 years. And in either
case if it doesn't the manufacturer should take care of it at no further
direct cost to the customer. The way things stands right now is that
effectively there is an externality and information imbalance: some percentage
of buyers get screwed at odds they don't know as well as the manufacturer,
unless they pay a bunch more money to insure against it (and again, the
manufacturer knows the odds not them). It's something that should just be part
of the upfront price so everything can be compared evenly.

 _How_ the manufacturer "takes care of it at no further direct cost to the
consumer" is an implementation question for which there are many good answers
that come with different tradeoffs and costs. "Right to Repair" legislates one
specific solution, rather then correctly legislate the desired _result_ and
then let everyone experiment and adapt.

2\. The second part ties into the idea of trusted software and hardware chains
vs owner control and it's complex. Take the brouhaha over Touch ID repair:
allowing any independent 3rd party to "repair/replace" that _by definition_
means any 3rd party can hack it and replace it with something malicious too.
Giving up the control of that to Apple changes the repair market, but it also
changes the level of expense necessary to compromise it. Same thing for the
software stack: more control means more ability to have things get messed up,
be social engineered, etc. I'm not comfortable with it being _illegal_ for me
to specifically buy a device with a cryptographically secured hardware chain
that cannot be altered. I know the tradeoff there is that there is more of a
single point of failure and risk I could be left with a non-functional device
(though point 1 requiring the manufacturer to offer a 4-5 year warranty or
whatever could help). But that's a tradeoff I want to be able to make in some
cases.

I do think though far more gradations could be mandated as being offered. Say,
manufacturers must offer it as a one-time order option: in Apple's case, I
would support them being legally required to offer customers a model of phone
shipped that can accept owner inputted root signing certificates. As in, an
actual physically separate model (fuses) that cannot be changed afterwards so
somebody could also buy a model like now with Apple roots only. Then the
choice can be made (I'd also be fine with Apple or whomever being absolved
from any liability or support requirements resulting, more freedom for the
owner should mean more responsibility for the owner too). But I've yet to see
a Right To Repair that covers any of this.

\--

It all stinks because I think these are really important issues and ones that
would make the overall market a lot better. And I think particularly for the
first the public has a general sense that something is wrong but they don't
know how to really express the root of the problem. RtR seems to piggy back on
that, but not in a great way.

~~~
monocasa
You can absolutely have a cryptographically secure hardware chain that you can
replace parts on. Just require that root keys get wiped on a part swap.

~~~
saagarjha
Ok, but you now have an iPhone that can leak your fingerprint or face data, or
make it easy to pull credit card information off of. When that happens, will
consumers (and the media!) blame Apple for making an insecure phone or the
repair store for using untrusted hardware?

~~~
Dylan16807
That all got wiped when you swapped parts. How does it leak now?

~~~
saagarjha
Because you set it up again?

~~~
Dylan16807
On a new cryptographically secure hardware chain, with parts from Apple.

If you have a bypass to that security, the anti-replacement measures won't
work on you.

If you don't have a bypass, then the replacement parts won't leak any more
than the old parts.

