
Rotten Apple: Right to Repair Roundup - Cbasedlifeform
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/rotten-apple-right-to-repair-roundup.html
======
tomxor
This is such a bad article, I half suspect it's astroturfing and food intended
for Apple apologists. It's focused on a single small part of the problem and
unnecessarily misrepresented it.

As a reminder of the broader picture: Apple has a strong anti-repair stance,
they have lobbied for this [1], have engaged in broad, deceptive strategies to
remove 3rd party repair options, by confiscating legally refurbished hardware
under the guise of "counterfeits" [2], attempting to confiscate grey market
parts under the guise of "trademark violation" and threatening the 3rd party
repair shops [3]. They profit from this continued attack by deceiving
customers into expensive unnecessary part replacements, suggesting repair is
not possible and generally coercing customers into buying new products instead
[4].

[1]
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180126/07355539089/apple...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180126/07355539089/apple-
verizon-continue-to-lobby-against-right-to-repair-your-own-devices.shtml)

[2] [https://boingboing.net/2018/10/20/louis-
rossman.html](https://boingboing.net/2018/10/20/louis-rossman.html)

[3] [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3yadk/apple-sued-an-
inde...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3yadk/apple-sued-an-independent-
iphone-repair-shop-owner-and-lost)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns)

~~~
nfellaby
This is the real issue.

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.

~~~
ReptileMan
You stopped "owning" your device the monent you accepted locked bootloader and
no root. It is weird that it is the battery replacement that triggered that
feeling.

~~~
throwaway808080
It’s not about owning. It’s having trust in the device that it will do what it
says it will. Buying from Apple there is generally a trust that the device
meet’s Apple’s bar and hasn’t been tempered with.

------
kemayo
> By activating a dormant software lock on their newest iPhones, Apple is
> effectively announcing a drastic new policy: only Apple batteries can go in
> iPhones, and only they can install them.

I really dislike the phrasing attached to this story.

It's not a lock: a third party installed battery still _works_ , the phone
isn't refusing to start up until you go to an Apple Store and have an
authentic Apple(tm) battery installed. Rather, it's a warning in the "battery
health" section basically saying "we don't know if your battery is any good,
you might need to get it replaced".

That said, I'd prefer a clearer phrasing of their error message. It looks like
it's just triggering the generic "your battery may need service" warning,
which is more of a scare tactic than I'd like. "You don't have a certified
Apple battery" would be completely sufficient.

Given the existence of refurbishment scams, where substandard parts are put
into old phones to make them look good briefly, I can understand where Apple
is coming from on this point. Someone who buys a second-hand iPhone and finds
the battery dies after a month isn't going to be very happy with iPhones.

~~~
kuzehanka
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 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.

~~~
0ld
> 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 function
properly until "registered /converted/(or even) programmed" [0] at the
official bmw service. The difference is that the software to do that is
pirated and thus available to the 3rd parties

[o] [https://bimmerscan.com/bmw-battery-
registration/](https://bimmerscan.com/bmw-battery-registration/)

~~~
kuzehanka
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...](https://oppositelock.kinja.com/replacing-bmw-batteries-yes-it-is-
ridiculous-1681775778)

------
abalone
_> Now, I’m not sure that Apple has thus far triggered that kill switch. But
they can do so at any time. _

This is just scaremongering. Apple has not, in fact, triggered a "kill switch"
or "locked" anyone out of using a 3rd party battery.

All it does is display a message that it's not a genuine Apple part. Deep in
the battery settings. That's it.

Remember that old iPhones are frequently resold. You're going to want to know
if it has OEM parts.

~~~
ChickeNES
> 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.

~~~
danieldk
...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.

~~~
rland
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.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
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

(4) They add software checks which attempts to subvert the same third-party
repair providers after their lawsuits fail - to sell you more shit

Apple consistently, at every step, serves their bottom line ahead of your
interests. Quit letting tribalism blind you, Apple users - this behavior is
unacceptable.

~~~
deergomoo
> 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.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Lightning, sure. How about firewire, and thunderbolt, and the 30-pin
connectors for the iPod? Have you also forgotten their proprietary SSD
connectors - SATA compatible but with a non-M.2 socket. Or ADC, a proprietary
pinout for what's effectively a DVI cable? Or AAUI? Mini-VGA and Mini-DVI?

Apple has been doing this for longer than I've been alive. I'm happy that
they're phasing it out in favor of USB-C - this is a positive step - but their
past definitely helps damns them when fanboys come to their defense over right
to repair.

~~~
benzoate
To my knowledge those described have some distinct advantage over what was
available on the market at the time. Firewire was way faster, ADC carries USB,
Thunderbolt is connected to PCIe, mini-vga and mini-dvi are self explanatory
and their proprietary SATA like connection was, again, way faster.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Their proprietary SATA was just SATA with a wrong connector. It was not
faster. Firewire was faster at the expense of massive security holes. A
practical reason for having Thunderbolt connected to PCIe never materialized.
Don't kid yourself - Apple made these calls for one reason and one reason
only.

~~~
benzoate
There are external GPUs now that use thunderbolt, prior to this you could run
external displays at a greater resolution than was available via HDMI at the
time.

Firewire was mostly not used because people were content to endure USB, and
USB had a larger availability on consumer hardware. Apple gained nothing by
spending money to add the port to their computers so I find it hard to buy
that they had a secret malevolent purpose in doing so. In this case they
rolled the dice on a superior solution and it didn’t pay off.

------
judge2020
So Apple's take is probably: A bunch of people get mad when their iPhones stop
working, start running slow, etc; research data shows that when they need a
battery replaced, they're more likely to go to the local third party (non-
authorized) repair shop and get it replaced. We have no idea how skilled or
unskilled these repair shops are, even if they use genuine Apple batteries.
Our best bet for maintaining the reputation of our product is to make sure
only Genius bar or AASP staff install the batteries and run the necessary
diagnostics post-install.

I don't agree that they should be doing the battery authentication thing,
replacing your battery is pretty easy and simple; but you have to look at this
from Apple's standpoint:

Yes, Louis Rossmann runs a repair shop that is better than the Genius bar in
every way and, should he join Apple, all of their repairability issues would
disappear overnight. The issue is that many (most likely a majority) of local
computer repair shops that get asked "can you fix this battery error on my
iPhone" aren't on par with Louis Rossmann and will make mistakes such as
improper installation, not re-sealing the phone for water resistance, using
non-genuine batteries, etc. Apple could, by all means, make the process
easier, cheaper, and more idiot-proof, but that would require engineering
efforts. The best course of action, both for making money from repairs and not
losing money to engineering and possible product changes ("don't sacrifice
form for function", at least under Jony Ive), is to get the software to verify
that Apple had complete control over the replacement battery from factory to
phone.

~~~
temporaryvector
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.
Nowadays, car manufacturers also seem keen to jump on this bandwagon, since it
would also benefit their bottom line to keep third party mechanics from
touching their cars.

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.

~~~
mschuster91
> 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 manuals, genuine tools, spare parts
and utilities from the manufacturers (as a result of the right to repair laws
mentioned in the article), and third party replacement parts have to be
certified as well (at least in Europe).

With phone repair shops, you have no guarantee that the person doing the
repair is actually skilled, or that the repair parts are genuine/certified in
any way. The right-to-repair laws have to be extended to force manufacturers
to provide genuine spare parts, the sooner the better. Lithium battery fires
are a real and scary threat.

~~~
craigsmansion
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 and need replacement at some point. What Apple is trying to
do here is fusing the tyres to the rims and claiming it's necessary and
specialist work.

> Lithium battery fires are a real and scary threat.

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

~~~
mschuster91
> 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](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.

------
puranjay
I'm done with Apple. How can a computer company knowingly ship a product with
a keyboard that breaks within a few months for three whole generations?

Mine lasted just 4 months and I was advised to invest in a silicone cover for
it. Which is absurd for a $1500 laptop. And they made it sound like it was
just a minor issue - "oh everything works great except the keyboard". As if a
laptop without a keyboard isn't practically useless.

My wife's Macbook Air developed an issue last week after installing the latest
OS update. The computer would just freeze randomly making it impossible to
use. Apple Support said that it was a known issue with the update. A known
issue that was still released?!

I moved to Apple because I was frustrated with Windows. But even the $400
Windows I've owned in the past gave me at least 2 years with their keyboards.
And Windows has been painfully slow and error prone, but no update has ever
crippled my laptop as the last macOS update did my wife's Macbook Air.

If you're going to charge me a massive premium for a product, at least make
sure that it works.

Sorry for ranting here, but these two issues happened within a week of each
other and I've just been angry and disappointed

~~~
pentae
It's put a big stain on them in the last few years thats for sure. That being
said, at least the keyboard replacement program is basically a free extended
warranty on the keyboard if they didn't have that I think the situation would
be far more aggravating. I'm more pissed that they dropped USB-A about 5-7
years too soon.

~~~
benologist
The keyboard replacement program just forestalls the class action that will
force Apple to do right by affected customers in about 20 years. They will
fight hard for their expressed right to knowingly sell faulty hardware, or
lemons as they're sometimes called in consumer laws prohibiting that. They
will devote millions to preserving the option to ignore and lie about hardware
faults for the first 1 - 2 years.

------
acd10j
Lots of people here to defend Apple in-spite of their outright anti-consumer
stance against right to repair. In this case they could have shown a warning
with option to permanently choose to remove/ignore, Instead of scary permanent
"service" Message.

------
mister_hn
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

~~~
rimliu
Not sure about you, but I am the owner.

------
gandalfian
The irony is this is such a big issue because iphones are one of the few
products they make that are both easily repairable and expensive enough to be
worth repairing. Nimble fingers and the right screwdriver and it all comes
apart and back together again unlike many rival sealed glued products.

------
cardiffspaceman
If a message displayed by the first-party software is an intentional message
that obfuscates the true status of the device for the benefit of the
manufacturer, is this not fraud?

------
goranovich
iClaymore - front toward enemy

------
mjcohen
Naked Capitalism is my goto blog for what's really going on.

------
algaeontoast
Apple Care isn’t that expensive - I’ve rarely had an apple product break that
hasn’t been free or under $100 to have fixed at the Apple store.

Louis Rossmann is the best, but I’ve never really encountered a reason to care
about Right to Repair...

~~~
emsy
This argument sounds like "I don't care about cancer research because I don't
get sick". It should matter to you for many reasons that have nothing to do
with whether you're affected or not. I don't want to see the hostility towards
customers you see e.g. from tractor companies creep into my computing devices.

~~~
algaeontoast
I use Hacker News mostly to avoid vapid responses like yours.

However, I should say that the right to repair a device like a tractor is
something I very much support. But that's a $100k+ piece of equipment that
someone's livelihood depends on and should last in excess of 10yrs.

Apple devices and phone toys... please...

The issue with apple devices is that they're intended to be discarded and
replaced, not that they're "unable to be repaired". Have you seen how poorly
most people treat their phones and computers? There's a reason Apple doesn't
engineer products to last that long - because a majority of their customers
will manage to break them anyway and inevitably will buy a new one because
they want to be "cool" like all their other friends (an societal and
consumerist trend I honestly take more of an issue with).

I understand your point, but I hope this has helped you understand my point of
view a bit better :)

