The cost of the equipment to do component levels repairs on an iPhone is well over 100% of the cost of a new iPhone. And the skills required are not reasonable to expect of any but a handful of consumers. The repairs are difficult enough that literally Apple doesn't do them.
> The cost of the equipment to do component levels repairs on an iPhone is well over 100% of the cost of a new iPhone.
Nah. If you know what's broken (which is often a cheap multimeter test away given you have the right schematics/boardview files) you can totally get by with a cheap hotair (858D-style clone for $60), a decent soldering iron (even a dinky TS100, $70), and some decent miscellaneous tools and supplies (tweezers, flux, solder). This is equipment anyone that does any sort of electronics should already have. And likely equipment you'll find at a local hackerspace.
For 01005-sized SMD passives you'll most likely also need a cheap binocular microscope (an amscope on a gooseneck for $150 will do), but you can totally do 0201-level stuff without one if you have good eyesight.
It gets a bit more expensive if you're doing BGA swaps from donor boards because you need to reball them, but it's still easily all within a $1k budget for all the tools required. But hey, if Apple just allowed you to buy their BGA components new instead of people having to use donor boards, this wouldn't be needed.
Component level repair is not voodoo magic, you just need practice and a steady hand. Equipment is cheaper than ever. Pretending it's out of the hands of an average curious hacker is playing into Apple's bullshit about how magical and integrated their devices are and that therefore they're the only ones that can possibly work on them.
I'll concede that it's possible with cheaper equipment. But the people who actually do this work tend to have $1000+ in equipment at their disposal. And there are very few of them. And none of them would be accurately described as "consumers", or even "DIY-inclined consumers". These people have skillsets so unique that their skills are beyond the capabilities of most professionals in the electronics repair field.
> And none of them would be accurately described as "consumers", or even "DIY-inclined consumers".
I think there's much more people that are somewhat inclined to learn these skills and that have access to such equipment than you think. And plenty who don't work in any industry related to electronics that just happen to tinker with electronics as a hobby and effectively have gotten very proficient with a soldering iron. Don't underestimate curious hackers from places where fixing your own equipment makes economic sense.
For me, disassembling my iPhone and replacing its battery was much more difficult than any sort of component-level repair. So if we're letting 'consumers' do that, why not let them also try component level repair?
This isn't an Apple-sponsored educational exercise. It's a consumer-facing program where they are sharing some of the parts, instructions, and components they use for repairs. While I think Apple should share repair information, I don't think it is a reasonable expectation for them to provide information on repairs that they don't even do.
We don't expect this level of detail from any other industry, even when they are required by law to provide repair information. Toyota doesn't give information on how to weld damaged engine parts, even if it's a technically feasible repair. They don't do this repair themselves, they replace it, so how would they be expected to provide this level of detail?
Also, it's done for laptops and phones by a huge number of shops in China, which clearly has no shortage of skilled labour. Many years ago I went there with a friend to get his laptop fixed and the customer experience was incredible. The young lady doing it (in a shop of about a dozen others) actually left the stall and went with us to the other shops in the building to buy the necessary parts, and we got to see them being installed and tested. It was surprisingly cheap too, I only learned afterwards that haggling is the norm but we paid the asking price (which was already quite low from a foreigner's perspective!)
(1) Component level repair is done daily by multiple repair shops. Apple not doing something doesn't make it impossible or uneconomical.
(2) Competition and availability of parts/tools/manuals will bring down costs. Apple forces suppliers to not sell parts to repair shops driving up acquisition costs for parts.
(3) If someone still doesn't want to use a third party repair shop, they can take it to Apple.
(4) Labor prices vary throughout the world. Smart people exist everywhere.
Lets focus on the real issue - reducing e-waste and promoting longer device lifetimes via repair.
This program is not for repair shops. Apple not producing repair procedures for component-level repairs does make it impossible for them to share those procedures... because they don't have them to share.
We don't need any "repair procedures" from Apple. What needs to stop is Apple choking the repair market by blocking sales of components by third-parties.
I'm sure Apple has designed the electronics really well, so there is no complaint there. But they're still using normal components in a normal circuit doing normal things. At the electronics level, a competent tech can diagnose and fix/replace faulty components with some working knowledge of electronics and a curious mind. Like with anything else people get better with experience so there may very well be a difference in the amount of repair each individual repair shop can do.
As a society, our final goal should be to reduce e-waste and promote longer device lifetimes through reuse and repair in all industries.
>We don't need any "repair procedures" from Apple.
Who is we? Experts? Or consumers repairing their own devices? For the latter, people absolutely do need repair procedures. The first stop for most people is a site like iFixit -- a site founded on the need for documentation to repair an Apple laptop.
While we certainly need to be mindful of e-waste, I'm not convinced that component-level repairs are unquestionably a net benefit to society vs module-level repairs. Process efficiency, shipping, warehousing, packaging, materials-used, and the environmental controls in place have huge environmental impacts as well. The total environmental impact is much more complicated than the board itself.
I understand and share the desire to tinker with and repair anything regardless of complexity. However, as someone who also produces products, I also think that the law should be reasonable in what it forces me to do when I create something.
I can only hope you've read statements from environmental organizations urging electronics makers to promote repair and reuse to reduce e-waste. The goal isn't to convince you or change your beliefs, the goal is to reduce e-waste. There are plenty of volunteers, but companies like Apple are also hiring lobbyists to block right to repair legislation by making false statements.
>I understand and share the desire to tinker with and repair anything regardless of complexity. However, as someone who also produces products, I also think that the law should be reasonable in what it forces me to do when I create something.
Sorry, but the environment comes first. The point with right to repair is to remove the artificial restrictions on expert technicians so they can service consumer electronics.
I don’t disagree with the sentiments you have, and I share the goal of protecting the environment. However, our environmental impact is very multidimensional and affected by much more than just the quantity of e-waste.
Our missteps with recycling programs are a good example of this. As municipal recycling programs grew with a singular goal of increasing recycling quantity, many cities (like my own) decided to legally require recycling. This increased the quantity of the recycling, but decreased the quality. Eventually the quality got so low that third world purchasers started dumping it in the ocean. So, in an effort to save a bottle from being sequestered carbon in a landfill, we instead shipped it halfway around the world to become ocean pollutant.
Now, the recycling demand for some types of material has completely dried up and some cities have nowhere to put the recycling other than the landfill. So in effect, they’re burning more diesel to drive two trucks to the landfill instead of one.
The same experts who were urging everyone to recycle in the 90s now agree that we’d be better off if the people who didn’t wash out their peanut butter jars didnt recycle. “More recycling = more better” ruined it for everyone.
All I’m saying is be careful not to be focused on the single dimension of component-level repair in this case as well. Good intentions to improve one variable can backfire if it doesn’t consider its effect on the entire lifecycle.
It isn’t hard to imagine a similarity disastrous situation if tens of thousands of sweatshops started dumping flux and solvents in their rivers, when Apple may have a more environmentally controlled process in spite of a modular approach to repair. Just because something is labelled "recycling" doesn't guarantee that those processes are lower impact than any alternatives.
I agree with the the public's right to repair, in that it compels companies to share the same repair parts, procedures, and tools that the company itself uses. But you're asking for more than that, which I think is unreasonable, and a misguided hill to die on, particularly for environmental reasons. If component level repair of iPhones was more accessible, you won't see this cottage industry flourishing in well-regulated high wage countries with strong information industries. This is high-skill labor intensive work. It will happen in low-wage countries with skilled workers, many of which have horrible environmental protections.
I'd rather focus on the solutions than what some people did wrong - of which there are plenty of examples for every good initiative.
>All I’m saying is be careful not to be focused on the single dimension of component-level repair in this case as well. Good intentions to improve one variable can backfire if it doesn’t consider its effect on the entire lifecycle.
You can only improve your model from past data. When it comes to major policy initiatives we are getting better at many things every passing decade. We only have to measure outcomes when it comes to childhood immunization, poverty, childhood mortality, healthcare, etc, etc. All of these were far far more complicated to execute than right to repair.
>It isn’t hard to imagine a similarity disastrous situation if tens of thousands of sweatshops started dumping flux and solvents in their rivers, when Apple may have a more environmentally controlled process in spite of a modular approach to repair. Just because something is labelled "recycling" doesn't guarantee that those processes are lower impact than any alternatives.
It also isn't hard to imagine things going well, and as long as we're imagining I prefer to be positive rather than negative. I am not only talking about recycling - but also reuse and repair. Devices are ending up in landfills because companies refuse to let repair shops do their job. This is why we need a right to repair law.
>I agree with the the public's right to repair, in that it compels companies to share the same repair parts, procedures, and tools that the company itself uses. But you're asking for more than that, which I think is unreasonable, and a misguided hill to die on, particularly for environmental reasons. If component level repair of iPhones was more accessible, you won't see this cottage industry flourishing in well-regulated high wage countries with strong information industries. This is high-skill labor intensive work. It will happen in low-wage countries with skilled workers, many of which have horrible environmental protections.
If things were open and available, you'd see experts from all walks of life - smart teenagers working on the lower hanging fruit (replacing buttons, screens, fixing charge ports etc) for extra cash on the side, older people who were left out of the labor market, etc, etc. I see immense potential. If specs were open it would be much easier to design an automated diagnostic tool-set to reduce the time-cost in evaluating which component has failed, etc, etc.
I see regular people discuss complicated car repairs about their alternator or fuel injector or vacuum lines, and this is only possible because the components are not a mystery. We have entire generations of people who grew up knowing for a fact that a car has components that can be repaired by experts. With consumer devices we have an entire generation that grew up thinking of electronics as blackboxes that you don't touch because you can break them and then its impossible to repair them, etc.
As far as the point about high-skill labor - no that is not necessarily true. It would be easy to develop tools to pinpoint the location of failure. Not only that, if I was a repair shop I'd replace the customers broken device phone like-like with a repaired one and then send the repair to a 'bulk repair' service which can then farm out the repairs based on complexity and other factors. Its very easy to imagine a system that CAN work, just as you say its easy to imagine a system that CAN'T :)
Equipment costs are capex and amortized over all repairs. Apple doesn’t do them because of economies of scale and the cost of hiring talented repairers.
This announcement is about consumer self-service repair. Not repair facilities justifying a capital expense.
But as you mention, the associated labor cost is prohibitive even for Apple. So who exactly is component-level repair of iPhones a good option for? It seems that it's more of an ideological position than a practical repair technique.
