I'd guess that's their reasoning. But I'm not on their side here. I think they should be allowed to design products to make repairs as hard as possible if they want to, but once I buy it I should be able to do whatever I want with it. Plus there's not that much great experience to protect lately..
Other fuels may contain additives which make your Ford™ engine seem imperfect. A few misguided people are tempted by the siren call of the independent fuel suppliers to use something other than the Ford™ fuel specially made for your needs. When things go wrong, they spread rumors that Ford™ vehicles suck, when it was simply their misguided fault.
And that's why, as the proud owner of a Ford™ vehicle, you must go to a Ford™ gasoline station to buy Ford™ fuel. That's Ford™ fuel, available from a Ford™ station somewhere in your state.
Yes. The FCC actually sent out reminders to phone companies two days ago reminding them that use of aftermarket parts cannot void a warranty. This also applies to things like "warranty void if seal removed" stickers etc.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/04/10/ftc-reminds-phone-m...
The 30-pin connector lasted from the third-gen iPod (2003) through the iPhone 5 (2012), or around nine years. Lightning has remained the connector of choice since then for the past six years.
MagSafe debuted in 2006, was improved to MagSafe 2 in 2012, and is being phased out for USB-C (which is terrible, but I digress) in 2018.
One change in fifteen years for their handheld product lineup and two changes in twelve years for their laptop lineup seems pretty reasonable.
Which is why they added support for arbitrary file providers to integrate with iOS 11's Files app, and why they announced that iWork will support collaborating through Box last month?
Heck, they don’t even let me organize my home screen the way that I want to.
Microsoft was reamed over installing IE as the default browser on their OS, so how is not letting you change safari as the default on iOS any different?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-court/u-s-appeals-c...
"I can't change the default SMS app on my phone!" This has always been the case with the iPhone since the beginning. Until Apple says that this is now a new part of the OS, pretending like that was some kind of bait and switch or deceptive business practice is completely silly.
No they aren't - not here at least. Scanning this thread, it looks like they're just complaining.
> pretending like that was some kind of bait and switch or deceptive business practice is completely silly.
Who did that? Can you point out a specific comment? I certainly didn't and I don't see any other comments that did. I simply pointed out how Apple makes their product difficult to use by being so stingy with the level of access that they allow me to have.
Anyway, there is an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple right now. Since their iPhone does have somewhere around 50% marketshare in the USA I think there's a chance for it to succeed and I hope it does.
And what are the damages claimed against them? Even if they have 50% marketshare, they still have competition with a larger marketshare both domestic and worldwide. There's nothing that can be brought against them because they're not doing anything illegal or immoral.
The fact that there is a conflict of interest and the manufacturer will charge more doesn't mean that there aren't real issues.
... and at 3x the usual price.
Regardless, this is a pretty low-effort attempt to make a point.
Safety is one thing. Working against your customer another.
It's quite obvious that, to put it mildly, that's wishful thinking inspired by a heavily rose-tainted view of Apple.
Meanwhile, Apple is known for their extreme price gouging complemented with extreme actions to stop even their very own customers from even repairing their broken products, let alone upgrade them to a usable state.
Like what kind of actions? I can go to ifixit.com right now, order parts for my iPhone, order tools to work on my iPhone, and watch detailed instructions about how to repair my iPhone. (or Mac, or iPad, etc.)
The products are NOT easy to work on, but I am not aware of any action that Apple has taken against individual customers who want to repair their own products.
> let alone upgrade them to a usable state.
Personally speaking, I'm still using a 2008 Macbook Pro today because I was able to order and install more RAM (even above the recommended limit), a new SSD, and a new cooling fan.
While you may have the right to do that yourself, they don't want you to have the right to hire someone else to do it for you.
They also don't want you to have the right to get those parts for your iPhone.
Apple goes after producers and technicians, and not so much end-users. For one, I think end-users have rights, like the first-sale doctrine, which makes it harder for Apple to do anything to you other than terminate your warranty coverage.
Though I think they really would have preferred if they could sue you for jailbreaking an iPhone - they lost that court case.
I think the legality of jailbreaking was actually decided by the Library of Congress DMCA exception process.
iFixit was part of that effort. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8q89wb/how-to-fix... describes more about the company's history. I found it interesting.
https://es.ifixit.com/Answers/View/121003/The+replacement+ba... says (concerning a battery)
> The iPhone 4 Battery we sell is made to the same specifications as an Apple OEM part, but cannot be classified as 'OEM' because they are not made by Apple. Apple doesn't like to sell their OEM parts to anyone, so they are extremely hard to find. Our parts are brand new, fully tested, and made to the same quality as Apple OEM parts. They also come with a 6-month warranty."
The problem is, they are becoming less and less effective.
If you have no documentation or repair manuals, then it's harder to fix. An authorized repair site might know what error code 59276 means, but do you?
Apple famously started using a pentalobe screw, seemingly for the goal of making it harder for people who aren't at authorized service centers to carry out repairs. If a company uses non-standard parts when standard parts would work, this makes it harder for you to repair your own items.
In the pentalobe case, third-party vendors sprang up to sell the specialized screwdrivers, so it became less of a barrier. But imagine if the new screw were covered under patent that prevented substitutions .. and only authorized repair centers could buy the correct screwdriver.
Companies are using their rights under other laws to make it harder for you do to your own repairs. For example, farmers are turning to foreign hackers because farm equipment companies use the DMCA to prevent farmers from using anything other than authorized repair technicians from fixing the equipment. This equipment is increasingly reliant on DMCA-protectable software.
As you saw in this case in Norway, Apple wants to use its trademark power to prevent people from buying parts which would otherwise be legal
Are there any requirements would you force upon Apple in order to ensure that people have a reasonable ability "to repair any item they own or pay anyone else to do it?"
Make not mistake - it's also well-established law that the government can force companies to sell to people they might not otherwise want to sell to.
Are the iFixit parts genuine? I have no idea.
Just because some people might fail at certain tasks thinking they could perform aftermarket changes (so long my Palm IIIx and iPhone 3G) doesn't mean all people will fail at these things (wayhey hello new screen on my Thinkpad and significantly improved wifi on my XPS).
Meanwhile my MacBook Air now gathers dust and I was forced to fork out significantly more money for a MacBook Pro just to double the RAM from 4GB to 8GB. There's only one winner there (well, arguably two, as I still got a new laptop out of it...)
Well.... You can start by reading the news piece that's the source of this discussion. You know, the article on how Apple went to extreme actions to stop even their very own customers from even repairing their broken products or even upgrade them to a usable state.
The base model of their products are perfectly servicable and price competitive for the quality. They just know what the wealthier consumers are willing to shell out for.
Hooray Apple and its stockholders, but the consumer keeps on getting thoroughly screwed over and over again.
Capitalistic tendencies in capitalist companies is not shocking.
Otherwise that's merely another form of 'just following orders'.
1. Users swap parts in a way Apple didn't account for in software
2. Something goes wrong, users blame Apple for intentionally breaking third party repairs
3. Apple deals with it
Touch ID mismatch: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/19/error-53-...
Third party screens: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208067#1103
Third party screens, again: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/10/iphone-8-...
There’s almost no software that actually depends on you having the latest version.
Bad battery life or flash storage used to beyond it’s reasonable lifetime is a much bigger problem, a problem that can be solved by replacement parts, or even better: user replaceable batteries or SD-cards.
The first thing you are being told when becoming Apple Authorized Service provider is UP-SELL. Your main function and profit source is telling people "cant be repaired/repair will cost as much as new one, would you like this new model?"
I had water damage to a 2013 MBP, minor but nonetheless.
It passed all diagnostics. Ran fine on AC power. Battery diagnostics were fine too. But it wouldn't charge. "Charge circuit error".
No problem, I think. That's where the water damage was, no doubt. So I take it to Apple (in 2014, probably 18 months after purchase). I set my expectations, hmm, maybe $200-300? Let's go with $300, after labor, etc.
Haha.
"Sir, the charge circuitry is damaged and we need to replace that. You're looking at $899. Perhaps we should talk about you buying a new MacBook? Have you seen the latest?"
So, there's labor, etc. But you're going to tell me that to repair something, that by your own diagnostics, is fine except for this one part costs 70% of the new purchase price? I paid $1300, if I recall for the MBP. Take away something for labor, etc, and apparently the charging circuit is worth more than the CPU, the memory, the SSD, the screen?
No, now it serves as a driver for my step daughter's Garage Brand / Logic Pro setup with MIDI drums, keyboard, etc., remains on AC and has worked fine for several more years.
That's what a highly integrated machine gets you. Charge circuit defective => replace entire main board, including CPU, probably memory and storage too nowadays.
No one is doing component-level repairs any more.
Not entirely accurate, its just a highly skilled bit of work that you have to work to find people that can do it. This guy does it: https://www.rossmanngroup.com
Watch his youtube channel here and you can learn how to do it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2mFZoRqjw_ELax4Yisf6w
That said, in general you're right. Component level repair on multi layer pcb's with BGA or reflow soldering is... not all that economical in the amount of labor and skill and equipment involved.
I also possess a 2013 MBP with a Retina screen, proudly running well all these years later after many AAA games, overclocking, and innumerable HD repartionings. However, I broke my MBP's screen twice, and both times I called the closest Apple repair shop, and once the main "independent" repair ship in my city, and all three times the price came back as a nice, round $1000: nearly half of the original price!
So I looked around online (always had been vaguely aware of Right-to-Repair, and ifixit.org). After reading the excellent repair guide online and ordering what seemed a high-quality screen online, the repairs, which cost me no major headache or extreme difficulty, materially ended up costing around $300. Also, I want to mention that the aforementioned ifixit guide listed the highest difficulty grade to this type of repair.
So you are telling me, someone that had never engaged in computer or mechanical repairs before in his life, performed $700 of labor in just under an hour? No, the likelier answer is that Apple is simply rent-seeking in the sector of product repairs.
There is a vendor on eBay who does this, cannot recall his name.
But they will definitely desolder and replace any component wherever this is possible.
I've sent my laptop to this guy in NYC, and had a pleasant experience, even if he couldn't find my problem. (intermittent shutdowns)
I tried to stay with Lenovo, but after the endless waves of shitware, spyware and low quality hardware (!) I had to give up. Thinkpad’s great name is thanks to IBM, and perhaps, maybe, a bit of early Lenovo. Maybe.
If Lenovo is competing with anything, it’s with IBM.
I don't think this is particularly true, 2009-2012 era hardware designed/built by Lenovo/Quanta is also around in plentiful numbers.
This way I can upgrade to a new model when I feel it's time to.
My daughters new macbook pro dropped in to some very wet grass and the authorised repair shop wanted $1400 (in New Zealand) for a new motherboard to repair the water damage, the insurance company said to get a new one which we did.
The shop made it difficult to to get the old one back as it was being replaced with a new one and they said the deal price for the new one included a discount for the old which by pointing out on the apple web site it obviously did not.
Once it was returned about 5 weeks after going in I switched it on and nothing, five minutes of googling found a blown fuse and its been fine ever since, that was 2015 and I have since fixed two others with similar easy to fix problems.
It saddens me because the hardware is well designed in these computers and as an electronics engineer I hate to think how many good computers go to landfill for the sake of a $5 repair.
A Lot of my favourite companies are in on the act not just Apple (And Tesla Most Annoyingly) and it proves to me that the engineers in these firms have lost the high ground and now have a large controlling input from their legal departments. Personally I would keep quiet and take the money too but wouldn't be a happy engineer.
I think the thing is, even on a site where people brag about making $300K a year, everybody has way unrealistic ideas of what skilled labor costs. In my world, $55K is a good living for a programmer analyst, but that exact person gets billed out at over $120 an hour. An independent car mechanic might be $100/hr where I am; a dealer rate might be $160-$170. In the context of other types of skilled labor, that seems reasonable to me. Surely an auto technician and an electronics repair person are roughly comparable in skill, so should be in the same ballpark of costs.
But first world labor costs mean fixing things is frequently infeasible compared to replacing them. This is practically a cliche, but it seems like people will not or cannot come to terms with it.
Oh yes, one other thing I wanted to fix on my car was to replace the busted antenna. I bought one online for about $90. However, I was quoted something like $600 to install it. Well, I replaced the antenna on my car once, and I know it's a hassle when you try to thread it through and then it sticks or breaks, but the estimate was stunning.
All in all, I don't think Apple is as malicious as they seem - the problem is that expectations are set by robotic factories and third world labor costs.
A good mechanic will do a better job and usually be cheaper than what your local stealership will try and charge you for. Replacing a battery clamp will run you $60 at most Honda stealerships, versus a $5 part cost or $20 at the shop down the road.
On the other hand, I also have a 30 year old German sports car and limited ability to work on it myself (not having a house/garage) and I felt an independent European car specialist was taking advantage of me, so I tried a dealer of the marque. Keeping in mind they only want to replace things and charge incredible rates, it still seems like the best option for some repairs, to get it done right. When I had a fuel leak, I was happy to have the dealer replace the fuel pump and filter. Maybe somebody intrepid who charges half as much per hour could have just disassembled it and changed some seals, but how much labor is that and do I trust it not to result in setting my car on fire? I certainly wouldn't trust myself to do it.
Sometimes you want OEM parts and sometimes it doesn't matter so much. I'm going to continue to choose what to do on a case-by-case basis.
If you have an unusual old car, a lot of independent mechanics may be horrified at the prospect of working on it, plus the factory manual is out of print plus there's a very limited number of specialist mechanics. So, I'm not saying the cliched advice about avoiding the dealer and going to a good mechanic is completely unfounded, but it's of limited use if you haven't found a good independent. The good mechanics only survive because they're cheap and attract cheap customers, and don't specialize too much, so I say to myself - how can I expect them to be better than the dealer? If I was an employee and I was any good, why wouldn't I work at the dealer? Lots of dealers are terrible, but I infer that independents operate under really harsh constraints. The fact that their labor rates are so much less makes me paranoid both they are padding their hours and that they can't retain good mechanics.
As far as a battery clamp, I can order anything I need mail order, and I can compare mail order prices to the dealership and see if the markup is less than shipping costs. I can choose an OEM part or not. This really is just a separate choice, not a factor in deciding to go to the dealer. My Honda dealer will charge you a ridiculous price to put in a new cabin air filter, which costs almost nothing and is trivial to replace. But that doesn't mean I don't trust them to work on my car at all. Just that I'm careful to double check whether any given thing is reasonable.
But also, a major metro area may be different. I live in a three-city area that has about a million people combined, so it isn't in the middle of nowhere, but it's not like Seattle.
Presumably, anyway.
What problem in their design are you referring to?
Except that a lot of the times, you don't. The issue arises when the manufacturer adds some encryption to validate that a part is genuine (e.g. printer manufacturers using code signing to validate a printer cartridge is theirs) then suing people under the DMCA when they have to reverse-engineer the encryption just to repair their item.
Take the John Deere case for example (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/06/nebraska...) - farmers bought tractors. The tractors needed to be repaired. To do this, the farmers needed to either break John Deere's copy protection mechanisms or use John Deere's own expensive repair services. Deere sued the farmers for trying to repair their own tractors.
No, it's very clear they make their money by pushing new product.
Ford motorcars just cares about the brand, that is why you're only allowed to run them on officially licensed Ford fuel.
Philips lighting just cares about the brand, that is why you're only allowed to use Philips batteries.
Keurig just cares about the brand, that is why you're only allowed to use officially licensed coffee cups.
Miele just cares about the brand, that is why you're only allowed to use Miele dishwasher detergents.
...
What a horrible world that would be, don't you agree? Sometimes regulation of business really is for the benefit of all, as Apple so vividly reminds us of time and time again. Designing their products to be basically irreparable should be allowed but it would be good if they were made to fess up to this before people forked over their earnings to buy one of those discard-a-phones. In Europe manufacturers of white goods have to put an energy label on their products to give prospective customers some idea of how much energy the device uses in comparison to other current devices in a scale from A to D (up to 2010: A-G [1]). This concept could be adapted to device maintenance as well, covering both repair as well as replacement of consumables. Apple products would score 'D' on availability of spare parts and 'D' on third-party service access. Such a scheme might help in convincing manufacturers that serviceability can be a selling point if done right.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label
Adding further to this, Apple also wants 100% control over that experience and how that experience is deployed, including how and what can be repaired.
They can want it all they like, they just have no implicit right to it.
Not the 1st time they did that apparently. https://web.archive.org/web/20170103102649/blog.irepairnatio...
Source, please?
I’m sure they do it all the time, but this one incident actually caused worldwide news-coverage, even in tabloids read by normal people (that is, not just techies).
That’s the phone slowing the CPU when the battery gets old to prevent unexpected shutdowns. If you think this is “planned obselence” you misunderstand the issue.
iOS 11.3 now lets you disable this, so you can have full performance at the cost of unexpected shutdowns. Or you can just get an official battery replacement for $29 and your phone will be like new.
I'm sure there are examples with newer devices and iOS versions, but I wouldn't tell, because I didn't get any other afterwards.
Since when is buying a deliberately un-maintainable device 'the best experience'?
I would call that anti-user.
This is not subjective, this is not an argument over whether or not their laptops should have a replaceable battery. This is a blatant cash grab by them, at my expense. I gain nothing from this decision.
This practice may also be illegal in Europe.
I'm not sure this is an accurate representation of Apple's case. First, it seems like they are suing for trademark infringement, not for copyright infringement. Second, the repair shop owner is by no stretch of the imagination the end user of this product. Wikipedia gives this definition of end user:
"In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user)[a] is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product.[1][2][3] The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product,[4] such as sysops, system administrators, database administrators,[5] information technology experts, software professionals and computer technicians."
As for "no way markets them as OEM parts," this is not a very consumer-focussed answer. I think a reasonable step that this guy should have to take is to explicitly state, "I am not an authorized Apple repair technician and these parts are not guaranteed to be genuine Apple parts. They do not bear an Apple warranty and are not eligible for support by Authorized Apple Technicians."
Otherwise, from Apple's perspective, this repair shop owner is just taking advantage of Apple's reputation for quality and using it to make cut-rate repairs.
The point is that once the physical product was sold, consumers have the right to do whatever the hell they like with it, including sell it.
As to your latter statements, opinions will vary on this, but I believe it is well known that this guy's shop is not official / authorized by apple. People coming to this guy's shop are doing so to specifically avoid the drastically higher costs of seeking an authorized repair / replacement from apple. It'd be much easier to just mail it to apple, so I think there is an implied cognizance in seeking his services as an alternative. So I personally think as long as he is honest about not being an official apple repair shop, doesn't brandish their logos or in any way affirmatively hijack their brand, he should be safe from penalty of law.
Okay. So my mechanic needs to state that for every single manufacturer of every single component that he may potentially use to fix my car, right down to the level of individual capacitors on individual circuitboards, he is not an authorized technician for that item? That seems unduly onerous.
Except that the archive.org page for his site clearly shows that his site was marketing the replacements as genuine Apple parts and that it was changed after the court case began.
Apple now is a full on evil corporation.
I think this is the crux of the issue. The guy was importing refurbished parts with the logos covered even. They weren't counterfeits. How does a manufacturer have the right to sue for copyright infringement when it's just end users reselling authentic parts? The owner even states he in no way markets them as OEM parts.
Frankly I think it's pretty obvious apple is just trying to squeeze every cent out of these phones and it's a really bad hat to wear.