Actions like fighting right-to-repair bills in many states.

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 agree with all that. I wonder though... how is it that I can buy parts from IFixIt? I'm honestly asking--I read the linked story about Norway and I don't see how what iFixIt does is different... except that they don't do the repairs themselves. But it was the parts shipment that Apple objected to.

I think the legality of jailbreaking was actually decided by the Library of Congress DMCA exception process.

You are right, it was not a court case but a LoC exemption. Thanks for correcting my error!

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."

I'm just hearing about this "right to repair" thing. It sounds from this article that the "right to repair" also includes forcing Apple to sell their parts to be used by anyone for repair. If that is the case, I think it is going to far. I don't think Apple should be forced to sell their parts to anyone. But I do believe that anyone should be able to repair any item they own or pay anyone else to do it.

When you buy something, you do have pretty broad rights to repair it.

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.

You can't do that with a 2015 MacBook. Everything is soldered on.

Are the iFixit parts genuine? I have no idea.

This is actually much better than their previous designs which had 'replaceable parts' that by design would generally destroy the motherboard when replaced by technically-inclined users or non-Apple repair people. Now there isn't an illusion of repairability bundled with a false sense of defeat upon encountering failure.

I'm not sure it's better that GP wouldn't have been able to do what he did successfully, because other people might have failed thinking they could succeed.

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...)

It's tragic to see RAM moving in the opposite direction of other positive technologies like USB. Going from being difficult to reuse between devices to fixed and impossible to reuse, making entire devices disposable.

Just part out your MacBook Air. I just parted out a mid-2011 and got about US$600 for it, excluding the useless battery and frayed power cord.

Being forced to sell a product in perfectly good computer just because the manufacturer goes to extreme lengths to stop you from even performing the most trivial upgrade ever is not a solution. In fact, that caters to a single party's interests, which is the manufacturer itself. You're being forced by the manufacturer to waste a bigger chunk of your hard-earned money by giving it away to him.

> Like what kind of actions?

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.