99$ isn't really a "bargain" in the absolute sense. I encourage you to look at eBay buy it now listings for used/refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre NUCs, for example. You can get an entire computer with 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and a Skylake+ CPU for that kind of money.

A Skylake CPU is an 8 year old CPU. Why are you even comparing old desktop-class CPUs to the cost of a battery replacement on a brand new device?

I can buy an ancient server that consumes hundreds of watts for $100 too, it doesn't mean it's a good value.

I can also buy an entire iPhone SE 2020 or something, for $100 as well.

What does age have to do with the value proposition I put forward?

Has the battery chemistry in a iPhone 15 advanced significantly in the last 8 years? I don't think so.

> I can also buy an entire iPhone SE 2020 or something, for $100 as well.

Exactly, thanks for reinforcing my point.

I honestly don't know what you're even saying. The value proposition of an 8 year old piece of hardware that doesn't even have a battery in it is essentially unrelated to the cost or value of replacing a battery in a brand new phone.

Likewise, the used cost of a device that is functional today (iPhone SE 2020 in my example) is almost unrelated to the cost of the battery replacement. I think you'd find that attempting to repair the NUC you highlighted would soon exceed the $100 if you needed to do anything more than very basic repairs.

I was trying to put your original "100$ isn't unreasonable" into context. I think making a comparison between a roll of graphite dipped in some lithium salt and an entire computer made up of billions of transistors is a reasonable one.

You didn't address my parent question either. Because you either don't know (that's fine), or don't want to address the fact that there's very little that has changed in smartphone battery (or any lithium-ion battery, for that matter) composition or manufacture in a long while.

> I think you'd find that attempting to repair the NUC you highlighted would soon exceed the $100 if you needed to do anything more than very basic repairs.

Well I thought you didn't see the point of this comparison, so I don't know why you want to open that can of worms ;) But okay! A replacement 1TB nvme SSD costs 40 bucks (that's a new, in retail box, btw). A used stick of 16GB RAM costs 30 bucks. A used i5-6500T is 30 bucks.

Since you don't like comparing apple to ora--- er, batteries to computers, how about this? An iPhone 13 Max battery harvested from a broken-screen unit can be had for 30EUR on eBay. Except Apple doesn't want you to have that option. It wants to be the only game in town, and have folks like you justifying its monopolistic and unsustainable behavior.

And what exactly is stopping you from using said harvested battery? It works. You plug it in, and it's fine. Literally the only thing you miss is the battery life indicator (which, seems reasonable, since a harvested device may have had its battery life reset or something) and the pop-up that says this battery may not be an original component if you check the Settings menu. That's it. What's the issue here?

Well see now we've well and truly wandered away from the discussion of your original comment, and veered straight into the territory of what the original article was addressing.

> That's it. What's the issue here?

I guess you didn't read the original article, but it does touch on specifically why this is problematic, and can only lead to even worse outcomes in future.

It also links to this iFixit article, which might make things clearer for you?

https://www.ifixit.com/News/69320/how-parts-pairing-kills-in...

> the prices that Apple seems to be charging for common repairs seems quite reasonable nowadays.

That is besides the point. If Apple is the only one allowed to do repairs, they can set whatever price they want. That they've deigned to make it $99 is a price not determined by the market.

I didn't realize that Apple forbade anyone from doing repairs? If I want to replace the battery in my iPhone, there are a multitude of 3rd party vendors I can buy from. It'll tell me it can't verify the battery is authentic... but you can still use the battery. Same with screen, camera, etc.

If Apple wanted to actually forbid repairs, they wouldn't let you turn on the device if the battery wasn't authenticated, or the display wasn't authenticated, etc.

The point is that we shouldn't have to live under Apple's good graces and just hope they remain benevolent.

What is there to "live under"? You can already buy 3rd party parts, nobody is stopping this.

If Apple started bricking devices if they didn't have authentic parts in them... yeah, sure, I can see you point. But they don't, and you're free to repair devices yourself or take them to a repair shop who does this for you.

Frankly I don't see how this is particularly different from Samsung or any other android manufacturer, besides maybe aftermarket parts won't warn you that they're possibly not authentic.

> Frankly, the prices that Apple seems to be charging for common repairs seems quite reasonable nowadays

MacBook Air. Damaged charging chip. Laptop runs fine on AC. Battery is at 100% health. It just can't be charged (this is the summary from Apple after diagnostics).

Fine, I think. Maybe what, $2-300 with parts and labor?

"That will be $890 if you want to repair it. Maybe we can talk about getting you into a new Mac instead?"

$890. To repair a $1,100 laptop that is functioning perfectly other than being able to direct energy into a battery.

No other laptop manufacturer is going to offer you a repair that involves soldering, either. Everyone is just going to offer to replace the motherboard for a failure like that, and that motherboard contains all the most expensive components aside from the display. Nobody wants to lose money on the repairs, which is why soldering is right out and why a replacement motherboard is going to be over half the price of the machine before labor is thrown in. Your expectations were unrealistic.

I've gotten multiple laptops repaired by independent repair shops which did in fact desolder, change, and solder a part.

It's not actually as difficult as you think. The chip itself is likely just a few bucks, and it takes about an hour to make such a repair, so plenty of shops are happy charging a couple hundred dollars to do this.

Yes, some independent repair shops can do this. It doesn't scale. People who can diagnose such problems and solder well enough to make such repairs quickly and reliably are rare, and can usually make more money putting those skills to use elsewhere. There's no way every Apple store genius bar could have such a technician on staff.

It scales fine. Diagnosing and repairing these issues is not as hard as you think, and there aren't that many places that will pay, say, 40$/h for such a skill. It's also something you can train people on. The biggest problem is that you can't get the parts.

That's because if you have a schematic, you can build a diagnosis flowchart from it, so all you need is to know how to use a multimeter and you can follow the flowchart. If you can't figure it out from there, you cut your losses. Then the skill remaining is to be able to hand-solder SMD components - it's not an easy skill, but there are plenty of jobs that pay worse for harder skills and not many places that will pay you well for it (if you know one, I'm all ears).

You don't need to be particularly quick either. Such a repair for a really good technician might only take 20 minutes, an average one maybe 1.5 hours. At 50$/h, with a 50% success rate, you still make 150$ of expected marginal profit if you charge 300$. And of course many repairs are even easier. However most places pay around 25$/h and just ask that you have a high school diploma and some soldering experience.

But the fact that you just can't buy parts means that you need to buy donor boards, and that doesn't scale well.

> You don't need to be particularly quick either. Such a repair for a really good technician might only take 20 minutes, an average one maybe 1.5 hours.

Total bullshit. It takes more than 20 minutes just to disassemble and reassemble a laptop to get the motherboard out without damaging anything. Diagnosing the failed component can be quicker in some cases (eg. scorch marks), but checking the extent of collateral damage isn't that quick. A more realistic estimate would be about two or three repairs per day, unless you want to complicate things by stipulating that all the less skilled parts of the process (disassembly, fetching replacement parts reassembly, verifying repair worked) are to be done by a less skilled technician and only the actual board inspection, probing, and rework are done by the skilled technician. And then you have to consider that such repairs will never have a perfect success rate, so you need to be able to regularly eat the cost of wasted time on failed repairs while still keeping the cost of labor and maintaining an extensive parts inventory cheaper than the cost of a new motherboard.

It really doesn't take more than 20 minutes to get access to the motherboard of a MacBook. Are you under the notion that you need to fully strip down the computer before being able to diagnose it? You don't. You just pop the back cover, replace the battery with a bench power supply, and start testings. You can do most tests without removing the board from the chassis. You might eventually need to get access to the other side of the board, but again it doesn't take 20 minutes to do that.

Here's a video where they remove and put back a MacBook Air motherboard in 13 minutes, on camera (https://youtu.be/Sk8kj_y32mU?si=4fUoXux_zLIGg-9B).

I already took into account a pessimistic 50% repair success rate at a salary double what most shops pay.

So then the parent is right. If disassembling it took 13 minutes, then they’d have 7 minutes left to reassemble and that wouldn’t involve any actual repair.

It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble.

So then you have another 20 minutes to diagnose. If you can repair 50% of boards that make it far enough that you need to dissassemble for diagnosis and then you take an additional 30 minutes to do the repair with 50% success rate, you're spending 3.6 hours per repair, which is perfectly fine if you're charging 300$. These are pessimistic assumptions too - you often don't need to dissassemble the board to diagnose it, the person disassembling the board doesn't need to be paid as much as the person doing the repair, and you'll probably have a better than 50% repair success rate.

> It took 13 minutes to both disassemble and reassemble

Try linking to a video that doesn't fast forward the boring bits before doubling down on that 13 minute claim.