I would not want to be the person strapped to a medical device where “it looks fine, it works great” guy was the one that fixed it on the cheap so he could make an extra few dollars.

And why couldn't this be a post hoc PR rationalization for what just as well could be profiteering?

Now apply all those questions to the far less life-threatening concern of smartphones and laptops.

Yes, and they continue to be. Potentially, but no manufacturer, Apple or otherwise, has found one. Yes, but not at the scale that Apple operates. That's why Louis Rossman is a shyster. He has skills that are very rare but peddles his right to repair schtick as if every repair shop has those skills and then misrepresents the situation to create drama to drive engagement to his business and YouTube channel.

You can always go to a real apple repair depot, instead of the crook changing your screen, as you cited.

3rd parties having access to real apple parts, an easier ability to replace them, makes it easier for you to get good independent support. It has nothing to do with that crook you mentioned.

This was the default at one point. Look at the manual for any home appliance from the 1950s.

The difficulty in replacing an iphone screen is not that it's hard to plug it into its receptacle - the difficulty is in acquiring a part (they won't sell them) and then in opening the device, which requires skill and a specialized tool in pretty much every case.

Maybe, hold them together with small screws, instead of that.

"but then it will weigh an extra .237oz!"

Shut up.

It's not fair to dismiss this argument. The vast majority of people don't care if it's user serviceable and will prefer that the device weighs .237oz less than be user serviceable. This isn't some niche market we are talking about, we are 16 years after the release of the first iPhone. My account on this forum is 11 years old, and this point has been argued for almost that entire time. As much as been hand wringing about customers not caring about .237oz in favor of user serviceability, there have been countless smartphones released that people didn't buy. "Shut up" isn't a product strategy. "Perhaps they should design something users don't want" is a silly statement at this point.

One way, is to make it non-user serviceable, the other, to make it user serviceable.

Now, which do you spend immense sums researching? Which people do you hire for your company? And after you spend years down this path, tooling, hiring, designing, someone says "the environment counts, it should be user serviceable".

Well of course, with billions spent designing, and predicated upon current methods, AND with all the people you hire experts in closed, non-servicable design?

What sort of answer will you get?

Apple, and others, the entire industry, has created this industry to be like this.

If the same R&D was spent on user serviceable, it would happen. Cheaply. Easily.

So of course it's "very hard" to do user serviceable, because no one knows how, and no one has the experience, and no one is researching it.

And no, these little firms working at it, don't equate to Apple working at it.

It may not be on purpose, but to claim it isn't possible is unfair.

You know if the auto industry was left to its own devices, it would still be claiming electric cars weren't feasible too, right? And from their perspective, they were not! Because without billions in research, and iteration, it wasn't.

Just like with Apple and user serviceable parts.

Just as with cars, and bags, and everything else, we should legislate such requirements. So all players in the market must comply.

But sure we can keep pretending modularity is free and therefore of obviously a nonnegative option value to the user.

Laptops in the 90s had swappable batteries, as did phones. It's perfectly doable.

You have the scent of someone with Apple stock.

Fairphone has been around for 8 years. There was the Shift 6m. The Galaxy line was highly repairable up until S5. We are past the point of speculating if its "perfectly doable". People don't want them. To say there were "no options" is ludicrous.

>You have the scent of someone with Apple stock.

I guess it's easier to call me a shill than to accept the almost 20 years of failure for smartphones in this aspect. It's easier to pretend that there were no options than people not actually buying them.

Android isn't a malware riddled ecosystem and you can install 3rd party hardware and software.

Not sure if this is serious or sarcastic.

Backlight dimming can be implemented via PWM, which turns signal on and off at different frequencies to achieve the desired brightness setting from the backlight source. When it is poorly executed you tend to see that effect (more so at the lower backlight settings)

You've fallen for the scam.

There’s no scam here. Most of us find the official repair stuff to be a feature, not a crutch.