If made to fulfill the word of the law without actually having to follow it in spirit, this would be my modus operandi too.
By designing $1200 deposit, $49 rental & two Pelican suitcases of tools and manuals, while keeping the battery replacement price same at $69 (what you'd normally pay in total at Store), they have entirely disincentivized self-repair without actually breaking any law.
At the same time, it means Americans often complain about EU regulations as being too vague as overly specific ones are too prone to workarounds. See much of the discussion about GDPR where it's clear many of the complainers just want to task their lawyers to find the right magic loophole clause to put in their ToS to avoid doing any of it, and get frustrated when the law is intended to avoid that exact behaviour
> Probably something to the extend of “tools to repair must be found in any general DIY store”.
Does everyone realize how insanely bad this would be for phone progress? If we’re forcing manufacturers to avoid specialty adhesives and tooling, the overall quality and size of phones would be greatly compromised.
I understand a lot of HN commenters will say they don’t care if their phones are twice as big and not waterproof as long as they can replace the battery with a screwdriver from Home Depot, but that’s not even close to typical consumer behavior.
People want small, waterproof phones. Making laws to force companies to compromise everything so 1% of buyers can swap batteries at home instead of paying for official repair service is one of the more out of touch product suggestions I’ve read on HN.
They should probably ban surface mount components as well. Those make it really hard to repair PCBs. </s>
You can argue about specific design/manufacturing decisions but, in the aggregate, but in general there's a huge amount of modern technology that's become much more complex and difficult to repair especially at the individual component level. But most people probably don't actually want to go back to 1980s vintage car phones.
What I don’t understand is why do people feel the need to force Apple to produce what they could have just gotten from another phone vendor? Is it about denying other people choice (so we are all forced to carry around bulkier phones), or do they believe that Apple would make the DIY repairable phone they wanted better than the other phone producers? It doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s because they want all the benefits of the iPhone and all of the openness and repair ability of the PinePhone, but they don’t want to have to compromise anywhere.
The reality is that the magical solution doesn’t exist and can’t practically exist. There would be major tradeoffs with much of what’s being suggested in this thread, many of which would make the phone undesirable to the people demanding it.
You're ignoring ecosystem lock-in, which Apple is extremely effective at (eg, iMessage's "green bubble" bullying).
Regulation fills the gap when freedom of choice & ease of movement isn't actually viable for most people. See also search engine regulations, even though the barrier for using a competing product is much lower than it is for switching smartphone ecosystems
Also in this case you're ignoring the bigger picture of the entire industry is incentivized to be "anti-consumer" and hamper repairs. Right to repair isn't about Apple, it's about everyone. Nobody is going after Apple specifically, they are just the leading example. Samsung, Motorola, etc... are all offenders here as well.
Presumably to minimize e-waste, as it's more likely people will hang onto their old phones (or hand them down or resell them) if they can revitalize them with a cheap battery/display swap.
Things like recycling marks, appliance energy efficiency etc are all already regulated.
Because they feel that society should regulate entities like Apple to behave this way because they feel it's better for them as individuals and society as a whole if a corporation the size of Apple was regulated in this fashion?
I think, barring the USB-C issue which is more supportive of industry wide efforts to standardize and reduce e-waste, you cannot by any legal instrument force an equipment manufacturer to stick to certain parts or boiler plate designs, which can be seen as harming their competitiveness.
This argument can be construed by Apple lawyers as exerting unfavorable judicial bias to downgrade/bottleneck technical capabilities, which Apple would have otherwise provided to its customers & claim significant advantage over competition in offering their products.
EU or not, such regulation will be dead fish in water unless smartly crafted.
> The real victory will come months or years down the road, though. That’s when Apple can tell legislators it tried to give right-to-repair advocates what they wanted — but that consumers overwhelmingly decided Apple knows best.
I don’t know what Apple could have done better here. For $50 they shipped, both ways, all the expensive equipment Apple themselves use to repair their devices.
For how adamant Apple has been about the price of genuine parts for so long I’m starting to think that they actually sell replacement batteries at cost and eat the labor. Because having used 3rd party batteries they’re about half the cost but they degrade is way fewer cycles.
The problem with “right to repair” is that people thought they could hitch what they really wanted — “right to use cheaper 3rd party parts” which is a tougher political sell than “right to cosplay as the underpaid Apple service tech.”
They already bought it. What they want is autonomy with the product they purchased. They want Apple to support their rights and for Apple to not be babies about it.
Did they conveniently forget to say that Apple will give you a further refund in you return the replaced part? Ah, yes, they did. In the case of the battery for iPhone 13 mini described in the article, that's an additional refund of $24.15.
Since I've never heard of anyone getting back the broken part when getting an in-store repair, it'd be reasonable to compare at the $44.85 price, wouldn't it?
It's $49 to have Apple ship two Pelican cases of tools to you, to have you use them for the week, then to ship them back to Apple and (presumably) to have someone inventory them to make sure there's nothing missing and that they're reading to ship out to the next person.
No, I think Apple is making money in slow-walking an actual, practical repair program and if we lived in a society with proper regulatory bodies they would get their hand slapped so hard for doing so.
I have never understood this kind of compliance. The hordes that buy their disposable garbage aren't going to care, they've shown repeatedly that they're insensitive to, sometimes even aggressive towards their own autonomy. So why do this? Just to _waste_ more?
it is less that i am against my own autonomy and more that i value my time aggressively and don't want to spend it repairing shit i don't want to repair
i know i _can_ repair my own stuff. i've worked soldering irons and have a heat gun and could go into it again if i need to. i just don't want to make the time.
i don't want to spend hours repairing my iDevices. been there, done that. i'm not fucking with impenetrable adhesives and cracking screens and ultra thin wires, especially when i'm doing so at the cost of losing waterproofing, faceID, and warranty (extremely important to me).
(i completely get why apple disables faceID for screen replacements; gotta protect the software supply chain)
i'd much rather drive to my apple store 15 mins away, go to the genius bar and say "iphone broke" and get a new one right there or have it repaired in a few hours.
Probably to make sure that their iPhone repair business (and that of their authorized partners) doesn’t just collapse by getting massively undercut by unauthorized resellers that can use the official repair kit.
IMO the $1200 deposit is less ridiculous than the same-as-store $70 battery price. If the cost for the new battery were at wholesale prices, and one were able to purchase tools from the kit individually, I think that would be the best Apple could do (besides redesigning their devices to make repair easier).
Tools always cost money, a capital investment which ends up being vested in professionals that buy the tools once and then repair many people's gadgets. Right to repair is just as much about empowering independent repair shops as the individual DIYer.
Us DIYers have kind of gotten spoiled with the continually dropping prices of tools and parts combined with the always rising price of labor and overhead. For example, I was just shamelessly quoted $1300 for a rear brake job (wtf?). For that price I could buy all the tools to do the job, premium parts, and still come out favorably compared to engineering rates.
I have a standing offer for my friends: I’ll do a brake job with you in my driveway to show you how easy and cheap it is. It’s common for those $1000+ dealer quotes to be $75-$150 in parts, $5 in consumables, and < 90 minutes from door open to putting the last cleaned tool away (while explaining each step to them and having them do at least part of each step).
Over 20 years, I’ve done this for a few handfuls of people. How many have switched to DIYing anything more than filling washer fluid and maybe replacing a lamp? One. (Two others have switched to indy mechanics.)
The others keep complaining about their $800-1250 per axle brake jobs and $2500+ service visits at the dealer and how expensive it is to own a car, but keep right on doing it. <shrug />
Yeah, the "could" in my comment was only because I already own the tools, and I had just done the brakes on the other car. I might take the excuse to buy a new jack though, so I can lift up to the jack stands without needing to cheat with blocks.
The funny thing is they also wanted $700 to adjust the valve clearances. This is expensive (it's the stealership after all), but I might have said yes just to have one less thing on my docket. However after the outrageous brake quote put me in the mindset to DIY, I figure I might as well do that myself as well.
This is a bad take, because Apple has shown how they do this with the App Store and it their behavior there was far uglier than providing high-quality, albeit bulk and awkward, repair equipment.
By designing $1200 deposit, $49 rental & two Pelican suitcases of tools and manuals, while keeping the battery replacement price same at $69 (what you'd normally pay in total at Store), they have entirely disincentivized self-repair without actually breaking any law.
Masterstroke /s