As someone who has repaired Apple devices over the years, swearing under my breath each time they put new hurdles in the way, it is so refreshing to see a full repair manual for my relatively new phone [0]. Lots of negativity in the comments but it is so relieving to see Apple change course and lift the curtain.
Also adding to the anecdotes with my own:
I have never needed a case for my phones or computers, and have barely even scratched the shell. I go on adventures for a good portion of the year and still manage to keep it intact, so i scratch my head when people say they break easily or that they always shatter their screen, it really seems to go beyond accidental damage and stray into carelessness.
It's not as if Apple didn't do everything they could to not do this. They were forced kicking and screaming by the EU to do this, and now they are trying to take credit for doing it.
Let Apple embrace this forced change. Let them squeeze as much money as they can out of doing the right thing. This is no time to be petty, it's win-win.
It's not the right thing if its prohibitively expensive and inaccessible. The right thing is doing it without the inflated costs and expensive leased equipment. The right thing is not building your product in such a way as to require specialised equipment in the first place.
No specialized equipment? So an iPhone / Mac has to be repairable with a consumer Phillips head screwdriver? Full size? Or is a T6 screw allowed? How about glue?
Who is to make the call about what specialized equipment and level of expense is ok enough by you? If people are buying the phones for the features they offer and the way they're constructed, and they offer a repair path, what do you suggest we do now, to satisfy your criteria?
For starter they could use 0.1mm thicker glue pads so that they won’t break so easy. If anyone tried to change battery on iPhone then knows how easy they are to break then you have to resort to using dental floss or fishing line as an improvised saw to remove the battery.
Seriously there is enough space to make it just 0.1mm thicker
Exactly, they glue is that thick for a reason, they very carefully design everything to be a perfectly integrated device. If everyone got their 0.1mm we are looking at a phone that feels substantially thicker.
Apple know better than random people on hacker news about what makes their phones sell, they don’t make them thinner for no reason.
So, that's one part out of thousands. You're going to write up the 100 page list of all the considerations for how it has to be done, just for the iPhone? And that's going to be enacted into law/regulation?
Why is Apple unable to make sane decisions about their product to make it legitimately repairable? Do we need to result to specific laws for every common sense thing?
If common sense ruled us, we wouldn't need any laws. Maybe you're not thinking about how laws and regulations work, but they usually require specific wording and criteria to be laid out so that companies/people/governments know what is ok to do, and what is not ok to do. What criteria are they to be held in legal jeopardy for not following?
So are you proposing that you simply tell companies to use "good design principles and sane decisions" and leave it at that? It's up to their interpretation? How does that get us something different from what we have today, and how could you say they didn't follow that regulation then? "We did use good and sane design principles that are repairable."
If you can't say what rules (words and details) govern what you want to happen, how can you pass a law that gets people to do what you want?
I don't think you're arguing from a good place - specific concerns have been called out about pretty specific design flaws from Apple. Instantly upgrading those criticisms to a full generalization about all components in the phone doesn't feel particularly constructive.
Do I think that Apple shouldn't use some proprietary thermal paste to mount their heatsinks? I don't really care and I don't think anyone here does either - but the tools to get general access to the device body are a different matter... they're necessary for a wide range of relatively simple repair operations.
> A product like this would not be popular because it would be thicker, heavier, and have worse specs.
This is not a statement you can just make with no evidence and expect people to take at face value.
At least for laptops this is a myth. The Framework laptop has the same dimensions and weight as a Macbook air (give or take a few tenths of an inch on width/height but same thickness - I believe they kinda did this intentionally to call out Apple) and is fully repairable with individually replaceable parts.
Many (most?) of the decisions that Apple make that make their systems less repairable are not things that meaningfully impact weight or size, it's just an excuse that they've been very successful in seeding in the minds of consumers.
I think it's a tall order to argue that worse performance is a necessary requirement of repairability and height and weight are constantly obsessed over but very few people I've met actually care about it (and a fair number like the Mac interface but would be happy to trade height for keyboard improvements).
Id claim it’s the products bought without clear alternative choices or understanding in the disposability of the designs. When I bought a MacBook Air around 2012, I didn’t expect the battery to be so remarkably difficult to replace as every laptop I had owned prior had removable batteries. Given the choice of a bigger computer with a replaceable battery/ram and probably better cooling, I’d choose that instantly.
> I didn’t expect the battery to be so remarkably difficult to replace
Having seen a MacBook air, I’d be shocked if the battery weren’t remarkably difficult to replace. What was it about the almost paper thin form factor back than that lead you to believe you could just pop the battery out?
Although the laptops are thin, I think it’d be possible to use less glue when setting the internal parts and to use screws that have heads that provide more grip to screwdrivers.
Apple could also provide affordable batteries for sale in the event that a person wants a 3rd party professional to replace them.
Id claim that this was somewhat of a turning point when computers started becoming more disposable and that competing companies followed suit. At the time I owned a flat phone with replaceable battery.
This is really not the gotcha you seem to think it is. One is unlikely to learn how difficult repairs on a given device are until deep into the ownership cycle and well past any return window.
The poster claimed to prefer thicker laptops with replaceable batteries. There were lots of thicker laptops out there with obviously replaceable batteries. If it was such a priority, there were plenty of options.
People are acting like they didn't have a choice but to choose a laptop with a battery glued in. No, the poster chose that machine at the time. There were laptops on the market with replaceable batteries, it just wasn't really their priority as they claim. If it was their priority, you'd think they would have bothered checking.
If I claim having a lot of RAM is important for my machine, and then I buy a laptop with 2GB, I can't really go about arguing I didn't have a choice but to buy the 2GB machine. I just didn't bother investigating the specs and figure out there are machines much more suited for my demands.
There were teardown reviews of the MBA almost instantly when it came out. The knowledge was there, if it was a priority they could have easily known. I'm arguing it wasn't really a priority, I'm sure they were plenty satisfied with that device the day they bought it. They went and choose a machine without bothering to consider if the battery was user serviceable. They might say now it's a priority, but when they paid for the machine it clearly wasn't.
And yet every Apple product I've ever used was pretty below average and absolutely normal things like nice keyboards, and mice with useful buttons. Their laptops, for example, often lack absolutely fundamentally basic things like common ports. And there are no replaceable batteries! As far as I'm concerned, their stuff is half baked at best.
That sounds like a picture perfect argument for industry-wide regulation. People don't want thicker phones, but if it must be done, then the market should compete to do it at the lowest overall cost.
Have you looked inside an iPhone? There’s barely any extra space at all for anything. Adding slots for people to take things apart, put in new commodity parts, and then seal the device up so it’s waterproof again are not zero-cost.
Sure, but mind you Apple's phones have gotten thicker over the past 5 years (as have their laptops), and that certainly hasn't impacted sales in any meaningful capacity. People don't really care, and I don't buy the arguement that it's impossible for Apple to design things to be more repair-friendly. Simple changes like socketing the battery or limiting OEM component DRM would make all the difference, but Apple actively fights against any changes that would threaten their authority over the iPhone and it's aftermarket profitability. Maybe there is a technical limitation here, but I'm not convinced the world's largest engineering team can't fix it with their 100 billion dollars in liquid R&D funding.
Can you provide a source for "gotten thicker"? I'm looking at https://www.knowyourmobile.com/user-guides/iphone-size-compa... and the iphone x (2017) was 7.7mm and the iphones 12 and 13 were both 7.3-7.4mm. Only the iPhone 11 increased thickness and even then only by a fraction of a millimeter.
This seems like the worst kind of regulation. Not only is the goal not one worth pursuing (subsidizing the handful of people who want to repair their own phone, among whom I'm included), but it also approaches it in the worst way--forcing everyone to accept awful tradeoffs in the form of a bulky phone. If you insist on subsidizing the few at the expense of the many, a more intelligent approach would be to buy fewer public tool sets that can be checked out from a public library or similar. Of course, the market already solves this kind of problem all the time (and very well) in the forms of tool shares, rentals, and maker spaces--this is a solution in search of a problem.
No, it's about making the phones themselves more repairable so that it makes financial sense to have them repaired versus buying new ones all the time. It would also be great if they were more robust in general. Even with the correct tools, and decent skills, repairing a lot of common issues on modern phones is really expensive and complex. After a couple years of value depreciation, it is often questionable whether it's even worth it.
The problem is that today, the incentives are all fucked up. Everyone's just trying to make phones with increasingly greater sex appeal every year so that they can convince consumers to throw out their perfectly working phones. Granted, there was obviously rapid progress for quite a while, but it has slowed down a considerable amount; it's hard to argue that this year's phone line ups offers something significantly game changing versus last year's. People have been saying this for a while, but it just gets truer every year. At best, real meaningful differences occur around every three years or so now.
I really don't think corporations will magically decide to all agree to stop this completely unsustainable and pointless madness. It seems like the perfect place for regulation, because it puts everyone on a level playing field.
I also think people are imagining that the result will be phones that all look and feel like the PinePhone (which, BTW, feels pretty nice in my opinion) but honestly, I seriously doubt that's the case. The degree of corner cutting going on today to get the smallest possible footprint is insane (and yes, I've opened up a reasonably modern phone; the latest being an iPhone XS.) We were perfectly happy with significantly more repairable phones that were not much bulkier...
In my opinion, the concerns are much ado about nothing.
> No, it's about making the phones themselves more repairable so that it makes financial sense to have them repaired versus buying new ones all the time.
I'm strongly biased in favor of fixing stuff versus replacing stuff--I don't like our consumerist, disposability culture. But "making phones repairable" has virtually nothing to do with this, because "my phone broke" is not a major driver behind replacing phones. Rather, people replace phones because new models offer compelling features, because new software runs slowly on their older phone, or because their old phone is no longer supported by the software they want/need.
Making phones repairable isn't going to fix this problem.
You're deluding yourself if you think there aren't significant tradeoffs in making a device serviceable without specialty tools. "Bulkier" is a common one, but you could keep the size down by sacrificing performance (in order to keep the heat down and/or to make do with a smaller battery). I'm not sure exactly what kinds of tradeoffs are being made, but (for example) according to Tom's Hardware, the Framework laptop has half the battery life of the MacBook Air.
Ideally we don't debate/decide public policy based on one person's preferences, and clearly a solid majority of people want a thinner phone, or else companies wouldn't waste the effort competing on thinness.
A 2021 Macbook is barely thinner or lighter than a Frame.work laptop. The difference is negligible. And the latter is made to be super easy to open and self service.
Nonsense. This isn't prohibitively expensive, as anyone who has googled it for 5 seconds knows, so why tell that kind of lie? And it's also obviously very very accessible.
Something that always felt strange upon seeing critiques of Apple's execution of guaranteed self-repair rights is that those critics are complaining about cost, about money.
To whom I say: Bitch, you asked/demanded Right To Repair and y'all finally got Right To Repair. Money shouldn't be a concern, because that was never part of the demands. If you are going to forsake self-repair because it's (relatively) cheaper to get Apple to do it instead, you never truly cared about Right To Repair.
Right To Repair was never about fixing something for cheaper than the OEM, it has always been about having a practical and realistic option to effect repairs yourself. How much it ends up costing you is an unrelated matter.
Similar to Microsoft's volte face supporting Linux after over a decade spent trying to destroy it by bankrolling SCO's lawsuit and peddling their own bogus Linux patent racket.
anecdotally there are two kinds of people, the people who break their phone twice a year and the people who break one maybe every 10 years. It'd be really interesting to see a probability distribution function of failure rates.
Yup. I got my first smartphone in 2010. In those 12 years, I've only cracked a single one, and there were extenuating circumstances.
It was my Droid Turbo, which was known for having a shatter-proof screen. One of the things that helped achieve its durability was that the bezel actually had a lip around the screen, so if it got dropped, then the screen glass never took the impact.
That changed once the battery had reached nearly 4 years of age and had started to swell, pushing the screen outside the bezel. Dropped it onto concrete and it got one crack across it.
I replaced it with a Pixel 3, and then later a Pixel 6 Pro. I put cases on them, but they're thin TPU, and I use them mostly for being able to have a better grip, since the trend for phones now is a slick glass back which offers zero grip in your hand.
I might just opt for a pop-socket on my next phone. To be honest, I rolled my eyes at them at first, but I realized it was just cynicism for hating popular things. They're actually quite nice for using your phone one-handed, and almost a must-have considering how big phones have gotten.
That's really not a fair comparison. There are plenty of people who are elderly or dealing with disc injuries where they are prone to losing their grip or slipping a phone when moving about, picking it out of their pocket, etc.
While you may be in good health, it's important to remember not everyone is the same and some people are dealing with a variety of issues.
Parent comment seems more focused on the probability/distribution than in the reasons why.
The anecdote seems true from my experience as well; people tend to either break their phones often or very rarely/not at all. Of course it could be that you are far more likely to take notice of someone breaking their phone if it happens often.
I got my first smartphone in 2011. I got my first iPhone in 2016. I bought an iPhone XR in the fall of 2019, and got a glass screen protector with it, mainly because by then Apple had those nice jigs that let the staff put it on in about three minutes perfectly. In January 2021, my phone fell about a foot from my pocket, landed screen-down on the driveway. A chip in the glass screen protector eventually (about three months) turned into a crack. I went to Apple and had another screen protector turned on.
That's the only time I've come close to damaging a smartphone or tablet screen.
Anecdote - my wife went through 3 iPhone screens in the course of 18 months due to dropped phones (6, 8, 8) but then she got a plus-sized iPhone and an otter box case and hasn't broken one in years.
yup I think the "uses a case vs doesn't use a case" is a strong factor here. I've always used otterbox cases and never broken a phone - I've actually broken one of the otterbox cases, but never the phone itself.
And the one ipad I've broken, I broke one time when I took it out of a case for a bit and ended up taking a few weeks to put it back in...
Yes, this. I have two kids and am always juggling different things. I have dry hands that are crusted from manual labor. They don't have the same kind of grip that they used to have. Between those two factors, I drop my phone at least once a week.
The glass back of my phone was smashed by a grocery store turnstile without ever leaving my pocket. Assigning user error all the time is a mistake - sometimes the product is just fragile.
I'd have an easier time feeling relieved if the limited parts selection and prices weren't obviously calculated to make self-repair extremely undesirable. Not to mention you can't order a part until you've registered with Apple - ensuring third parties can't sock up on parts for quick in-store repairs.
Parts availability and pricing wouldn't be so much of a problem if Apple would stop getting in the way of third parties replacing broken parts with with genuine OEM parts from donor devices, selling those parts themselves, and sharing schematics for component-level repairs. The vitality of the classic car community is an excellent example of how valuable the used parts market is to independent repair.
It's a start and Apple deserves credit for taking a few steps in the right direction. But the limitations of this program highlight how it is obviously nothing more than ammunition for their lobbying efforts against the right-to-repair movement.
When you said "full repair manual" I was expecting something much more interesting, e.g. with schematics and boardviews which I bet many un-authorized repair shops already have, but after taking a look, I'd say it's only better than nothing. It looks more like a very detailed parts-swapping guide, probably the internal training material they already had, with additional lawyer-motivated warnings/disclaimers added.
...and installing the battery requires a special tool? It reminds me of German engineering, or some parody thereof.
> I go on adventures for a good portion of the year and still manage to keep it intact, so i scratch my head when people say they break easily or that they always shatter their screen, it really seems to go beyond accidental damage and stray into carelessness.
Children may be one of the cause of the breakage. It's not always been possible to keep my phone out of their hands, and for young children, they don't have fully developed motor skills yet, and drop things often. Even with a case, they managed to find the exact angle to drop the phone to crack the screen. I'm considering whether to get a full coverage case including screen cover to protect the phone from every possible drop angle, just so I don't have to worry about this anymore.
My wife set her iphone6 down on the floor next to her seat at a party once, and then stepped on it with a stiletto (or some other thin-healed high-heal shoe, idk women's fashion). I'm still not sure if it was an accident or if she wanted an excuse to upgrade. :/
Valve's approach to the Steam Deck has been a refreshing approach in all this. It is a well-built product and replacement parts are a few clicks away https://www.ifixit.com/Parts/Steam_Deck
People keep asking me why I don't like Apple products. I actually like most of their actual products, but their attitude as a company is frustrating. I don't want to pay a premium to feel limited.
I feel you. I want Apple's privacy advantages but every single time I use an Apple product I just feel like I can barely do anything useful with it. Do you still have to jailbreak your iphone to set a custom ringtone?
Edit: I just checked and amazingly, yes. Unless you have a mac from a specific time with specific software to maybe help you out. If it's a song available on itunes you might be able to buy it as a ringtone but if it's something like your own recording, and you don't have a mac, basically go die in a ditch. Embarrassing.
Can I doubt about the privacy advantages part? I've noticed that Apple really love to talk about such things. But, they are making string-attached proprietary equipments behind a closed door, and as far as I know, they don't have a formal declaration on what exactly is the privacy that they've claimed to guard.
So how to actually prove that they do care and protects user privacy instead of just use the word to make their ads more appearing?
Apple specifically does things the hard way so they don't need to know anything about you.
Siri works mostly on-device and any queries are anonymised. This is one of the reasons why it's not as good as Google's Assistant. Assistant on the other hand is 100% cloud-based, but has been moving more to on-device.
Same with Apple Maps, they cut any fetched route to multiple legs and fetch each individually so they won't accidentally know where you are going. All suggestions on possible destinations are based on on-device ML. Google's version just happily uploads every place you've ever been to the cloud and uses that to calculate possible destinations.
I think it's also reasonable to trust Apple to actually implement the security and privacy features they claim to, because those features are a part of their product, which means their incentives are clearly aligned, and there is some professional auditing being done.
I think it's even more reasonable to have a relative preference for Apple products, when compared to Google products, because Google's incentives are clearly perversely aligned against user privacy.
Even so, the fact that AOSP can be readily audited by literally anyone does create a more provable reason to trust devices running Android. This does, unfortunately, have some serious limitations, like the fact that most Android devices can only run whatever closed-source AOSP fork the manufacturer flashes on it, and Android is considered generally incomplete without the closed-source Google Play store and its associated apps.
It’s always weird to me when I hear people with custom ringtones on their phones, it feels super boomer and a bit embarrassing. I’m not sure I’ve even heard my iPhone 12 ever audibly ring, vibrate or gtfo.
Thinking on it, I think I’ve heard my 12 mini ring a couple of times, but always in the context of “What? Weird, why is that on?”
I had a custom ring tone on my first iPhone, and probably the Android after that. Since then, it’s never been worth the effort. I’m rarely in a situation where I need to hear my phone ring.
It's nice to identify callers if your pone rings a lot. Unknown callers get a different ring. It's also nice to be able to customize what you own. I know not everyone wants to customize but it's hard to argue that it not a nice feature to have when you want it. Imagine being able to have a custom start up chime for your car. Now imagine every other car is able to do it except for yours. Thats not very fun.
I was always surprised at how good the one wheel after market parts stuff was. Like you could replace almost everything besides the front foot pad, brains, and motor. I guess most of it is just injected molded plastic bolted on with screws but still it was nice to have the option of different rear foot pads, fenders, tires, etc.
How have you found the switch? Still enjoy riding as much? I had to sell my One Wheel because I moved and the new area the roads were too annoying to cruise on. I've been considering it since the bigger wheels might make it easier to ride on the rougher roads.
The learning curve is significantly steeper. I am already (2-3 weeks) feeling a more frequent urge to go for a ride, compared to the OW, but they say it takes about 6mo for it to really click and drag you in.
It definitely doesn't feel as cool, though, and doesn't start conversations.
How is the EUC on slightly rougher roads? The roads around me aren't as well maintained as some places. It's not horrible, but bad enough that my one friend with a OneWheel doesnt like riding around my neighborhood.
I have been considering the EUC as an alternative.
The larger wheel definitely handles challenges better than a OneWheel, it's one of the "known advantages" of EUCs. That being said, the advantage only applies in the forwards/backwards axis. Ruts and hitting things from the side may challenge and newbie. Many EUCs have shock absorbers.
Caveat: repair now available for Mac Notebooks "with the M1 family of chips" - this is reasonable, I think. However, I do feel badly because I have a 2017 with a noisy fan that needs to be replaced, but I don't think I'll ever be able to get the precisely OEM Apple-blessed one. This is important to me because of the non-annoying whoosh sound that the varied blade spacing of the OEM fans normally provide. My options are (1) used or (2) rando cross-your-fingers 'brand' fan. I guess I could just try a variety of those no-names and use the least annoying one.
My 2017 had a clicking/buzzing fan when it was about 2 years old. I bought a used fan from a seller on eBay (I think it was a $12 part), took the laptop apart (involved some very tiny screws) and replaced it and it's been fine ever since. There's even videos on YouTube you can follow along with.
Nowhere near as simple as repairs on the old non-Retina, unibody machines but easier than an iPad.
And do it soon, or the 7 year “legacy” period might kick in. Apple has a cut-off past which they will not service or support their products. It’s usually 5-7 years from when they were first or last sold. (Actually, it’s a bit arbitrary if you ask me, because Apple is the one that sets whether a product is still serviceable or not, regardless of how long it’s been.)
I'm not seeing the viable alternative to a clearly-stated policy on the duration of repair services.
Ok. I can imagine a world where I could bring in an Apple II from 1980 and get it serviced at a shiny glass Apple store. That would be pretty cool in fact, leaving aside the small but entirely real population of enthusiasts who would lose income, livelihood in some cases.
But it doesn't seem like a reasonable demand. At some point the specialist aftermarket takes over. Clearly stating when that will be in advance is the most one can ask for.
They could give out an expiration date for repair services at the moment of purchase, instead of having what comes across as a yearly lottery for current owners.
The relevant quote "Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago".
"More than 5 and less than 7" means some time in the sixth year. It couldn't be more clear than it is without them putting a retirement party on the calendar.
Maybe they should?
Edit to add: of course you don't want to know how long the device will be supported, to the day, because this policy gives a minimum of the sixth year after the date of purchase, and if they sell it for longer, they'll repair it for longer as well.
I’m impressed Apple supports iPhones for 7 years from when they went on sale, but 5 years from when they stopped selling them varies by product line.
On the Watch, it’s 3 years. It’s unfortunate because you could have bought a Series 3 this year and learned you will not get a software update for it ever again.
Where this 5-7 year legacy thing gets annoying is computer hardware - it used to be that you could bring in an Intel MacBook of any year and get it serviced, but at some point they cut costs and instituted this 5-7 year “legacy” policy, without actually specifically telling anyone any dates as to when their devices would or would not be serviced. The rule of thumb for computers is that if you can’t get OS updates, you’re probably not going to get spare parts, but that isn’t always the case either.
Mandate a reasonable support delay, beyond the 5-to-7-years that seems to be the gold standard today. A computer from 10 years ago can still do a lot of things.
2012 macbook pro user checking in. If it weren't possible to work on this computer myself, I wouldn't be able to use it anymore. It's been upgraded to 8gb of RAM then 16gb. It's been given an SSD. Various flex cables and the trackpad have been replaced. Battery has been replaced. All I do is use this thing for stackoverflow, email, and ssh, compute stuff happens on a server anyhow. As long as I can source parts off ebay, I don't see any reason why this thing can't make it to 20 and beyond.
Why can't they repair older computers? Car dealers do. You just might wait longer for parts. Apple should do this so users always get decent parts. Imagine how nice it would be if you did have an old Apple II and you could get it serviced just like you can get your 1980s honda serviced at the dealership today.
Do you want to pay 25% more for Apple products so they can afford to train hundreds of repair techs to repair 10-year-old stuff, and keep supply chains alive to keep supplying 10-year-old parts, or, apparently, by your standards, 45-year-old parts?
Vehicle manufacturers don’t actually make all the spare parts, other firms find it worth it to do so for them. Similarly, I could buy some common parts for the 2014 Mac mini that was easy to service on Amazon, without waiting for Apple to return my call. The annoying part is that Apple uses security to sign and enforce their chips vs third-party replacements.
On top of that, some repairs are really cheap but require electrical work. For these, you could visit a specialist, just as not every shop or dealer will service every car.
The gotcha is that with Apple, you can only service it at Apple & friends, with Apple parts. While they enforce this, yes, they could indeed offer such a program, and it wouldn’t cost 25% more.
Training people every year on the newest models costs more than having folks who repaired the 2008, 2011, 2014 and 2016 models continue to do so, etc.
1) You're citing the 2014 Mac mini because it's an outlier, and also old enough that some things which are integrated into the motherboard now (RAM, storage), weren't then. Coincidentally, these are the two most common reasons you'd ever want to open up and service or upgrade a Mac.
2) This isn't the auto industry; it's not as easy for third parties to make and stock these parts, and also, computers become obsolete long before cars do, for reasons that have nothing to do with repairability.
3) You cite Apple's security measures, but as you know, those only apply to a very small minority of the chips (and other parts) that are in the computer. And those security measures do provide a real benefit, much as right-to-repair advocates like to ignore or obscure or downplay this point. (Not saying you are doing this.)
If you can repair a modern mac, you can follow a guide to fix a 10 year old one just fine. It's just screws, flex cables, and glue in more recent models. The supply chains still exist though through third parties. I bought a flex cable on ebay for a 10 year old computer that was $7 from China.
Not to make this my personal tech support but... I thought my 2017 model was 'vintage' status and not repaired at Apple anymore? I'll see what I can find out...
It depends on what’s wrong. Just like anything else you have to take it in for an estimate. I don’t expect my car dealer to quote me a price on a repair without bringing it in.
Replacing the keyboard on my 2018 retina/touchbar MacBook Pro was somewhat of a nightmare because it is riveted to the chassis and also screwed down with like 42 screws - but afterwards I actually preferred the feel of the keyboard with the new subtle 'give' that it had. The juice was worth the squeeze.
Keyboard on the M2 air is outstanding though, so the 2018 MBP is now collecting dust. I should probably find a way to turn it into a headless vm host with built-in battery backup but something about putting a closed laptop in the rack feels trashy.
I tried replacing a broken speaker on my old Macbook Pro. I followed a very detailed guide from ifixit and it involved removing the motherboard, disconnecting 7 different ribbon cables, and keeping track of the exact location of 30 different screws of various sizes.
I've done a fair share of self-repair on various laptops and smartphones I owned and this was by far the scariest one. It didn't seem like something an average person can pull off easily.
I can’t help but think that no average person fixes their own laptop these days. And for that matter, I’d say that the average person doesn’t change their own oil anymore either.
I think those are both true but for very different reasons.
The competition for oil changes has become so intense that there's basically no profit margin on it. People can have their oil changed "professionally" for so little cost over doing it themselves that it's just not worth bothering. Professionals do oil changes to get customers in the door and hopefully upsell them.
Meanwhile, consumer electronics repair has so many barriers to entry that it's usually just easier to cut your losses and buy a replacement or pay the exorbitant prices demanded by manufacturers.
That's because those laptops were specifically designed to not be easily repairable. The new ones are complying with EU regulations, and so are easier to repair.
They were designed to be as small as possible, which sacrificed internal access. I doubt they purposefully made repairablity difficult. It just wasn't a major factor when 90% of the time they just give you a new laptop when you show up at Apple with a broken one (with a warranty or Apple+).
What makes you think it was unnecessary? Sockets are good for expansion but they increase failure rates and the extra distance increases latency so losing it is one thing helping push unified SoC performance.
Meanwhile, I've never had a socket failure, and I've upgraded the RAM on the 2012 mac I am using 2x now over its life (once to get to 8gb, a second time when users reported the computer could take 16gb despite what apple says). If I had soldered ram then I would be saddled with 4gb ram total and this computer would not be easily running mojave and allowing me to post this comment with 3 dozen tabs open in the background.
Again, I’m not saying that sockets are entirely bad but remember that the claim here is that this was just a cash grab when there are valid engineering trade offs. You’ve been lucky at n=small but DIMM failures was a relatively well-known thing to troubleshoot - notably more common for laptops which see more shock & vibration - and while having that expansion capability is certainly nice, it also made the system slower over the course of its lifetime. I don’t love the RAM constraints either[1] but picking something which is smaller, faster, and more durable is a very defensible engineering call and I think portraying that as a cynical cash grab is more intellectually lazy than we should expect around here. Notice how the person I replied to has been unable to engage with this at all beyond cheap shots which are indistinguishable from the posts you’d have found in some PC vs. Mac thread 3 decades ago.
1. Although I will note that it’s been many years since I used a browser which couldn’t suspend unused tabs.
So imagine it wasn't soldered. Was apple justified back then asking for $200 for another 4gb of DDR3? Absolutely not. The RAM was identical to what you could get from crucial or anyone else. HDD upgrades were the same way. It's just a 2.5" SATA but Apple's pricing suggested they were made of gold. Maybe soldered ram is more justified today, but you'd be ignorant of the history of this company to suggest they aren't simultaneously trying to screw you on upgrades.
Yes, I made those same upgrades both personally and professionally. I’m not saying you can’t criticize pricing, just that in a technical forum I’d also expect acknowledgement that there are benefits rather than an assertion rejecting that possibility.
I’d also be curious how many people ever did this - one interesting question is what percentage of users need to actually use an option for it to be expected. I haven’t looked for data in years but at one point heard that it was something under 20% of people ever upgrading their Mac.
There being valid reasons to solder RAM doesn't preclude being annoyed at Apple for charging 3x the market rate to upgrade it with them, I suppose. It'd be a lot less controversial if that were the case IMO.
I don’t think anyone is saying you can’t question their pricing. My disagreement is solely with the very confident assertion that this is done to prevent upgrades with no awareness of all of the other reasons.
I wouldn't be surprised. It was common back then to hear on forums to never waste money speccing up the ram on macs, since you can upgrade it yourself for half the price with sticks from crucial. It was always a $200 upgrade even when you were just getting another 4gb of DDR3.
Would add to the other comments that having sockets increases the thickness of the device.
Now you can argue that you wouldn't make this trade-off but for others including myself it is the right decision. For most people, including professionals, RAM is no longer the bottleneck for system performance.
I don't think the Mac Mini's case has gotten any thinner in spite of having soldered RAM. The M1 says it's 3.6cm thick, while my old intel mini is 3cm exactly, in spite of having socketed DIMMs (I upgraded it to 32GB, which was slightly harder than I expected, but manageable).
That's a pretty bold claim, to say that a company had the motivation to purposely make it difficult to repair. What support do you have for that statement?
And what support do you have on your claim that any EU rule has mandated an approach to make something easier to repair that has made Apple (or any other company) change the way they design their hardware?
This looks a lot more like Apple finding additional revenue streams selling "genuine™" parts than a genuine attempt at making their devices economically repairable. What's the markup on the genuine™ sticker?
Probably to stave off lawsuits for right to repair tbh. Tellingly they've only publicized the repair manuals for their newer machines, not their older hardware that certainly has a manual sitting in an internal server somewhere.
On the face of it, it would appear a big change from a PR perspective. Still though, you can't upgrade or change the RAM, CPU, SSD, or anything else. The parts are insanely expensive and it's designed for manufacturing (DfM), not repair or durability. Just ask any tech who has ever worked on a Thinkpad T-series vs. a MBP. Although it seems like they're going through the motions of R2R to quiet down the shrieks, only time will tell if they really mean to return to almost serviceable computers.
While the limitation to newer models sucks. The fact that thanks to (planned) legislation Apple feels pressured to make parts available to consumers is an absolute win for right to repair.
Is Apple doing as much as they can to make this as unviable as possible? Yes, but it's a first step in the right direction :D
I know this will be a item of only specialized interest, but I note that:
It is important to know that while this new repair site now offers parts and instructions for repairing MacBooks for example, there is also a special activation/configuration requirement on M1 MacBooks now after certain kinds of repairs, like screens, webcams, boards, etc. Otherwise they will not work fully (disabled webcam, screen brightness/Trutone not working, etc). I don't know the specifics but it's some kind of calibration codes, secure component tying or something similar.
The thing is that this repair site will not assist you if you do not buy the part from the site. I asked them about it because I was thinking of repairing mine with this new site. So even if you take a genuine original Apple part from another computer (not even ordering some 3rd party part, but a real Apple component) and use it in your own repair, you may not be able to activate it.
> Apple announced Self Service Repair will be available tomorrow for MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks with the M1 family of chips,
No M2 support? Also, no support for Intel based Macs? Seems like lip service to me.
Although on the bright side, at least Apple is making an effort in the past 1-2 years towards repairability. Would be better if they pull their opposition for "right to repair".
I don't forsee Intel support, but M2 support will come. They're just slowly rolling this out.
> Would be better if they pull their opposition for "right to repair".
But then you'd be in the same position you are now with Apple where you'd just get the individual parts and fuck your computer up.
Though maybe they should pull their opposition (if indeed they are opposed to this for no good reason) so then companies would have to support the right to repair products like dSLR cameras, TVs and computer monitors, Nintendo Switches, and Samsung mobile phones. I think this would be a nice little market advantage for Apple since these companies are fucking terrible at support for products beyond "send it in". Can you imagine Google trying to support repairing a Chromebook? Though I think what you'd find is just more throw-away electronics because a screen for a Chromebook individually purchased and sent to you will probably cost half as much as a new one. Good for the environment there.
Another thing I wonder about is should we treat personal electronics differently? There's a lot of focus on them but most are cheap and disposable. I think there's significant issues with manufacturing or industrial scale products like the infamous John Deere tractors that you can't fix yourself.
My niece broke the screen on her dirt cheap Chromebook. A Samsung Chromebook 3. I bought her a new screen for about $30 and was able to replace it myself in about 5 minutes after watching a short Youtube howto.
The Lenovo Chromebook 3 seems to be similar. I bought one during the recent $79 sale. Was curious if I could DIY an upgrade to an IPS screen. Found some screens that looked like a good fit for around $40 and the screen is easily user serviceable. There's many videos on how to fix various aspects of this ultra cheap laptop, and Lenovo has an easily downloaded service manual.
Then what's the issue? Apparently we already have right to repair in practice. Or is specifically that people want to be able to do this with Macbooks and iPhones? Vote with your wallet then.
Not enough. Right to repair should be mandated by law, because throwing away perfectly good hardware damages our planet, so it is not just a matter of the money exchanged between the producer and the customer.
Then don't throw away your hardware? The person I'm responding to didn't. Would you also mandate recycling? I'd certainly support that. I'm just not sure what a right to repair law is addressing here that's different than what's currently happening. I would hypothesize that mandatory recycling would go further in effect than right to repair.
I was responding to your mention of Chromebooks and how expensive you thought they would be to fix. And also because I thought it was interesting that these two very cheap gadgets were easily fixable. I guess since the main customers for these cheap laptops are schools, they'd have to be repairable. School budgets would almost mandate their hardware acquisitions be cheaply repairable instead of having to replace the entire unit. Especially when they hand these things out to accident prone kids.
But we don't have right to repair across the board. Would be nice if manufacturers took this into account.
To nitpick a bit I was more so criticizing what I envision Google's support for repairing these devices to be. More from an infrastructure/customer support perspective. I did mention that these devices were inexpensive and I would guess that for most people they'd prefer to throw the device away instead of repair it given our current cultural climate.
Now I do not have a lot of experience fixing devices, I tend to use and then either gift old devices to family members or recycle them, but I am curious about how much more repairable one of these devices is compared to, say, a new Macbook Pro. Also I wonder if current state is indicative of future state. For all we know Apple might make repair and upgrade of devices a top priority. Certainly they're showing some serious movement here in my opinion.
I think repair rights for Asus/Samsung Chromebook should be cared by Asus/Samsung rather than Google even though it's named "Chromebook", just like Windows laptops.
The repair program is operated through a third party; products in active production with available OEM repair parts is possibly the criteria, and they may be rolling this out on a product-by-product basis in terms of producing comprehensive end-user DIY instructions and processes.
A M2 Mac isn't out of warranty yet, making self-repair more costly for all but a few non-covered instances (e.g. liquid damage, screen drop). For this reason, I would expect newer Intel Macs to be supported before the M2.
Yes, and they charge $129 to remove some screws, unplug an old battery, and plug in a new battery. So why do they not give people the option to just buy a battery, if they are doing all these self service repair rollouts.
The point is they are going through this song and dance of selling parts directly to customers, but have excluded extremely easily replacement batteries.
Please don't continue lazily spreading this "planned obsolescence" nonsense, especially in cases like this where it's obvious, immediately, that the claim is wholly unsupported by any facts or even possible theories. Thanks.
Only if they can prove that your lipservice caused the damage in question, which should be avoidable with the use of antistatic lipstick and regular blotting to ensure the lips are suitably dry.
Remember when Apple made their computers intentionally easy to work in? The old G3/G4 Powermac towers with their drop-down side doors were really nice to deal with. The G5 Towers were almost as good.
My 2010 macbook pro had a nice door to access the battery and disk drive without any tools. Gone by the 2012, replaced with phillips head screws. After that it was it for user replaceable batteries. I'm glad I have this 2012 macbook pro that is still user repairable and upgradeable. I just gave it a fresh battery this summer and I'm hoping for another 10 years out of it.
Following the right to repair movement, Apple seems to only be providing coarse-granular self-repair, meaning that a large amount of small issues need expensive fixes. For instance, display cable broken due to normal wear -> replace entire display assembly @ ~50% of MSRP on an older model. Apple themselves are often doing the same thing when repairing in-house, replacing larger components and charging a premium. And why wouldn't they? Sure, they lose a bit to independent repair shops, but they win massively by having people buy new instead.
In other words, democratizing the Apple-grade repairs is not enough, we need individual components to be replaceable, like with a car. Apple quite literally HUNT anyone selling those right now.
This new stunt is an amazingly smart way of confusing legislators for a few years. It's even confusing tech enthusiasts. But apple is very much against proper repairability (like a car), no matter who does it.
>Apple quite literally HUNT anyone selling those right now.
This is just objectively not true. Apple only goes after people claiming to sell OEM parts because that's a trademark issue. You can sell 3rd party parts without any issues and Apple can't do anything about it.
That's what they seem to be talking about. If you want to buy replacement ICs from Texas Instruments, you can't. Apple won't let you order the parts from them, entirely because they want to monopolize the Macbook repair pipeline. Your only choice is buying sketchy third-party components, or risking damage by removing a similar part off a donor board. This is entirely a side effect of Apple's control over their supply chain, and it's 100% a conscious decision. The only word suitable for describing it is 'petty', but that seems to be the crux of most of Apple's business decisions recently.
Texas Instruments doesn't make those IC's available because the design is custom to Apple. TI is just manufacturing them. They're Apple parts so repair centers and customers need to go through Apple to get them. There's no incentive for anyone, Apple or otherwise, to allow people to buy parts directly from their vendor.
SPOT is fulfilling the requests but they're still through Apple. It is an officially supported means of getting parts, manuals, and tools from Apple. It's not through a third-party.
The OP's complaint was that people can't go to Texas Instruments and get parts. That's not the same and what I was pointing out.
Nod. I should've said how cars used to be. I used the analogy because it's a familiar mental model, worked well even for safety critical heavy machinery, and is the obvious way things should be.
Sure, we should just go back in time to when we had carburetors and simple fuses instead of CAN bus etc. Who needs modern tech in our cars (or computers).
Sometimes the whole right to repair movement seems to be populated with luddites who just want to live with 1980's technology so they can enjoy turning a wrench.
Maybe some. But a lot of the right to repair movement is just fighting companies like Apple or John Deere actively preventing tinkers and 3rd party repairers from fixing devices they supposedly own.
Apple preventing computer repair folks from sharing blueprints and hardware locking some components are two examples.
More like 60s and 70s for me, IMHO the height of the era ;-)
There's a definite sense of pride and ownership in being able to understand and work on your own car. Sadly, that's all been replaced with subservience to the corporatocracy and the accompanying erosion of the concept of ownership.
A lot of wear items on cars have been hard to repair for a long time. If we're judging "right to repair" by how easy it is to replace, say, a clutch on a front-wheel-drive car, I think computers are already ahead.
Good news, if you think your display cable is the issue, you can now get it for $5 through Apple's self service repair. Same for the audio board's cable, the track pad/keyboard cable and the antennas (with varying prices). Separate IO and audio boards are had for <$50. Heck the entire M1 air logic board can be had for $370 now (assuming you return your old board). Other than literally sending schematics off for cloners to produce their own boards, I'm not sure what people could actually want done differently here for a "Self Service" repair program.
> if you think your display cable is the issue, you can now get it for $5 through Apple's self service repair
Are you referring to flexgate, ie MBP 2016-2017? Those are fused with the display assembly. Even if I had one, I'd basically need a lab to extend it, even independent shops usually don't do that repair.
Doubtful. It'll be a while until Framework operates at a scale that even makes a blip on Apple's bottom line. Legislation could have a large and immediate impact on Apple.
It's so that they can claim people can repair their stuff, while making it more expensive than bringing it into an Apple store. Then they'll argue that nobody does this, so strong right-to-repair legislation is not necessary.
They have had the parts available for the iPhone for a while now. The general consensus is that while the program is a good step forward, it isn’t nearly good enough and all the parts that authorised repair stores wouldn’t fix like charge ports or power buttons, is still not possible to fix.
Probably preempting this to avoid stricter regulations that would force them to do it regardless, along with other things they don't want. "See, we're already giving our customers the right to repair!"
I was told at Apple Service that replacing the battery in M1+ generation laptops no longer requires replacing the whole case. Specifically I also have M1 Air and was told that battery is easily replaceable. Waiting for that one myself, too.
Unfortunately no support for previous gen Intel machines. The ones that were notorious for keyboard failures. Guess that means my keyboard will never work again.
The page says it applies for "4 years after the first retail sale", but in practice they seem willing to replace covered models older than the cutoff. If you've got broken keys, might as well take it in to see if they'll replace the keyboard for free.
If you take two obvious leaders in manufacturing excellence (for this audience at least), Apple and Tesla, they both now in 2022 seem to be running up against repair and service problems. Part of this might be that they have so optimized the rest of the funnel that these blotches stand out in even more contrast. When the goods are cheap, late, or defective their lack of post-purchase service is taken for granted.
I do kind of wonder how much the new repair-friendly Apple has to do with the fact that they lose basically the entire laptop's margin every time they have to replace a battery under warranty.
Somehow I suspect Louis Rossmann will still be non-plussed by this and release a video explaining why... and he makes solid points. When Apple starts allowing him to order all of the chips (like charge controllers) to repair his customers' devices then this is just lip service from Apple meant to do the absolute bare minimum to look like they are accommodating Right To Repair while giving the middle finger to independent repair shops who are only being held back by lack of access to parts.
> Self Service Repair for MacBook Air and MacBook Pro offers more than a dozen different repair types for each model, including the display, top case with battery, and trackpad, with more to come
So you can purchase the whole display assembly, top case (so basically the whole computer except the display assembly) and trackpads separately. Buying these parts in most cases will not be cost-effective and it's just pure waste to offer them instead offering components more granularly. So yeah, I fully expect Louis to roast this and he will be right.
> Buying these parts in most cases will not be cost-effective
Apple also requires a serial number when purchasing these parts and the parts are paired to the device. So even if you wanted to start a repair shop that just replaces those parts you can't stock or even install them.
A lot of people seem to think Apple purposely made the components less modular for profit purposes, but I think the bigger reason is that Apple took was limited by the tolerances of the case design and took shortcuts with the component assembly to make manufacturing/QA cheaper.
Why not both? They certainly aren't pricing RAM and SSD upgrades from the goodness of their hearts. And I do wonder if continually making the base models have sub-par amounts of SSD and storage for the price gets people to upgrade the entire machine earlier.
Doesn't help that you can't easily get a 1TB MBA either, that BTO, but you can pay an extra $1000 and get a 1TB 14" MBP right now.
I remember there is a LTT video saying that buying components from this self service repair is more expansive than their official repair service, you need a device serial number to buy some major components. So it is probably not really for independent repair shops, just a lip service.
I was wrong, parent comment is correct. Program is priced to be more expensive and less convenient than taking it to an Apple Store or buying/upgrading to a new phone.
this is why right to repair needs to exist. apple is just paying a lip service right now.
One of the problems is that truly 'fixing' a Macbook is impossible. If your Logic Board has water damage, 90% of the time you'll need to replace the entire board instead of the $0.50 component that's failing. That's why Louis (and other repair shops) have used donor boards to attempt actual repairs instead of just replacing your whole mainboard.
I reckon that's what Apple is going to do here, too. Of course they don't have the gall to sell consumers their Texas Instruments ICs for board repairs, it's likely they're only going to sell piecemeal topcases, Logic Boards, and if we're lucky, batteries too.
Unlikely that Apple even stocks "Texas Instruments ICs for board repairs" for their own use either.
Custom ICs (and at Apple's volume why wouldn't they be custom?) will be ordered and delivered straight to the manufacturing line. They'll know exactly how many to buy to minimize waste. A few leftovers may end up on AliExpress, but Apple is pretty tight so they probably go into the trash.
In no situation would we expect either Apple or TI to keep a stockpile of out-of-production custom voltage regulators around, unless a hardware engineer happened to have some in a desk drawer somewhere.
I assure you no one at Apple is losing any sleep over Louis Rossmann.
If they have freaky strict disposal controls over leftover components, it is because they are trying to prevent China's famous "midnight run" of the assembly line to produce counterfeit assemblies.
I wonder why Apple would even want to protect a battery charger IC? All of the interesting stuff would be in software anyway. Maybe the reason repair shops can’t buy it is more mundane. Basically it’s an expensive part, particularly to Apple’s logic board, and distributors don’t believe there are enough Rossmanns out there to sell through a 100k part factory order. When I made PCBs for a large company I had parts I could buy direct from Maxim, at 250k parts minimum, that weren’t on Digi-Key for just that reason.
Apple is selling you exactly what they use to repair their machines. If Apple shares all of the tools/parts/manuals they use to do component level repairs, the result is NULL.
This isn't anything limited to Apple, or even computers. For just about any OEM repair process for nearly any product, there's someone who will do a repair with a higher labor cost and lower parts cost. That doesn't mean it's a reasonable process for a business at scale.
That's great (for you), but there's no telling what "works like a charm" actually means, and no real way to tell if the specs as-advertised still match the specs-post-repair. This is also why Apple doesn't bother with board level repairs on an individual basis.
For some people, that measure or metric doesn't matter, and that's fine, but it by no means is a universal "see this is better" approach. And I say this as someone who does board level repairs. On iPhones. (and that mostly came about because people tried to replace the screens on their phones with the power on, blowing the backlight circuit)
Doing something as a one-off is nothing compared to doing something world-scale.
Apple can't realistically do board level repairs because they can't guarantee that a board level repair will bring the device back to its original level of reliable functionality. When you mess around with soldering and desoldering individual components, you can't guarantee the end result in the same way that you can when it's the outcome of a reliable and repeatable manufacturing process. For example, rework with a hot air station might imperceptibly weaken a solder joint somewhere else on the board, which will then fail 6 months later.
Yes. Repair shops have been advocating for a long time for companies like Apple to allow repair shops to obtain certain parts and ICs which are otherwise unobtainable due to exclusivity deals with chip fabs, as well as to provide repair schematics. When companies go out of their way to make both impossible to obtain, it becomes very difficult for independent repair shops to do their work.
This program, like the iPhone program, is not that program. This is for adventurous people who want to do the repair themselves because they don’t value their own time highly enough.
One can complain about how Apple deals with repair shops. One can complain about how Apple deals with self-service repair. One should not confuse the two situations as if they were in any way equivalent.
It's repair versus buy. If you cut the power cord of your dishwasher, you can buy a new dishwasher from Bosch for 900€, or ask a 3rd party to repair it for 25€. I don't see any "fuck Bosch" logic here.
I am from India. My 10 day old Macbook M1 Pro suddenly died with no signs of life. As sad that may sound its nothing compared to what happened next at the Apple Authorized service center. The lady at the counter put a giant scratch across the Apple logo going further ahead on the case.
Now these service centers are so much afraid of Apple and its policy that she started parroting that its a cosmetic damage and Apple policy doesn't allow to replace it for that. I asked her I am not invoking my warranty, the scratch is done by you and you have to fix it.
Days pass and they divert me to the seller, who refused to replace the laptop due to the scratch.
The Apple Support in India is equally pathetic with no authority at all. Had it been the U.S. and someone at Genius store would have done that, it would have been much easier to get a new machine (it was just 10 day old) or atleast the display case replaced but welcome to India where consumer laws take the second seat and Apple's policy take the first.
After all this, I had to call the police and when the police came the service center gave me in writing that they would replace the display.
Filing consumer case now against Apple for the harassment, preparing the docs. If you are from India and want to join in - drop me a mail.
Edit: forgot to mention the popping sound on my older macbook from 2017 with touchbar. Will apple do anything about that? Seems it is also clueless.
I'm surprised the popping sound doesn't surface much more than that. I recently bought a 2021 M1 Macbook Pro (so a 2K€+ machine) and this popping sound I get when I use the built-in speakers is awful.
After Googling around, it seems this issue hits a lot of people and dates back to the first M1 Macs being released (nearly 2 years now) and has still not been properly addressed (and I never found a workaround other than plugging headphones and just not using the speakers). And as you said, Apple seems clueless about it.
> popping sound I get when I use the built-in speakers is awful.
My issue might be a different one, it comes when I touch the display back side (and sometimes just randomly). I did some research and it seems to be caused by expansion and contraction of some kind of metal inside the body.
The root of the problem is essentially Apple since there is no other way than going to these service centers. Moreover the policy fears are so much instilled in these service centers and Apple support people that they can't even see whats the right thing to do by the customer.
So last week I was quoted, by Apple, 680 EUR to fix the cracked screen of my 1000 EUR MacBook Air M1. I'm giving them the finger but, to add insult to injury, I still need to pay 50 EUR to get the computer back.
It's sad because I was satisfied by my two previous MacBook Air (non retina / non M1) and I was satisfied by my Mac Mini.
But now the Apple love story at home is done. Now recommending Chromebooks to the 65 years+ around us (where we used to recommend Apple).
In case there's any class action lawsuit in Europe over this new M1 bend-gate I'll be sure to join and donate to the cause.
Typing this from my MIL-SPEC LG Gram, which is an actual proper, sturdy and lighter than any Mac laptop.
This comment is what you reap for screwing people over.
I will never buy another Apple product without AppleCare+. It seems like with these ridiculous repair costs that's exactly what Apple was going for and it worked. If you had AppleCare+ ($199 for 3 years), it would have cost $99 to fix. The funny thing is that in my country (Czechia) you cannot even officially buy it and have to jump through some hoops to get it. Fortunately, once you do have it, it's accepted everywhere including authorized repair shops regardless of your country.
AppleCare is insurance. There's a bit of a wrinkle in that it's insurance from a company who can do the repairs as well, but at the end of the day, it's insurance.
At work, we looked across the body of devices we had and tracked the AppleCare incidents (times when insurance "paid off") and concluded that it wasn't worth buying across the fleet. (This is aligned with the general principle of "don't insure against losses you can afford".)
If you can't reasonably afford the loss, insurance can make sense and you should consider AppleCare. If you can (or if you can self-insure across a large install base), you probably shouldn't.
Or if you know that you (or someone like your kid) is more likely to treat your gear more roughly than average. But, yes, in general extended warranties aren't a great deal.
Or if you know that you will probably have issues with your computer sooner than later even though you're not rough with it.
I did initially not buy it with my current laptop. Something broke during the standard warranty. Got the motherboard replaced... With a faulty one. So they replaced it again.
Got a feeling that buying extended warranty would be a good idea. And indeed, 3 months past the standard warranty end, it refused to boot at all. And once again, got replaced with a (less) faulty motherboard (some faulty USB ports).
I'd have preferred not being given broken motherboards by the warranty service, but since I have no ultimate proofs, had I not bought it, I would most likely have been refused service.
There's probably a better case to be made for laptops and phones you use outside the house than there is with other things. Sure, a TV can die young. However, as the parent said, if you can afford to self-insure you'll probably come out ahead on average.
> Well, repairs are usually warrantied themselves.
I don't know if this holds when the issue occurs more than one year after the repair, and has, at first sight, has nothing to do with it (Won't get into the details as it's not that interesting. The most important part being that the company's logs did not acknowledge a potentially-related issue reported while the servicing technician was still there).
> if you can afford to self-insure you'll probably come out ahead on average.
Yes. But if two parts of my TV broke in its first year and it needed to be serviced a second time just after because the replacement parts sent the first time randomly shut down with the company refusing to acknowledge it because "Yeah, the first technician said this, but the second time a technician came, it was not having issues" or missing logs, my guess is that buying the extended warranty at that point would probably cost less on average for that TV as I would not put any trust in it surviving long without needing another repair.
> If you can't reasonably afford the loss, insurance can make sense and you should consider AppleCare. If you can (or if you can self-insure across a large install base), you probably shouldn't.
You should also check to make sure you aren't already covered by an existing policy. My home insurance covers accidental damage with only a £100 excess, so AppleCare isn't so useful for me (although I've yet to test it!).
note that this often counts as a claim against your home insurance as well, which can result in higher rates. Generally speaking equipment riders are generally not worth it except for during a larger event (home burns down, etc) because of this - they get you on premiums if you don't make a claim (generally it ends up zeroing out after a couple years) and they get you on premium increases if you do make a claim.
It's insurance, on average the underwriter is still coming out ahead, that's the premise of the industry.
Generally the point of underwriting is to look at the specific individual and write a policy that accounts for their own particulars. Otherwise nobody would take any policy in any case where they would come out behind, so the insurance pool would be 100% 'adverse selection'. Insurance companies need to come out ahead on every policy, on average, that's how they're written.
A practical example of this, my insurance company told me to cut down a tree they thought was too close to my house for example (and I agree, it was a pine which tend to blow down, and it was too close), or else it would have affected my rates, and if you have particular high-risk breeds of dogs (dog attacks are covered by insurance) you will pay more as well.
In this case - if you keep making claims against your homeowner's for accidental damage to contents, even via a separate high-value-property rider, that is going to be accounted for the next time your renewals come around. And the next underwriter will be able to see those claims as well, those claims data are shared.
I had a high-value-property policy on a laptop (through USAA) and made a claim, they actually tried to come through to my parent's homeowners' insurance as well (which my parents didn't like and they backed them down lol). USAA is great in general, great about paying up when the bill comes due but, insurance is insurance.
So if you want to be nitpicky - no, they do come out ahead on any specific policy, on average - that is the point of diligence in underwriting, to account for those individual-specific factors. Even if you are "riskier than average", they will eventually account for that too. What is true that once written, they either win or they don't - and some policies they will lose. But the expected net value is biased to the house, on every single policy, given the best information they have.
In economic terms: perhaps there is some alpha that you as an individual can extract with your precise knowledge vs an unaware underwriter - but over time as you exploit that, the alpha will decrease to zero, because it will show up in your claim data. Just like any other market, alpha decreases to zero.
The house always wins in insurance, on average. You're not special, you aren't going to beat the house in the long term. Insurance is a "smoothing" tool, it lets you break a $5k lump expense out into $50/mo payments, it's not free money.
> Insurance is a "smoothing" tool, it lets you break a $5k lump expense out into $50/mo payments, it's not free money.
This is called a loan. Insurance "smooths" across the population, because not everybody breaks their laptop.
Of course you pay more after renewal when you make a claim (because you've shown yourself to be at risk for breaking laptops), but if you are able to make an insurance claim for something you generally do better in the long run making that claim than not - that's the entire point of insurance, nobody would get it if it was a net negative when you had to use it.
> but if you are able to make an insurance claim for something you generally do better in the long run making that claim than not
nobody has ever disputed that, but if you read my comment again, you'll see that I was discussing expected value of writing/taking a policy.
> that's the entire point of insurance, nobody would get it if it was a net negative when you had to use it.
in fact, on the topic I was discussing - everyone takes insurance policies even when they expect it to have negative net expected value - which all homeowners insurance policies are underwritten to have. Yes, if you make a claim you come out ahead, but on average you are expected to come out behind.
The fact that you also remembered some other thing that also works by the same method, is not particularly interesting or insightful. See:
> This is called a loan
Yes, indeed, loans also have neutral or negative expected return, so do lotteries, and that doesn't mean that insurance doesn't too. A is a member of S doesn't mean that the cardinality of S is 1.
You're trying to be cute and contrarian, in the finest HN spirit (it's also not cute or funny when anyone else does it, fyi) but you're going off on irrelevant tangents. Please, you're not furthering the discourse here, you're just being tangential and contrarian.
Please re-read the rules, it is very explicit that you need to take the most generous interpretation of a comment, and the reason that rule exists is because it's tiresome dealing with this contrarian nitpicking mindset. It's pretty clear that this statement does not imply in any way that you shouldn't make a claim if you have an event, only that taking a rider generally has a net-negative expected value - as does all insurance. Your entire comment chain here is the least-generous interpretation and should not have been posted.
> Generally speaking equipment riders are generally not worth it except for during a larger event (home burns down, etc) because of this - they get you on premiums if you don't make a claim (generally it ends up zeroing out after a couple years) and they get you on premium increases if you do make a claim.
> nobody has ever disputed that, but if you read my comment again, you'll see that I was discussing expected value of writing/taking a policy.
Your original post strongly implies that making a claim against the policy is net negative: "they get you on premium increases if you do make a claim". I am disputing that implication.
> Yes, indeed, loans also have neutral or negative expected return, so do lotteries, and that doesn't mean that insurance doesn't too. A is a member of S doesn't mean that the cardinality of S is 1.
The point is that you said that insurance "lets you break a $5k lump expense out into $50/mo payments", this is not true. That is what a loan does. There is a meaningful difference. Insurance allows you to pay to guard against risk by spreading payments out over multiple people, not spread out a large payment over a period of time.
> You're trying to be cute and contrarian, in the finest HN spirit (it's also not cute or funny when anyone else does it, fyi) but you're going off on irrelevant tangents. Please, you're not furthering the discourse here, you're just being tangential and contrarian.
Please read the HN guidelines before commenting, in particular this section:
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Generally speaking equipment riders are generally not worth it except for during a larger event (home burns down, etc) because of this - they get you on premiums if you don't make a claim (generally it ends up zeroing out after a couple years) and they get you on premium increases if you do make a claim.
This in no way implies that you should not make a claim if you have a covered event. It simply says that the expected value of any given policy or clause within a policy is net-negative - because that's how insurance operates.
You took that comment and cleaved off the bits you didn't like, until you had a sufficiently narrow statement that you could come up with some contrarian bullshit to look pithy on HN.
Again, have you finally accepted that just because loans also operate in this way, that it doesn't mean insurance can't too?
> Please read the HN guidelines before commenting, in particular this section:
Haha, this from the person who didn't even read the "please follow the most generous interpretation" clause?
Your entire comment chain has sprung from a least-generous interpretation of the rules, which is explicitly against the HN rules. Don't cite rules to me while you're breaking them yourself. And again, you should read the rules about not being snarky or making shallow dismissals.
You wanted to make a cute contrarian comeback post and you made a very in-generous reading of the comment in order to do it, and then if I point that out I'm the bad guy. Again, a very HN phenomenon - too much coddling here. You broke the rules trying to look cool on a social-media site and when called out you tried to rules-lawyer to make yourself look like the good guy.
Take it up with @dang if you want, I don't really care. But I'm not going to be scolded by the wrongdoer for pointing out that someone is cleaving apart substantive comments to make little gotchas. It's a real problem on this site, as is the hiding behind rules-lawyering when people call it out.
Your reply is a low-value comment that doesn't belong on this site and it's gone downhill from there on both sides. This is why we have a rule about that, your comments set the downhill direction here.
I do think your original text was clear enough that I was able to figure out what you meant, but it would have been a lot clearer if it explicitly mentioned spreading a lump-sum expense across multiple people rather than only mentioning spreading a lump-sum expense over a multiple time periods.
By only mentioning the time-series of payments, it took me more than a single read to understand and I could easily see someone genuinely misunderstanding your point.
I actually don't know what you mean by that, but, the "insurance industry comes out ahead on average" is true both of individual policies and on average, which is why his response is kinda irrelevant. If you're a high-claim buyer that will get passed along to you in your premiums (which is what I specifically said in the first paragraph). They don't just write "here's the average policy, we'll do this for all situations" because then they would be hit by adverse selection. All homeowners/etc are underwritten against a specific property and person.
Of course any particular policy may end up being a win or a loss for the insurer - but - the policy is written so the insurer wins on average, and that's also true of any particular rider or supplemental coverage. The expected value of all particular policies and all particular supplementals/riders is, from the insurer's data, negative for the buyer, otherwise they won't write it.
I did not address it in that comment in particular, but in the specific case of when you already have an accidental damage rider or it's generally included in your policy, whether you should take it... the answer is probably yes, but, you should also expect it to impact your rates down the road, especially if you do it more than once. You'll have to weigh that, and sometimes it's not worth it unless it's part of a larger claim. Yeah, sometimes you do win on a particular insurance policy but... the insurer can still win on the backside too, with higher premiums in the long term. And even if you pick up and move insurers, the next insurer will see that claim too and it will affect the quotes you get. Again, not a money fountain, it's just risk smoothing.
What I was more going for was, in general the net expected value is negative so you shouldn't take the rider, because it will come back in your rates if you actually need to use it. The rider premium isn't the total cost here, there's additional long-term costs if you end up being a claims pest. Homeowners is not designed for every time you drop your laptop, and if you use it in that way you'll end up with substantially higher premiums in the long term to account for it.
I’m specifically responding to your explanation of insurance here, to which another poster said “that’s a loan” [and you objected]
> Insurance is a "smoothing" tool, it lets you break a $5k lump expense out into $50/mo payments, it's not free money.
If you believe insurance is only spreading payments for losses over time, you don’t have a grasp of how it works. If you believe insurance is spreading payments for losses over multiple policyholders, you know how it works but didn’t express yourself very clearly and then objected when someone read your words and got misdirected by them.
> the "insurance industry comes out ahead on average" is true both of individual policies and on average
What would the former mean as distinct from the latter?
That wrinkle is important though - since their repair services could be more marked up when purchased directly Thant the insurance is. Looks like that isn’t the case for Apple at least for your fleet but there is no reason in general that a membership / HMO style insurance service will be more expensive than paying out of pocket.
That insurance company is also going to [intend to] make a profit on that policy. Self-insuring lets you keep that profit (in exchange for fading the variance yourself).
(You also get the additional benefit of not having to deal with an insurance company over a claim. :) )
There’s a free market to sell laptops in. What terms are attached are up to the consumer to consider.
Many people are happy with Apples terms. That some technologists are not is not evidence of a conspiracy.
Contemporary problem solving does not have to contort itself to the philosophy and nostalgia of some computer nerds. Same as we don’t have to kowtow to a Bible; it’s not about the what but who; present/future meat bags don’t owe past meat bags. No one asked to be born.
Apple and customer are free to set the terms of their relationship without your input.
Freedom from, freedom to; law is semantic games not physics. You have the rights agreed upon by the rule makers.
Currently the free market you envision is not the status quo.
The only mechanism allowed in our social system to change that is vote em out or build a company that works how you want. Posting here is equivalent to echo “impotent rage” /dev/null imo
> Apple and customer are free to set the terms of their relationship without your input.
Thats not true. We can make laws that force Apple to support the right to repair, and force them to open that market up to the free market.
Which is what is happening here. It is because of legislative pressure that Apple is now engaging in some actions, to allow users to have access to the free market of device repairing.
As in, we are literally commenting, on a thread, about how Apple is now being moved in this direction.
> The only mechanism allowed in our social system
No, we can force Apple to allow the free market into their device, with laws, and take away they money via fines, if they refuse.
Which is what is happening.
> Currently the free market you envision is not the status quo.
Actually, with many of the upcoming laws, the status quo is about to change, so that Apple is forced to allow the free market into many of their markets. The one that is most obvious is the App Store Market, which they are being forced, under legal threat, to open up on.
But, also, the other market is the right to repair market. I can't remember the exact laws that are going to force Apple to support more repair options, but I am pretty sure that they exist and are coming into effect soon.
Tim Apple built his computer so that if I bump it off my waist-height table, it will shatter into a million pieces and I'll be out >$500. Conveniently, Tim Apple also sells a peace-of-mind insurance policy that replaces your Mac no-questions-asked. Does this create a conflict of interests that encourages them to design fragile display assemblies, unfixable Logic Boards and un-upgradeable storage? You decide!
I buy Apple products, I like them, but I'm not going to buy AppleCare.
I expect Apple (or the resellers since there is no Apple Store in Slovakia) to deal with anything that is supposed to be covered by warranty. Both of our countries have strong consumer-protection laws.
AppleCare is basically insurance, and I would much rather take a 10% chance of having to pay $900 than a 100% chance of having to pay $100. Insurance makes sense for stuff you can't afford to replace, such as a house, not for consumer electronics.
That is, unless Apple sells AppleCare at a loss, but I somehow doubt that.
What happens when a Chromebook or your MIL-SPEC LG laptop breaks? The possibility to even get a repair done in a matter of days was what kept me with Apple so far. When you have to rely on a device being available (or suffer economic losses as a consequence) I don't really see any alternatives right now to Apple. Worst case is you could buy a new device and restore your backup.
In the past, the only comparable service was IBM's on site technician service where they'd send out somebody in a van full of replacement parts to repair your ThinkPad on site.
Dell, HP or Lenovo would send a technician to your office (or home office). For simple repairs (e.g. battery), they can also send the replacement part and you can swap it yourself -- two of my colleagues chose this during Covid lockdown, and changed the batteries in their work laptops.
And "a matter of days" is a low bar. These companies offer next-business-day on-site support.
Here's an example for a Dell Chromebook, although I'm not familiar with buying individually from a reseller:
> Keep your 2-in-1 laptop protected with the 1-Year Mail-In to 3-Year Next Business Day Warranty Upgrade for Chromebooks from Dell. Providing 3 years of coverage, this manufacturer warranty upgrade features next business day onsite hardware support following remote diagnosis. Plus, get technical support via phone or online during business hours and self-service case management and parts dispatch. $63.50.
What happens if you are abroad? I don't have recent experiences but in the mid-2000s, IBM refused to repair my Thinkpad T42 that I bought in Germany when I was living in the US. Apple on the other hand doesn't care if you bring an Indonesia bought MacBook into a store in Sweden.
If you move permanently, I think you need to tell them.
I don't think they support devices during holiday/business trips, but I could be wrong. (I don't handle the laptop/desktop support myself, only the servers, and they rarely move.)
The big 3 laptop vendors (Dell, HP and Lenovo) all offer a next business day warranty, usually worldwide. To have an engineer show up at my home and business and repair the computer in a matter of hours is a much better experience than having to trek to an Apple store, make an appointment and be told that the entire unit has to be replaced.
I guess it's only available if you have purchased the laptop in the US or some specific parts of the EU originally, isn't it? At least, I cannot see any way to purchase it or even extend the warranty for my laptop.
I highly doubt such service is provided in Malta or Cyprus, for example, considering Lenovo only has a single authorized service center per each island, IIRC.
I'm living in Cyprus; had a Lenovo technician come here from Nicosia (~150 miles return) to fix my left-side USB ports of my ThinkPad T590 about six weeks ago.
In the past, I've had come Lenovo to remote parts of Switzerland and Germany, as well.
I am an Apple ecosystem user myself, but previously used Dells, Lenovos and HPs, and never without NBD warranty, so I laugh at all these reactions, too haha. Apple warranty is not bad, but in 8 years of using their products, they definitely deteriorated both in timing, willingness and quality of the repairs. And the frequency increased, too. I pretty much serviced each of my recent (~3 years) MacBooks and iPhones. Personal experience, but still, I used to praise them, no longer do.
Apple laptops come with a 2 year warranty by default. I've taken advantage of that probably ~10 times over the last decade. Not sure what you are implying.
Looks like that's true for some machines, they've got a $50-$100 discount across the board for some machines like the XPS 15, which makes the first year free. Without that, it's normally (for each year of the warranty):
1. $50
2. $100
3. $250
4. $400
So really pretty good for 2 years. I guess they are slightly more worried about it making it to year 4, though.
Not GP, but I did similar. It was a non-issue because I could buy multiple Chromebooks for the price of the one macbook, and because they're fully cloud synced there was no backup/transfer of anything required.
Once while traveling a kid stomped on the chromebook while it was on the ground. I was able to drive to the nearest walmart and buy a new one for $150*. Within 10 minutes of signing in it had restored everything and was ready to go.
* I normally spend a little more to get a chromebook with higher specs, and I recommend everyone do that. The point here was that I was in a pinch but was able to get out of it quickly and cheaply. I suggest absolute minimum of 4GB of RAM (8GB preferred).
You throw it away (or better, sell for $20 "for parts only" on craiglist/ebay), then buy a new one. They are 3-5 times cheaper than a regular laptop, and aren't all that much more prone to breakage. And all the important stuff is in the cloud anyway. "Backup" and "restore" aren't even distinct operations there.
Don't expect to run Adobe Premiere on one of those, but hey, you get what you pay for.
If you want fast repairs, then Apple – contrary to your beliefs – is a terrible option. For example, Dell includes next business day on-site service for all XPS laptops. They also offer up to 2-hour 24/7 on-site service plans if you so desire. So if you really do care about your hardware being available, you do the opposite of what you just said: Choose something other than Apple.
When my Mac had to be repaired in December 2021 it took 3 weeks (Battery, Touchbar and Keyboard). I ended up buying a second computer so I could keep working.
Plenty of other big PC manufacturers have decent repair programs. Often you can even do the repairs yourself (as Apple is finally allowing again).
I just booted up my HP ZBook after replacing the keyboard. Plenty of videos about how to DIY [1]. Granted, pulling it out is not as simple as in the video (I'm not doing it every day, not every other year) and the laptop weights 3 kg but I'm not buying something that I can't service myself for basic stuff like replacing keyboard and expanding or replacing RAM and disks. I had a HP technician come to my home to replace the screen (a bad wire in the right hinge). It was included in the extended warranty, something between 100 and 200 Euro, 3 years.
I'm about to buy another spare keyboard for when it will wear out again. It's 62.99 Euro.
I have Keychron K1 and one of the keys failed (I carry around the world as a digital nomad). I took it to a hacker space in Sofia and unsoldered a working less important key and switched it for the broken 'T' key.
> What happens when a Chromebook or your MIL-SPEC LG laptop breaks?
Chromebook: if in warranty fix, if out of warranty, buy two more Chromebooks for the price of one M1 Macbook Air screen.
LG Gram: LG has a pretty good repair network. My team (5) has been using LG Gram 17" laptops running Ubuntu for about a year, and one person managed to chip the paint (it's anodized black on a metal body), but that was about it. They've been surprisingly sturdy despite weighing a few ounces more than a 13" macbook air. Also, battery life is on par with the M1 air I carry for occasionally dealing with App Store issues.
Is it wasteful though? Chomebooks generally can be repaired for cheap with a little time investment. Sell the broken one on ebay "for parts" and someone will repair it and continue to use it.
OTOH Apple's are notoriously unrepairable, or way too expensive to repair (case in point; this entire thread). They become trash when they break.
> If you are telling me you are relying on LG notebooks just not breaking
LG has a first class repair network, so if they do break... same as any other global PC manufacturer. Also, standard procedure is to buy at least one machine and put it on the shelf so if one fails... we have an replacement.
Exactly this. It's easy to call out Apple but I'm yet to have an experience with other brands where I don't have to ship my product somewhere and wait for weeks on end to see if anything can even be done. Samsung is the biggest offender from my perspective. Everything they make has broken on me. Phones, entertainment devices, and most recently appliances that don't even last 6 months. The good news is when the appliances broke, they sent dish network to my house who also had no clue why it was broken and left.
Thankfully New Jersey (I'm in California) consumer fraud laws kicked in and I was able to get a full refund for my refrigerator.
Depending on the countries traveled to, Apple stuff can make a lot of sense for traveling because they have stores all over the place. If something happens to the MacBook I bought in the US while I’m abroad in Tokyo it’s no problem, I can drop by the store in Shibuya or Ginza and get it repaired, probably same day in many cases.
Phones: I gave my Samsungs and Sonys to shops close to home and got them back after a couple of days.
Laptops: I either pay for HP's next business day support (they come to my home) or, for old unsupported models, I replace parts myself. As I wrote in another commend, I replaced this keyboard less than half an hour ago.
Was this the case where the screen cracks on its own? You seem to [edit, reworded] be much more angry about it than I'd be if I'd damaged the computer myself.
If I had damaged a small part of something I'd bought, I would be angry if the quote for fixing it would be nearly the price of the whole item new.
If you buy a car, hit a kurb and destroy a wheel, wouldn't you be annoyed if it was only the manufacturer that could fix it, and they would charge you 70% of the price of a full car?
The display on a laptop is almost certainly not a small part. When I got the display replaced on a 2015 MacBook under warranty (Apple extended because of screen mottling due to a manufacturing defect), they replaced the entire display assembly, i.e. top half of the laptop case and all.
In general, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect the manufacturer to make parts available more granularly than they do to their own repair centers.
But what if you had to replace the RAM, what would that cost? The CPU? Fix the keyboard? I think the total sum if you add the various components up it would be 10x a new machine, excluding the actual labor costs. And when there are others wanting to do it cheaper, but are being blocked by Apple, this doesn't sit right with me.
Not a very good analogy--a wheel, even a nice one, is like 1% of the value of a new car. That display is probably single most expensive component in the whole machine.
Why assume something that is a “small” part necessarily would result in a repair price that is less than x% of purchase price?
There are myriad factors that affect repair place, especially for something as technologically advanced as the newest laptops. Labor prices, design of the laptop, parts supplies, etc.
Of course, the ability for only one entity to source and supply those will tilt the scales towards a higher price, but that is unrelated to the “small”-ness of the damage.
As a hypothetical, suppose the camera glass or lens was made with materials or a technique that caused it to be 90% of a phone’s cost to produce. Then replacing this item would cost >90% of the phone’s price, even though it is “small”.
Or you have a huge transport ship that has an issue with a propeller or a small part of the ship on the bottom, but it needs a dry dock to repair, and there are only a couple dry docks in the world that can handle it. Then the price could be a very high percentage of original price due to the extreme supply and demand curves involved.
Repair costs are not a simple a function of the “size” of the damage.
> As a hypothetical, suppose the camera glass or lens was made with materials or a technique that caused it to be 90% of a phone’s cost to produce. Then replacing this item would cost >90% of the phone’s price, even though it is “small”.
When I say there are people who do the repair for much cheaper I mean including the price they pay for the part, not merely their labor. Your hypothetical is not the case here.
I don't get how that addresses anything. Maybe they're "tilted" toward a "higher" price, but until you put actual numbers on these (are we talking $10 higher or $1000 higher?) it doesn't say anything. I'm saying that, for a wide variety of common repairs, it is a fact that you can literally get the exact same repair done for the exact same issue (parts, labor, everything being the same) for far less (literally hundreds) than Apple does it for you. And I'm talking about profitable businesses here, not charities. There's no need to give hypothetical academic rebuttals on economics when the facts are clear on the ground.
The only thing broken on the Mac was the glass display, which I guarantee you does not cost more than $100 to replace wholesale, even with labor. However, Apple doesn't offer this repair for you. Instead, they sell you an entire topcase to replace the entire top half of your computer, even if your aluminum case, display, hinge, backlight, microphone and webcam are all fine. Your only option is replacing everything, at which point, I think OP has reason to be mad. Apple simply doesn't invest money in making their devices more repairable, they make too much money off selling replacements for it to be lucrative. That's fine, and their decision to make, but there's a real human/UX cost that comes with making fragile hardware.
Parts? Manufacturing? Shipping? Labour? Storage? Distribution? There's more to a part than the cost. Now whether or not what they're charging is over the top, then I doubt you'll find much disagreement; however, the GP doesn't say how the damage happened. I don't know of a single vendor that will cover accidental damages on a screen, and no-one is responsible other than the party that caused the damage. Also, late 2020 MBA (M1) goes for $465, with ~$30 for the parts, ~$15 for shipping.
And if you bent the frame of the car and broke the suspension and did some damage to the sensors on your suspension? In the US it would cost a fortune and it wouldn’t shock me if it costs 70% of the value of the car.
The outrage is justified if the screen cracked due to a manufacturing defect. Otherwise, get over it and be careful with your stuff if you can’t afford the repair.
And before you send something off, ask questions. The shipping costs I’m sure would have been disclosed.
> Otherwise, get over it and be careful with your stuff if you can’t afford the repair.
I don't know if you're an engineer, but if you are you probably don't take the same approach to errors in your software. Being careful is only part of the solution to reducing risk. Another is adopting practices and patterns that are less error-prone. And another is to reduce the impact of errors when they do happen.
With a software service, we might have redundancy, and a watchdog or orchestration system that restarts any instances that crash. With a laptop, we might purchase accidental damage insurance, or just decide to buy a brand that is cheaper to repair.
When humans are involved, "be more careful" is rarely a successful strategy on its own.
I mean, the screen is a major part of that initial 1000 EUR cost. Could easily be half. No way you can get a MacBook Air M1 for much less that 1000 EUR used, those things keep their price for years and years. And how much were you willing to part with? Is that 100-200 (or even 300) EUR difference really worth the near-aneurysm you're having?
I am like this too. I will flip my lid over something like this, but about half the time upon further reflection I will come to the conclusion that I was being irrational, and simply upset at how much things objectively cost or how long things take, or whatever.
>I mean, the screen is a major part of that initial 1000 EUR cost. Could easily be half.
The macbook air m1 here is 1100 euros, the mac mini is 800 euros.
So the keyboard, trackpad, battery, screen and form factor are worth 300 euro according to Apple. So that LCD screen they put there even though has a high res, is definitely not worth half the price of the laptop.
You seriously believe that a screen replacement (even after including labor) costs 70% of the price of the laptop? And that OP is irrational for thinking otherwise?
The screens arrive at the factory by boat, in an optimally-packed container. Replacement screens are individually packaged and delivered in low volume by courier.
Apple must first examine the laptop, which isn't free, then put in the replacement, and do acceptance testing, because they warranty repairs, and even if they didn't, not repairing something and claiming it's a repair is bad press.
Maybe they make profit as well who knows, but it's easy for me to believe that the assembly-line price of a screen triples by the time a repair is installed and the user gets the laptop back.
Starting to look like some of the M1 Airs got a bad batch of screen glass, which is a separate matter. If so, here's my prediction: Apple will do the same thing they did for the butterfly keyboards and eat the replacement cost, and people will be complaining about it ten years later.
Unlike the butterfly fiasco, I'm not betting on this being a design flaw, it's either the law of large numbers or a badly-tempered batch of glass.
None of that is relevant to the cost to replace an uninsured screen which broke under user-error conditions.
Everyone here is capable of looking up shipping prices from China or similar even for the volume of 1 screen, and seeing it doesn't cost hundreds of dollars.
Similarly, the average pay of Genius Bar employees and Apple repair techs is semi-public knowledge that can be found on the internet.
Nobody is believing that it costs Apple $400-500 in additional expenses _per screen_ to repair MacBooks.
> but it's easy for me to believe that the assembly-line price of a screen triples by the time a repair is installed and the user gets the laptop back.
Like it or not, in a lovely city called Shenzhen, it costs you $200 to get your macbook pro's screen replaced in a regular roadside repair shop just next building to your fancy apple shop.
As a low skill job, you get to master the procedure by watching online video tutorials, interestingly, that is also a viable business in Shenzhen, they have such "online schools" to get people trained for such jobs and some of their videos are free -
No doubt, feel free to find a service in Shenzhen you can ship your Mac to and employ them. It's not even implausible if you speak fluent Chinese, there are uh. Limits to your ability to recover if you make a bad choice, but it might work out.
And locals can import those screens right? Little bit of markup. Anyway let me know what the actual price is where you are, from someone who will actually do it, and isn't Apple, all of this is legal and the service is available. That will give us a point of comparison.
So many people commenting on OP's post essentially gaslighting them for not wanting to pay $1000 for a screen repair, as if we dont live in a universe where replacing screens on every other product is 1/3 that cost.
Yes the well known “touch screen” that MacBook Airs are well known for. Displays might be able to be had cheaper (in fact straight from the manufacturer they surely are) but I’m not sure I would trust buying from a vendor that doesn’t even know what they’re selling
> the screen is a major part of that initial 1000 EUR cost
No, LCD screens are pretty affordable these days. You can buy yourself a portable external display with a 4k samsung panel for about $200-250 depending on where are you. Such portable displays have extra batteries included, so extra $ costs included.
Hmm, that's strange. I guess out of warranty? Even still, I just walked in 3 days before the 3 years ran out and got them to replace the screen that only had some standard permanent keyboard imprints on it. Though it is a shame that the likelihood of encountering this does make applecare necessary.
Macbook air M1 was released in November 2020,all electronical goods in Europe have a 2years warranty, so unless the person bought it on a Grey market/2nd hand, it's strange. I believe most credit cards are also offering extended warranty (Switzerland, 3y and 5y with a debit card).
Europeans generally knows their rights on warranty and warranty period.
I had a macbook pro that was involved in the recall for that series for catching fire.
The machine caught fire in my bed. I woke up to it burning and melting.
I took it to apple SF... they had the machine for nearly 2 months while they "investigated" -- then they returned it to me and said that at one point in the machines life, the moisture sensor had been triggered.
Apple "offered" me an opportunity to buy a replacement at full price. even though the machine was under recall for battery fires. I had a battery fire. But because they claimed the moisture sensor had been hit - they wouldnt honor the recall and didnt replace my machine.
> This comment is what you reap for screwing people over.
?
Have you attempted to get it repaired by a third party? What do they quote? Is it possible that the part + labor is worth around $680? It does sound like an absurd price, but I would expect the display to be a relatively expensive part (a replacement is $600 at iFixit[0]) to replace depending on the extent of the damage. It might also be labor intensive considering how unrepairable Apple products are.
> I still need to pay 50 EUR to get the computer back.
Presumably this is for shipping? $50 is expensive sure (unless you're talking expedited shipping), but I suspect you'd be mad even if this was a more reasonable price.
---
It sounds like you're just being vindictive because you feel slighted by a company. If you actually want a solution it seems that tomorrow you can buy the part yourself and replace it.
> It might also be labor intensive considering how unrepairable Apple products are.
Even if two thirds of the price of the laptop is a reasonable reflection of the cost of repair, poor repairability is a choice Apple made. It seems fair to criticise the cost, and to factor it in to future buying decisions.
There are no shortages of alternatives to Apple. Apple doesn't hold a monopoly on anything. They're also a known quantity -- they value form over function, are very expensive, and very hard to repair. You know what you're getting.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't ask for Apple to do better, or try to get changes made. But, I do think it's completely ridiculous to rage about repair-ability like the parent did.
Poor repairability is not usually an obvious cost when buying a laptop. And many people don't buy laptops frequently. Sharing stories like this helps people make buying decisions that are right for them, making the market work better. As you say there are plenty of alternatives, although computing platforms can be sticky (by design).
What would obviously be even better than anecdotes is some statistical data on the likelihood of failure, average cost & convenience of repairs etc. I don't know if such a thing exists - in its absence we have to make do with anecdotes.
I guess that I'm expecting everyone to know Apple's reputation, but that's definitely not the case, especially outside of tech circles; I would expect someone on this site to not be surprised with repairability & Apple.
I think sharing stories is fine, but the poster seemed to be going much further than that by seemingly trying to get revenge on Apple, which is a strange thing to do.
Statistical ownership data would be awesome. Like a graph saying that if you expect the device to last x years you should expect y costs in repairs. That could even be a selling point for tech protection plans like Apple Care.
I got the same quote two years ago when my Macbook Pro 2015 got staingate display issue. It was a few weeks after the "4 years repair period" and they wouldnt replace it for free, even though its a known problem and their fault. I also didnt receive any email notification about 4 year repair period regarding staingate issue. If anyone is sueing in Europe about staingate issue let me know. It was sad to throw away 3000€ machine after 4 years.
This is the exact opposite of my experience. 2015 maxed out MBP bought USED off Craigslist for $500 in 2019. The machine had the stains on the screen. So I called up apple, got an associate explained the staining and “staingate” they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I then proceeded to as for their supervisor who knew exactly what I was talking about. After a few minutes on hold the supervisor said they would replace the screen as a one time curtesy (side note the supervisor tried to confirm the original purchase date which I didn’t have an tried to guessimate somehow that guess was only week outside the 4 year extension). Apple mailed me a box and I mailed in the MBP. MBP arrived at the repair depo and sat there for 3 days. I sweated thinking they’re going to kick it back. The next day I get a shipping confirmation that the MBP is being returned. Day or two later I received the MBP. Brand new screen, top case, keyboard, battery, they replaced everything but the logic board.
Just a recap: Bought 4 year old MBP off Craigslist for $500 within a week had almost a completely refreshed laptop for free (minus the time on the phone ~45 minutes and me constantly refreshing the repair status).
This isn’t the first time. Another time I dropped my Pixel and messed up the screen real bad. Pulled out my wife’s old iPhone 7 and used that until I decided which new phone I was going to get. About a week into using the 7 it wouldn’t detect the SIM card. Phone is out of warranty, no apple care, nothing. Book an appointment at the apple store. Show the genius my issue. They offered to provide a loaner (iPhone 6) and send it off to be repaired for free. Within a couple days I get an email that the phone is ready to be picked up. Pick up the phone and depot replaced EVERYTHING minus the metal back on the phone. New logic board, new screen, new battery. Completely refreshed iPhone 7 in 2019.
Just these two events along would make me stick with Apple. Either their customer service is top notch or I’m a really really good talker.
Ps. Still rocking the 15” MBP and the iPhone 7 sits back in a drawer until it’s needed again (I ended up getting a 2020 SE and now a 2022 SE.)
This doesn't fit my experience with apple reparation process. You usually can request a quote prior to any action, can you elaborate on the context? Was it returned to factory via a shipping company prior to any quote from the support?
I know laws are much kinder to the customers in EU than in the USA, but such a difference of process sound pretty odd.
The display assembly itself is $450, so 680 EUR sounds about right to have it professionally repaired.
Also, it makes sense that it would cost that much. Most of the product is that luxury display, with an M1 hanging off it. You could probably open up the case, rip out the logic board, and pay less in repairs.
AppleCare+ is pretty fairly priced and generous with their services, and would have made your display repair substantially cheaper, most likely free unless you tell them straight up that you dropped your MacBook or punched the screen.
It's cheaper to initially make something because economies of scale in low(er)-wage countries where most of our stuff is built. Repairs are 'artisans' working at high(er) wages (and sometimes parts that need to be ordered and shipped over long distances).
Someone at Foxconn can make "x" devices in an hour in their sleep because that's all they do. A repair technician has to spend an hour tearing something apart and poking around just to figure out what's wrong and only then start fixing it.
It's not all due to mass production. Modern industrial design has made it so that accidents are expensive.
If you involve yourself and in a minor automobile collision and damage one of your front headlights on your Lexus with adaptive lighting, your total repair cost for the headlight itself will exceed $1000. A new headlight will require removal the front bumper and calibration of the adaptive sensors, both of which add labor costs. It's not just headlights; if you have lane-keeping technology in your vehicle and this is achieved via a forward facing camera, then a windshield replacement exceeds $1000 as well. If you smash your rear bumper into a mailbox and need to replace the whole bumper, you need your parking sensors re-calibrated. And this is with a maintainable car make like Lexus. For the more ostentatious luxury makes, the costs will be significantly more.
You might think, I'll buy a truck then. But trucks also have windshield-integrated forward-facing cameras, backup/parking sensors, and adaptive headlights. You wouldn't save much versus the Lexus.
Apple's equipment is also designed in a way to be difficult to repair.
Swapping the battery on a Dell laptop takes a few minutes for someone unfamiliar with the process -- unscrew 6 normal screws, swap the battery, replace the cover and screws.
Replacing the battery in a MacBook takes an hour for someone familiar with the process, and several hours for someone unfamiliar. It also requires special tools.
>It's cheaper to initially make something because economies of scale in low(er)-wage countries where most of our stuff is built. Repairs are 'artisans' working at high(er) wages
I get your point but my MacBook Pro's screen cracked a few years ago. This happened in India, they quoted $700 (around 55k rupees) for a Mac that cost $1100 (around 90k rupees)
I am taking a look at the comments on this thread and im astonished. HN is full of intelligent, self-reliant people and yet, all throughout this thread I see so many users trashing people for complaints about price and service quality from Apple.
So many users here have had obviously bad experiences with Apple Care and Apple Repair Services, why is it so hard to believe them? Also, why is it so hard to imagine that Apple is making some mistakes in their repair model?
Commenters defending Apple here - they dont care about you at all, they dont need the assistance from you in defending them, and you dont get a discount for doing so, so what is your motivation for doing it? It is clear this 'Self Service Repair' model is designed to prevent independent repair shops from making money, therefore eliminating them. In what way is this good for the consumer?
For many of them, they identify with Apple. That is, part of their self identity is tied to Apple. To them Apple isn't just a for-profit company that makes good products, it's a philosophy, a way of life, a team, an identity.
If someone challenges or says something negative about Apple, it's a negative about their identity and they take it very personally.
To be clear, this tendency is not limited to Apple. Humans do it regarding all manner of companies/things. But Apple does have a particularly large and passionate following.
I do t think this is necessarily true for many of the users here "defending" Apple.
It's likely that many people just use their mac and find that the hardware quality, etc is nice compared to other competition. If the company now wants to make it possible to fix your computer, I would imagine that would typically be celebrated by HN, since apple has had such a history of lock-in/non-customization problems with the professional computing demographic.
The note here about affecting small businesses is nonetheless a good point, and should be recognized for the potential problems it may bring; however I don't think discrediting the users by making it 'their identity' to defend some hardware is correct.
There are reasons to not like Apple products, but there are also quite a few great qualities about them as well. For example, the ARM processors they're making right now are excellent (best in class by a lot, as far as I can tell) - for battery life. While they may certainly have lower benchmarks than some i7s, they are doing fantastic for only using 15W. In today's age, few developers use their laptop for more than ssh and firefox, so it makes more sense for a good Linux dev to be on asahi Linux with an M2, while the 'typical business user' or 'creative type' would be more likely to use a Falcon Northwest TLX with a nice dGPU for their heavier workload.
So, again - there are plenty of reasons to not like Apple such as all the lock-in associated problems - but you can certainly use a device and it not be 'your identity'.
I personally love the Apple products I own. I also have many other products from brands I trust that I love. When someone has a bad experience with a product I love, I try to help them, I don't put them down for trying to destroy my preferred brands reputation.
I agree with you. I didn't mean that all defense of Apple is for identity reasons.
I am often an Apple critic because of their lock-in/closed/proprietary nature, but i think this is a good move. Personally I think it's a cave to pressure from the right to repair movement, and they won't be sad about killing independent shops, but that doesn't make it a bad move. I'm happy to see it.
When I switched from PC to Mac about 10 years ago, for the most part I was thrilled. But I missed a few features. The two big ones I remember are cut and paste files with Cmd-X/Cmd-V, and selectively delete specific files from the trash.
I can't tell you how many times fanboys told me that neither of those features made any sense, and I was silly for even wanting them. Yet within a few years Apple added both features.
While it is possible that they hire surrogates to post on HN, the simpler explanation is that they have rabid fans that stick their necks out for a trillion dollar company. The proof is that this behavior has been around Apple even well before their re-rise to dominance.
It would be very interesting to pull a history of complaints about e.g. Apple’s white power cords and their failure rate from reddit and then examine the self-similarity of the “what are people doing, this has never happened to me” responses.
Of course to do this properly you also have to realize and account for the idea that others are just as incentivized to fund artificial critiques as Apple is to artificially defend themselves.
I disagree, the fewer assumptions means the simplest. I'd argue it's not worth the risk for Apple to hire people to shill for them, when there are so many who do it not just for free, but do it genuinely. Imagine if Apple hires shills, then they spill their guts to the NYTimes, that overall makes Apple look far worse.
We're both making the same number of assumptions. The difference is that yours is in the negative and mine is in the positive. Your example about the risk of someone leaking to the press shows we simply live in completely different realities, thus argument is impossible. Which is fine! In my reality people are leaking to the press all the time about such things and simply being ignored by most who don't want to confront how dark corporate and government PR and marketing has become.
Again, you're assuming they don't have surrogates. This is still an assumption. The miscommunication here is that you think I'm a conspiracy theorist or something, and I think you're naive. But so what? Sure, maybe I'm seeing phantoms where they don't exist. We've clearly had different life experiences though. To me the basic calculus of a multi-trillion dollar company perhaps throwing out a few million bucks a year to pay "surrogates" to influence opinion on popular online forums is not the claim that carries the burden of proof. I'd be absolutely shocked if they weren't doing this. But again, there's no way we can even argue if you think the burden of proof goes in the opposite direction. But at least understand that neither of our claims are "simpler" than the other. My original comment saying "more simpler" was a bit of sarcasm in case that didn't come through.
Yup. My hypothesis is unambiguously verifiable, and I've verified it to my own satisfaction through my personal experiences. Your hypothesis is not unambiguously verifiable, only statistically so (whatever that means). At least it's falsifiable, but there's a deep challenge there because falsification would unveil aspects of our society that most people don't want to know about.
Apple is following the Harley Davidson strategy. Their brand becomes a lifestyle and personality for their customers. Build quality falls, prices go up, and people who've bought into the brand-as-a-lifestyle defend it all while acting disturbingly hostile to everybody else who isn't in their club.
> It is clear this 'Self Service Repair' model is designed to prevent independent repair shops from making money, therefore eliminating them. In what way is this good for the consumer?
The quality can be highly questionable. One shop first put an old battery in my MacBook, and after I complained they put in a new one from a bad manufacturer which ended up breaking touchpad and keyboard.
On my iMac a different store installed the wrong screen (from the previous model that had ghosting issues and wasn’t as bright) - I ended up changing it myself for around EUR250 instead of 700 the store charged or 1100 Apple wanted. Also the screws were loose on the MacBook and the camera and microphone weren’t aligned on the iMac. I obviously went to different stores and checked the reviews before, but it didn’t help.
Ideally it should be simple enough to make these repairs- on the same MacBook I replaced a broken fan which worked perfectly fine for four years. You really don’t know what happens in the store.
That being said, I don’t think apple is seriously interested in helping users with this, it starts with the design of products. My old MacBook Pro retina was so much more robust than the new m1 pro I had to replace it with. The iMac screen is just silly with the easily breaking glass front that makes you replace the whole thing and also with the inaccessible drives.
>The quality can be highly questionable. One shop first put an old battery in my MacBook, and after I complained they put in a new one from a bad manufacturer which ended up breaking touchpad and keyboard. On my iMac a different store installed the wrong screen (from the previous model that had ghosting issues and wasn’t as bright) - I ended up changing it myself for around EUR250 instead of 700 the store charged or 1100 Apple wanted. Also the screws were loose on the MacBook and the camera and microphone weren’t aligned on the iMac. I obviously went to different stores and checked the reviews before, but it didn’t help.
Is this not due entirely to how hard Apple makes it to get OEM parts?
For the iMac panel: I did some research because I wasn’t sure if it actually had a problem (I just had a hunch on the brightness and the monitor symbol had changed) - then I found one that worked as expected on alibaba, but dealing with all the glued on panel etc. Was a real pain.
For the battery: probably. I didn’t bother searching replacing that one though and gave away the laptop. I would have changed it myself but at that time my government was subsidizing small shops with half price coupons so it was actually cheaper to go to a store than to change it myself (looking back I should have just registered as a repair shop and taken the subsidy myself)
Wow this is evil. Talking of a company that claims being super green by not adding a charger or using different boxes for refurbished devices, but then makes sure you have to replace your otherwise functional electronics every few years. Or also as a side note: causing a major annoyance with the non standard cable.
The panel I bought doesn’t have any apple references, just the LG part number. Funnily enough, the previous model panel from the store falsely had the same part number after I opened it.
The current state means you deal with “refurbishers” that mass sell used components (possibly fixing common issues at a micro-level), buy “broken” units yourself to harvest for parts or grab them off eBay et al.
Sometimes the manufacturers do run extra production runs so you get new OEM parts. Or there is cross compatibility.
I’ve covered a fair bit of the expense of my new Mac units by parting out my old ones.
> I obviously went to different stores and checked the reviews before, but it didn’t help.
This is an issue with reviews in general: most people critique the wrong things.
They have no idea how to review the finished product, but feel compelled to review anyway and beyond “it turns on now and it didn’t before” (which I guess is a great minimum bar), focus on the cleanliness of the shop, politeness of the staff or their hours. All of which I consider less important than fixing the issue properly.
> focus on the cleanliness of the shop, politeness of the staff or their hours
I was in a European country at that time, so all of this was pretty much standard for this tier of shop (reasonably clean, not very polite, bad hours), anything higher would have cost as much as the Apple Store, so it would have almost been worth replacing the whole device
From reading that a while ago, it seems to be designed so that Apple score some marketing points and plan ahead for regulations making that mandatory, while not actually delivering a credible service on that front. Virtually no one is going to use that service if it is indeed what's described in the article.
I think we are arguring the same point. I don't think Apple is doing this with good motivations and eliminating the independent repair shop is bad. The article you linked only further articulates why this move is bad for many other reasons, too
> It is clear this 'Self Service Repair' model is designed to prevent independent repair shops from making money, therefore eliminating them.
how is this clear? do you think everyone will simply start fixing their own devices? from my experience a tiny tiny minority of people have both the necessary experience and the time to do this, thus leaving the independent shops mostly unaffected.
It's clear because of the details. You need a serial number to get a part (so therefore cannot purchase in bulk or generically) and the prices are not any better, and in many cases worse, than apple's own in-house price.
LTT runs the numbers to demonstrate it. Apple is making you pay more to do it yourself, and you have to wait days for the parts to arrive, when you could just go down to the Apple Store. The pricing completely nullifies any real-world benefit of this program, making the program seem like it is entirely performative.
If an individual can't even save money doing it this way, the program is worse than useless for repair shops since they won't be able to compete with Apple Store repair services. That's also without even addressing the inability for repair shops to buy parts before a customer shows up with a problem. Repair shops want to be able to provide same day service, which this program makes impossible... unless your name is Apple.
There are no iPhone itemized repairs, with most items resulting in an equipment swap. Some of these are subsidized (for instance, some battery replacements). The replaced items are salvaged.
Linus's numbers are sensationalized on top of that - he drops the equipment return and salvage credit at some point, considers equipment rental as part of the part cost, as well as running numbers for his person's time (who I'm not sure is a trained technician, just that they value their time more than minimum wage). I personally would have looked for an AASP source for a cost comparison.
Mac numbers will lend themselves quite a bit more to an apples-to-apples comparison.
Repair shops have only been able to compete on pricing when they use non-OEM replacement parts or repair the OEM parts. Both these approaches are both getting much more difficult.
Independent repair shops also have the sales disadvantage when they don't have a relationship set up to cover warranty repairs - so they often would be quoting OEM replacement parts for gear with years of depreciation, as well as upgrade benefits when the customer does a cost analysis.
I'll go so far as to say if a repair place _ever_ quotes a cheaper price on a repair than Apple does themselves, they are doing a different repair. They are repairing the OEM part rather than replacing it, they are replacing a OEM part with a part salvaged from another device, or they are putting non-OEM parts in. For screen and battery replacements, the majority of phone repairs, it's almost always non-OEM parts.
Apple testified to Congress that their repair services lose them money [1]. If they have not focused on their own repair services profitability, then they likely also have not focused on profitability of independent repair services.
People upthread are saying Apple's OOW price for an MBA screen replacement is in the $500-600 range. The new self service program will sell you one for $300 if you return the old part, or $400 if you don't. Seems like it's perfectly possible to save money doing it this way.
The self-service prices for Mac weren't available yesterday, so all that we could discuss was their iPhone program. Apple doesn't publicly list repair prices for laptops, so it is hard to say exactly what you'll pay. I look forward to people doing more in-depth research and figuring out exactly how things balance out with the Mac self-service program, but the iPhone program did not live up to even the most basic expectations.
I'm also not seeing where you got that "$500-600" number "upthread", which presumably refers to the rest of this HN discussion, since I don't see any numbers like that. It could make the prices somewhat more reasonable than they were for iPhone, but I definitely haven't had time to do the research myself, and I don't appreciate how Apple hides the OOW repair cost for laptops, which makes this analysis harder.
I think it's because those comments are provoked reflexively by the appearance of $BigCo in a story (automatically guaranteed to generate generic complaints about $BigCo), and if the story is the tuple ($BigCo, $Theme) (where $Theme = something like support, repair, price, you name it) then the reflex is even stronger to reproduce any-associated-complaint in that space.
Because this is reflexive, it's not really a response to the story at hand—such comments are more self-referential than on topic. That is not intellectually interesting—we're not learning much from them. It's satisfying, though, to those who have similar pre-existing associations and feelings, so inevitably it brings up a lot of me-too reactions and similar posts. But again, those aren't particularly related to the original story—they're just prompted by it, sort of like tapping on a knee—so they aren't interesting to people who don't personally have the same associations with that topic tuple.
Eventually, users who have opposite associations get tired of seeing these generic, not-particularly-on-topic comments, and respond by complaining about the complaints. Of course that's a reflexive and generic response in its own right. I sometimes call this the contrarian dynamic of internet forums (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
The only two things I know of to counteract this trend are (1) for users to consciously post more substantive, on-topic, curious comments, which provide nuclei for better discussion to organize around; and (2) for moderators to downweight generic and offtopic subthreads, which counteracts their unfortunate tendency to stick at the top of the page.
This is a good post to reflect upon when considering the bias in HN moderation. The moderation is not just invested in YC financially, but the depth of self-righteous philosophical conviction is there too. This isn’t Reddit nor your average Trust & Safety team that aims at neutrality, dang wants to be a Drudge or a Jeff Zucker.
I think Apple has made major cost cutting changes on their repairs and returns department. As recently as a few years ago, Apple was much more liberal about returns and fees for repairs.
I've also noticed that the quality of the customer support around returns has gone south. I've seen cases where basic information about the context of the return seems missing and customers are put in long loops dealing with simple problems.
I've seen the miserly behavior myself. I've put a lot of cash toward Apple SW, HW and services but that loyalty is not recognized or rewarded in how you're treated by the company.
Between this lack of awareness of who their sophisticated customers are and their loyalty and cost cutting measure, I suspect some people have been shocked at how bad the repair / returns experience can be today.
When someone has a bad experience with a product I love, I try to help them, I don't put them down for trying to destroy my preferred brands reputation.
Apple users are always convinced that people experiencing problems with the product are intentionally complaining to damage Apple, rather than honestly having an issue
Apple is doing this to placate regulators. I want them to succeed because I don't want regulators dictating how the devices I buy, from Apple or otherwise, should be. Apple is fighting by my side.
Highly unlikely considering it also contains the secure enclave and considering it's PKI-based security you will only ever get chips that are matched to a serial number. Pretty much the same way Intel chips are matched to Intel PCHs using the CPU ROM. You can of course get the PCH and the CPU from Intel, but you'll never get the firmware to load on them unless you're a mainboard manufacturer.
Considering the secure enclave is also used for data encryption, anti-theft and machine identification to APIs like iMessage, it's probably not a good idea to have them available on the open market in manufacturing mode anyway (unless someone comes up with a smart way to have PKI while also having free-for-all).
It would be hard to use such a chip since it's so customized for Apple hardware, and it's likely only available in BGA(?) or similarly consumer-unfriendly manufacturing oriented packaging.
I would really love to see an ARM64 ecosystem similar to what exists for PC hardware with motherboards and chips and other parts available. The chip for that would probably be the Graviton or something similar, and apparently that chip is being sold to other vendors including high-end router vendors like Mikrotik.
Unfortunately I do think the M1 beats the crap out of the graviton in at least single core performance, but I think that's because the M1 is optimized for fewer beefier cores for desktop work loads where single threaded performance matters more. Graviton is mostly for cloud and other applications where most work loads are highly multithreaded or multi-tenant.
Isn't this what the RPi4 and other single board computers have already accomplished? They even support UEFI, ACPI and other modern amenities as certified through the SystemReady program. You have socketed peripherals through the compute modules as well.
The Ampere Altra Developer Platform might be the closest you will get for now.
Although you might have to go into debt trying to procure one - it's probably a low volume product with debug interfaces that isn't cost-engineered in the slightest.
the problem is more often in some specific chips that burn all the time (USB-C, battery controller), are rather cheap, and are un-available because Apple (and others) forbid the manufacturer to sell those separately.
there are plenty of videos of Louis Rossmann on this issue last years, if one of those 1$ chip burn the whole motherboard is good for the bin. the "good" news is that there will be a supply of M1 chips from these boards, if BGA (un)soldering is your thing.
That'd be fairly standard with laptop CPUs in general as far as I know. Apple barely sells any actual desktops too (e.g. mac mini is really just a laptop build with some extra ports).
I can't wait for the next big article complaining about Apple renting you exactly the same equipment they use, at cost, because it's all just too big and complicated.
Why would you "speculate" when the facts on this program (for iPhones) have been out for months and take 15 seconds to check and entirely falsify your comment?
So what would you have them do? Send you a kit with some janky aluminum foil, tools bought off Ebay, and instructions on how to scrounge around your kitchen for stuff that can be used to pry off the screen?
For fucks sake, it's like they can't satisfy you no matter what they do. You wanted to be able to repair to the quality and assurance that the manufacturer does and now are griping about the cost of it. (or did you? and now are having 2nd thoughts?)
If I had to say one thing it would be have the purchase of the items through the apple website and normal apple account. Not that strange third party thing. Just hook it into the apple eco-system like all of their other stuff.
Imagine if they did the apple trade-in program or returns this way or applecare this way, created a whole new obtuse website to use.
Also I don't appreciate the swearing and I don't have 2nd thoughts.
I remember when stealing peoples iPhones and iPods on the subway was affectionately referred to as “apple picking” by the perpetrators. iCloud locking has cut that down to almost nothing.
Thanks to the miracle of what is now called "Find My," I got to watch as my wife's newly stolen iPhone made its way from Rome to Tunisia. Unfortunately, in its early iterations, you could only locate an item, not take any action on that item.
I suspect that wouldn't happen today, since I could now remotely lock the phone.
Such a strong pipeline of stolen Apple devices -> backdoor shady PC repair shops -> North Africa. I too got to watch my buddies iPhone’s live journey. At least it was a bit entertaining.
Why do this for even phones not marked as stolen? The video even suggests having a "timeout" of only allowing a reset after 30 days of inactivity, at which point the original owner has gotten plenty of time to mark it as stolen.
The thing is that almost none of what I'm talking about are marked as stolen. They're just old devices bricked because they weren't removed from an account.
Agreed, they should add a 30 day expiration and send people a reminder to set their device to stolen if they haven't done so yet (if it was actually stolen). If the device is lost give them the option to extend the auto removal of the lock. If by expiration of that time period and the device was not marked stolen it should be unlocked so that it doesn't become e-waste because someone forgot their password and reset their phone.
Second Apple should provide a way to verify if a phone is locked to allow people who purchase phones on eBay to not get f'd. I see no reason for Apple not to provide this service again.
Third, apple should to take back all phones that are marked as stolen and recycle, refurbish or whatever without compensating the person who brought it in.
What if the stolen iPhone was your only way to access your email/iCloud? You might not be able to confirm it as stolen then.
I do agree that e-waste can be a problem, but unlocking the iPhone seems trivially easy, and as noted in this article, the real problem is that when devices you own break, they might become very expensive paperweights (aka e-waste) as repairing them might cost more than the device is currently worth.
And I believe Apple already has a program where they can recycle an iPhone back to spare parts without compensation as you describe.
That small percentage of people who can't mark their phones as stolen is not zero but it's small enough for theives not to bother stealing a device which 9 out of 10 times is unusable. The upside however of being able to recover a non stolen phone is so much higher.
> Apple will offer rental kits for $49, so that customers who do not want to purchase tools for a single repair still have access to these professional repair tools. Customers will have access to the tool kit for one week and it will be shipped free of charge.
Shipping isn't free. It's just included in the cost. Wish it was possible to force companies to stop using bullshit marketing tactics.
It just means that they don’t charge an extra fee for shipping. Of course the cost is included, just like the cost of employee time to design products is also part of the cost and not something we need to disclose.
Please enlighten me. How can a shipping service be free and why do you think I’m naive to assume that they bundled the shipping cost in the service fee?
It is included in the cost. It is not going to change based on location. It is not going to be a surprise fee tacked on (c.f. airline booking). Additionally, as it is something that is incorporated into the cost of the service it isn't something that can be removed if some later legislation says that repair kits must be shipped free.
It also implies that you get no benefit from picking it up yourself from their shop. I might be tempted to check out some of their other products if I feel incentivised to drop by.
I’m based in Europe, where it’s more popular to go and pick stuff up from a physical store. Maybe they should consider having such an option in some countries, but this is a different issue.
After Steve Jobs left Apple the first time, Apple became much more like the other hardware companies of the time, including opening up things that they had previously held tightly closed. When Jobs returned, they clamped back down. Now, Jobs has left Apple permanently and Apple is once again opening up.
So here's a question: Is this a good thing, or is it a sign that Apple is returning to the mediocrity of the earlier non-Jobs era? Is Apple losing what made it great?
Also adding to the anecdotes with my own: I have never needed a case for my phones or computers, and have barely even scratched the shell. I go on adventures for a good portion of the year and still manage to keep it intact, so i scratch my head when people say they break easily or that they always shatter their screen, it really seems to go beyond accidental damage and stray into carelessness.
[0] https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/2000/MA2074/en_US/iph...