Several years back, before Apple clamped down on this kind of commercial behavior, I made the mistake of taking my iPhone to a third-party repair firm for a screen replacement. They claimed to be “Apple-authorized,” but it’s unclear for what. The knockoff part they used to replace the screen was palpably awful-dim, purple-tinted, discolored around the edges, somehow flickering like a CRT, and a millimeter or two thicker than the real deal so that it stuck out from the body of the phone.
The guy said “it’s fine, it looks great, it’s working perfectly, there’s no problem with it.” Basically “a screen is a screen.” I suppose in some situations and some parts of the market that may be true, and I’m glad that part of the market is adequately served by commodity Android manufacturers. But part of the small premium I pay to Apple for my low-end model iPhone, I pay specifically to avoid having to look my repairman in the eye and attempt to divine his judgment and trustworthiness before he makes off with my money. Consistency and trust in the repair ecosystem is a feature, to me.
There’s a balance to be struck, sure, but I’d hate to think of somebody doing the equivalent “what, it’s fine!” type of repair to a safety- or life-critical device and claiming it’s just as good as new. Even if somebody were to track such repairers down and prosecute them after their repairs injure somebody, we’d be moving from a high-trust to a low-trust kind of environment in exactly the areas where I least want to have to worry about trust.
Anyway, as to phones, I’ve since been very happy to pay Apple the $4/month to cover quality, authentic repairs should I damage my device—and I take them up on that coverage fairly often. $48/year plus the $29 deductible per incident works out even cheaper for me than that unacceptably poor third-party repair cost me years ago.
This is only slightly comical to me because the article actually mentions ventilators and how evil they were that they could only be serviced by the OEM due to the “VIN” on the parts.
I would not want to be the person strapped to a medical device where “it looks fine, it works great” guy was the one that fixed it on the cheap so he could make an extra few dollars.
Emergencies happen. Were inappropriate or flawed repairs ever a significant problem? Are there other solutions to that problem? Could there exist a third-party repair service or parts manufacturer competent enough to be authorized? Even besides an emergency, is the measure worth, say, severe delays to or even the impossibility of getting a repair somewhere that's disadvantaged either by being too far away from official services or by economics?
And why couldn't this be a post hoc PR rationalization for what just as well could be profiteering?
Now apply all those questions to the far less life-threatening concern of smartphones and laptops.
>Were inappropriate or flawed repairs ever a significant problem? Are there other solutions to that problem? Could there exist a third-party repair service or parts manufacturer competent enough to be authorized?
Yes, and they continue to be. Potentially, but no manufacturer, Apple or otherwise, has found one. Yes, but not at the scale that Apple operates. That's why Louis Rossman is a shyster. He has skills that are very rare but peddles his right to repair schtick as if every repair shop has those skills and then misrepresents the situation to create drama to drive engagement to his business and YouTube channel.
Backlight dimming can be implemented via PWM, which turns signal on and off at different frequencies to achieve the desired brightness setting from the backlight source. When it is poorly executed you tend to see that effect (more so at the lower backlight settings)
Consistency and trust in the repair ecosystem is a feature, to me.
You can always go to a real apple repair depot, instead of the crook changing your screen, as you cited.
3rd parties having access to real apple parts, an easier ability to replace them, makes it easier for you to get good independent support. It has nothing to do with that crook you mentioned.
(Just to steel-man the counterargument) it is not as clear-cut to me that everyone is realistically able to make such choice (depending on the geo, quality control of the authorized centers). The repair process is opaque enough that you are compromising the user who is choosing to pay for premium parts to get ripped off with some probability. Even a small percentage of bad parts in the ecosystem will disproportionally diminish the value of used/repaired iPhones so there is a non-trivial calculation to be done on the social impact of such individual choice.
Perhaps they should design the machines so that they are user-serviceable.
This was the default at one point. Look at the manual for any home appliance from the 1950s.
The difficulty in replacing an iphone screen is not that it's hard to plug it into its receptacle - the difficulty is in acquiring a part (they won't sell them) and then in opening the device, which requires skill and a specialized tool in pretty much every case.
Maybe, hold them together with small screws, instead of that.
>"but then it will weigh an extra .237oz!"Shut up.
It's not fair to dismiss this argument. The vast majority of people don't care if it's user serviceable and will prefer that the device weighs .237oz less than be user serviceable. This isn't some niche market we are talking about, we are 16 years after the release of the first iPhone. My account on this forum is 11 years old, and this point has been argued for almost that entire time. As much as been hand wringing about customers not caring about .237oz in favor of user serviceability, there have been countless smartphones released that people didn't buy. "Shut up" isn't a product strategy. "Perhaps they should design something users don't want" is a silly statement at this point.
Exactly. The whole "modular phone" and related phenomena are effectively nerd porn and against 50+ years of industry progress towards cheaper, better, denser integration.
I’m glad that the nerd porn exists because I do care about sustainability but operating on Apple’s scale means those devices are a fantasy for the majority of people. Apple’s approach seems more sustainable considering how many claims they can continue to make. Maybe it’s all marketing but I can’t find anyone that invalidates their claims without mischaracterizing them (as this article does a ton).
One way, is to make it non-user serviceable, the other, to make it user serviceable.
Now, which do you spend immense sums researching? Which people do you hire for your company? And after you spend years down this path, tooling, hiring, designing, someone says "the environment counts, it should be user serviceable".
Well of course, with billions spent designing, and predicated upon current methods, AND with all the people you hire experts in closed, non-servicable design?
What sort of answer will you get?
Apple, and others, the entire industry, has created this industry to be like this.
If the same R&D was spent on user serviceable, it would happen. Cheaply. Easily.
So of course it's "very hard" to do user serviceable, because no one knows how, and no one has the experience, and no one is researching it.
And no, these little firms working at it, don't equate to Apple working at it.
It may not be on purpose, but to claim it isn't possible is unfair.
You know if the auto industry was left to its own devices, it would still be claiming electric cars weren't feasible too, right? And from their perspective, they were not! Because without billions in research, and iteration, it wasn't.
Just like with Apple and user serviceable parts.
Just as with cars, and bags, and everything else, we should legislate such requirements. So all players in the market must comply.
This seems a little disingenuous. The entire reason that user-serviceable devices aren't possible is that the tooling required to service them becomes more and more specialized as the devices get smaller. It's not a matter of whether or not they can make user-serviceable parts (which why I replied to a comment about things like Fairphone and other modular/serviceable phones) but whether they can scale that and the reality is that 1) it doesn't scale without being so expensive that users can't afford the devices and 2) most users just don't care about user serviceability. So the idea that there are 2 ways to build is a false dichotomy.
It's not a question of possibilities. It's a question of trade-offs. It just does not sell (or at least hasn't.) Integrating everything often equates to less cost, less weight, less materials, less power use, less thickness, more reliability, more water resistance, more performance etc. for the vast majority of the users who have voted with their wallets. And to a nontrivial degree there are physical constraints that dictate this not just marketing and R&D spending (do you want to have replaceable SODIMMs in your iPhone?) I bet the average user likes the idea of modularity and user serviceability but wouldn't want to pay $100 extra for modularity in their $1k iPhone. They are likely more willing to purchase peace of mind through insurance, ala AppleCare+, than to purchase serviceability.
But sure we can keep pretending modularity is free and therefore of obviously a nonnegative option value to the user.
>There have been no options besides that paradigm.
Fairphone has been around for 8 years. There was the Shift 6m. The Galaxy line was highly repairable up until S5. We are past the point of speculating if its "perfectly doable". People don't want them. To say there were "no options" is ludicrous.
>You have the scent of someone with Apple stock.
I guess it's easier to call me a shill than to accept the almost 20 years of failure for smartphones in this aspect. It's easier to pretend that there were no options than people not actually buying them.
There should probably be regulations mandating that electronics replacement parts meet certain minimum QA and performance standards, particularly those with the significant capacity for harm such as batteries and components handling power. Parts not meeting these standards would get rejected at the border.
Standards are preferable, and I'd like to pick and choose which portions of the ecosystem I like, and others where I'd like to use something different.
Android isn't a malware riddled ecosystem and you can install 3rd party hardware and software.
Oof, this just proves that their strategy works. By limiting the availability of panels, 3rd party repair shops are left with very poor quality rejects. What happens is that Apple disallows any of their suppliers to sell panels on the open market, so 3rd party repair shops aren't able to get good panels, then Apple points to the 3rd party repair shops with shitty screens and tells you that you shouldn't trust 3rd party repair shops because the quality of their repairs aren't up to par. If appropriate parts were available, there would be no reason that someone with basic soldering skills and the ability to use a screw driver wouldn't be able to replace your screen with one just as good as it came with out of the box.
You act like there wasn’t a full decade and more of history where 3rd party repair existed en masse for electronics and the situation that he’s describing was exactly the result.
There’s no scam here. Most of us find the official repair stuff to be a feature, not a crutch.
The guy said “it’s fine, it looks great, it’s working perfectly, there’s no problem with it.” Basically “a screen is a screen.” I suppose in some situations and some parts of the market that may be true, and I’m glad that part of the market is adequately served by commodity Android manufacturers. But part of the small premium I pay to Apple for my low-end model iPhone, I pay specifically to avoid having to look my repairman in the eye and attempt to divine his judgment and trustworthiness before he makes off with my money. Consistency and trust in the repair ecosystem is a feature, to me.
There’s a balance to be struck, sure, but I’d hate to think of somebody doing the equivalent “what, it’s fine!” type of repair to a safety- or life-critical device and claiming it’s just as good as new. Even if somebody were to track such repairers down and prosecute them after their repairs injure somebody, we’d be moving from a high-trust to a low-trust kind of environment in exactly the areas where I least want to have to worry about trust.
Anyway, as to phones, I’ve since been very happy to pay Apple the $4/month to cover quality, authentic repairs should I damage my device—and I take them up on that coverage fairly often. $48/year plus the $29 deductible per incident works out even cheaper for me than that unacceptably poor third-party repair cost me years ago.