As far as I know, they ship a whole package of tools to customers who would like to repair their equipment. They also made the latest iPhone models easier to disassemble. What do you think they should have done in order to comply benevolently?
- They don't allow repair shops to freely order parts, each part must be ordered on-demand, requiring repair shops to pass their customers' personal information to Apple. This adds significant delay to repairs which makes 3rd parties an unappealing option
- They implement digital pairing between parts that require Apple's authorization, which is inaccessible to third party repair shops. In practice this means that you could buy 2 identical brand new iPhones from the Apple store, and they wouldn't work when you swapped their screens.
- They restrict Apple authorized repair shops from performing many useful repairs, I'm not completely up to date on the exact list, but you can watch videos from Louis Rossmann or read materials from other educators on the topic
- They gaslight users asking about data recovery options on their own forum, claiming that any repair shop which offers to recover data is scamming them, and ban actual experts who correct them to say that data recovery is possible
And, of course, all this is done under the guise of "security" or "protecting privacy" and the users are cheering for it. You never know when a 3rd party company is going to place a digital time bomb _somehow_ by putting a screen from iPhone A into iPhone B! Better let Apple fix it. Oh, the margins? What margins? It's not margins, it's the price of SECURITY!
Don’t be too quick to accept these criticisms. You have to compare to competitors in the industry to get a clearer picture.
Looking at screen repairs for Samsung Galaxy phones the same security issues arise and there are complaints about Samsung blocking third party repairs due to security concerns.
So are both Apple and Samsung just being greedy or is there more to the issue at hand? I’m inclined to believe a company unless they’ve demonstrated that I cannot trust them.
> You have to compare to competitors in the industry to get a clearer picture.
This tells you nothing. They each have the same incentives. They want you to pay a premium to the manufacturer for repairs, because they're the manufacturer, and because that causes more devices to be uneconomical to repair and so more people have to buy new ones.
I agree. I give Apple more benefit of the doubt than other tech giants. I see many knee-jerk reactions to what Apple does --- in my opinion --- rightfully. After all, many of these decisions are trade-offs, such as reusing parts from another iPhone being a measure against theft. I thanked the previous user I replied to because they were able to go beyond knee-jerk reactions and highlight issues in which Apple is pushing too hard on the trade-off scale.
> After all, many of these decisions are trade-offs, such as reusing parts from another iPhone being a measure against theft.
This is their stated justification, but it doesn't hold water. The device could refuse to accept a part if the part is from a device that has been reported stolen but they have it refusing to accept a part from a device that hasn't been stolen.
"Trade-offs" is a weasel word. It excuses nothing because it excuses anything.
Automatically bricking every device the second the warranty expires is a trade off, because you're "protecting" the user from out-of-warranty repairs. Does that mean it's justified?
Real trade-offs are the epitome of customer choice. Both of the alternatives are available and you choose the one you want. That choice is impaired when products are bound together, so that you can't make your choices independently.
Forcing people into these trade-offs is the evil to be prevented. It's the reason anti-trust laws prohibit tying.
I didn't say trade-offs justify Apple's behavior. But unless proposed alternatives are superior in every regard, we cannot claim that Apple should have done so, or that they have secret motives. Your proposed alternative for third-party repairs is likely to require trade-offs that Apple is not willing to make.
> It excuses nothing because it excuses anything.
We have a bigger problem that excuses anything: current economic model. Under this model, actors act the way they do, not because acting so is right, but because they can. Apple can afford to limit third-party repair options, so they do.
Regulations only make it a cat-and-mouse game. Actors now do whatever they can within the new limits. And, they are very clever in finding new ways of doing what they can, which people call “malicious compliance”.
> But unless proposed alternatives are superior in every regard, we cannot claim that Apple should have done so, or that they have secret motives.
This is what makes it a weasel word. Nothing is ever superior to something else in every regard. To use this as the standard is to assume that an ulterior motive is never possible, even when there is an unambiguous perverse incentive and the company's rationalization is weak and transparent.
> Your proposed alternative for third-party repairs is likely to require trade-offs that Apple is not willing to make.
Which is why it should be the customer and not Apple who chooses whether to make them that way, and the customer should not be forced to make such otherwise-independent choices together.
> Regulations only make it a cat-and-mouse game.
The premise of a cat-and-mouse game is that the cat is unwilling to eat the mouse.
If the law says that you have to allow competing stores and the company flaunts the law, the next law could say that the same company is not allowed to both make the device and exercise any control over any store, prohibiting the company from operating one themselves. Penalties don't have to be limited to money, they could require the release of internal documentation and source code to facilitate adversarial interoperability. They could simply break the company into a dozen smaller pieces.
Regulations are often terrible because they create inefficiencies which raise prices and, when applied to smaller entities, can destroy them and cause market consolidation. And regulators often pass rules without ever checking up on their actual effects. But "regulations are often wasteful and ineffective" absolutely does not mean that the regulators have no ability to mess up your business -- that is, in fact, the hardest thing to avoid because it happens so easily by accident. The last thing you want is to do anything to cause them to want to crawl inside you and lay eggs.
