I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish. I don’t think that phones and laptops would be as light and portable as iPhones and Macs are if Apple was inhibited by the Right to Repair movement from arranging internal components in such a jampacked way.
I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly integrate with the hardware. Repairing a broken part with a third-party is exactly the opposite of tight integration. If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product. It’s not like the phone and computer markets are monopolies either. Androids and PCs of all form factors and OSes exist.
It would make more sense to me to call for regulation against pricing abuse for the repairs of tightly integrated products. The Right to Repair movement as it stands just doesn’t resonate much with me, nor do I agree with it, because integrated products that come with everything you need make for great user experiences.
Apple has proven with this iPhone (as have other manufacturers) that these goals don't need to be mutually exclusive. You can have wild products designed in all manner of ways (with satellite connectivity!!!), they just need to be user-servicable. That's not an unreasonable request for a company with 200 billion dollars sitting in their R&D coffers.
Right-to-repair regulation isn't about stifling innovation, it's about giving the consumer leverage in the lifecycle of the product they own. Before now, Apple has gone out of their way to make life as hard as possible on third-party repair shops - that shouldn't be an engineering incentive. Regulation gives us the power to force Apple to put consumers before profit margins, and innovation somewhere in between.
So if our goal is to prolong the lifecycle of consumer electronics, then repairability isn’t a necessary metric.
If regulators instead went after service pricing abuse, that would force companies like Apple to drive down their repair prices—which might force them to design their hardware in a more modular manner, but not necessarily, so that if it becomes negligibly cheap to manufacture and replace the entire part of a less modular architecture, then they still have the freedom to design electronics in a less modular architecture. Repairability, considering the arbitrariness of the level of modularity that it stops, really does seem like a constraint on innovation.
User-serviceability is another unnecessary requirement, in my opinion, and in this regard, regulators can go after service availability. Electronics manufacturers who insist on tight integration of their products should make their repair services highly available, which seems like a fair trade-off.
The most obvious option to me seems to be price controls, which historically have been a very blunt instrument and as far as I know, most economists recommend against them.
Err… it doesn’t have to be price controls? It could be as simple as an investigation to their pricing strategy and seeing whether the markup is obscene or not. Of course what is obscene is relative, but that’s why you investigate, so that you can see abuse on a case-to-case basis.
Also, how is this level of regulatory inspection invasive? The architectural tight integration almost guarantees that the device manufacturer has a monopoly on servicing their products—it’s just that the monopoly is being allowed because it’s the kind that allows for innovation. The regulatory crackdown would be fair and justifiable.
Now that is moving the goalpost, and hard. A senate inquiry or a class action suit (that Apple doesn’t have to lose by the way) is not how “price control” is defined, and even if such cases swing in the way of consumers, there’s no general rule that specifies how much Apple should lower their service pricing.
>Apple has gone out of their way to make life as hard as possible on third-party repair shops
No they haven't. They just had no reason to prioritize or put effort into making sure that third-party repair shops had an easy time to do this. Not putting effort into something isn't the same as actively putting effort into making things more difficult.
That is an incredibly ignorant statement. Pairing parts with the SOC is a security feature. The intent is to increase security with the side-effect being a more difficult repair process. You're acting like they did it with the purpose of trying to hinder self-repair. If that was the case, they wouldn't be taking any measures to make self-repair easier.
> You're acting like they did it with the purpose of trying to hinder self-repair.
That’s certainly one interpretation. What’s the security rationale behind disabling functions if you don’t pair the phone’s replacement glass panel? Or if you take a genuine battery from another phone (since Apple doesn’t sell them for most models directly) and put it in your phone? It’s a genuine battery but it’ll nag you and disable functionality because you didn’t pair it with your phone using software Apple didn’t release.
This goes beyond security and is downright hostile to user repair.
Both of those questions are easily answerable with a simple Google search.
1. >disabling functions if you don’t pair the phone’s replacement glass panel?
That's not what's happening. The "glass panel", as you put it, is the same part as the FaceID and TouchID sensors. They're cryptographically paired so that someone doesn't replace that part with a compromised sensor that would allow them access to the device. If you're referring to the back glass, then it needs to be paired to the hardware only on newer devices because of the Magsafe functionality and the fact that the cameras are built into the back. Compromising the back panel could allow an attacker access to any photos taken with the camera or, in some cases, access to data on the phone via the Magsafe connection.
2. >take a genuine battery from another phone (since Apple doesn’t sell them for most models directly) and put it in your phone
The only functionality that's disabled when this happens is the health measurement of the battery because there's no way to tell if the battery being installed is brand new unless the chain of trust for the hardware is intact. It doesn't nag you at all. It simply says on the battery health screen that the battery that's installed can't be verified. It doesn't affect the usage of the phone at all outside of the battery health display.
You're either being disingenuous or just outright lying here.
Alright, sure, putting a genuine battery and disabling some functionality is perfectly reasonable, let’s say. The battery fully knows it’s health, the number of cycles and charge levels are tracked by the chip inside the battery itself. The phone can and 100% does know exactly the condition of the battery. But you replaced it without involving Apple so the battery health functionality is disabled. Perfectly reasonable.
Just in case, what about auto brightness on the iPhone 14? If you swap the display with a genuine one from another iPhone 14, auto brightness is now disabled which means that your screen is black every time you unlock the phone and you have to manually go and crank the brightness up again (without actually seeing anything in the display) every time you unlock the phone.
I’m sure this makes the phone way safer too and is actually intended for your own good rather than being actively hostile to self repair by making the phone obnoxious to use as a result.
Design is a balancing of constraints, some of which are constraints of the product of the design, and some of which are constraints of the process. Repairability is a constraint, and when that constraint becomes stricter something else has to give. Maybe this is more expensive to manufacture (and given the massive price hike in europe it wouldn’t surprise me), maybe this design took up a lot of designer hours, which held up other products. Whatever the trade-off is, it must be real.
My point is: improved repairability always comes at the expense of something else.
Seems to me like Apple was more innovative when they had fewer employees and fewer resources, so perhaps we should break up the company in order to increase innovation.
I think this is kind of a strange position to take when the article is demonstrating you wouldn’t even notice the increased repairability as a consumer. What tight integrations were lost in Apple’s redesign?
Increased repairability != enough repairability, as per the comments here. Beyond the article, Apple products still aren’t as repairable as the Right to Repair Movement would like, because people still have to peruse thousand-page highly technical manuals and buy specialized equipment if they wanted to fix certain parts of their Apple devices.
You're conflating multiple issues. Having the right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair. I think we've gone too far down the road of not owning anything we buy, and thus having no rights to use things outside of narrow legal agreements nobody even reads.
Making the device easier to repair is also desirable, both for Apple and for third parties, because these things break all the time and need to be repaired. It saves everyone time and reduces waste.
> right to repair is valuable and desirable, even if it's not actually easy to do the repair
Huh? If the act of repairing is difficult (and extremely, in Apple’s case), then do you actually have the right, or is it only a right on paper? Is Right to Repair nothing more than printing out manuals no matter how difficult the process of repair itself is?
No, it's an important distinction. Right to repair is more about a company a) not being legally entitled to punish you for repairing yourself , and b) not making design or manufacturing choices specifically to make it harder (e.g. sealing a component against water ingress may make it harder to repair but is an acceptable trade off, sealing it just to make it hard to repair isn't).
The nature of the device itself may make for difficult repairs, but that's a different issue.
Nobody actively wants it to be difficult, but if you don't even have the actual legal right to modify the hardware or software it doesn't matter how easy it is.
> If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product.
This, a million times. I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product.
And because many of us are hackers/makers/programmers/tinkerers, one of those priorities is the ability to have all of the above, but also unfettered access to the internals to modify it as we please.
It’s like… this car is perfect for my needs in every way, and far and above the best in its class. But I want it to run on hydrogen, so if they could just do that, it’d be perfect. Why are they forcing me to run on electric?
> I never understand the take “this product is a runaway, worldwide success, and I want to use it as well because it’s by far the best, but I also want various other of my own, individual priorities factored in” in some sort of mythical unicorn product.
Just because a product is a runaway success does not mean it's also not a potential environmental disaster waiting to happen. Cars were also a runaway success. So were plastic bags and straws. So was snake oil and so are various sugary fizzy drinks that destroy your health.
We can't just leave everything to the free market and the uninformed preferences of the consumers and watch everything around us burn because $THING is successful because $CORPORATION advertises it and consumers love it, otherwise we end up in the dystopian Idiocracy scenario of "Brawndo is what plants crave because it has electrolytes and is the no. 1 thirst mutilator".
That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us.
> That's why we should regulate products that are a runaway success to make sure their success doesn't come at the expense of other things around us.
Yes, I agree completely. But I wasn't talking about regulation, I was talking about tinkerer users not understanding how the delicate balance achieved by a product is the reason that it is successful and good.
To note, it would be a waste of everyone’s time to scrutinize a product that has almost no users; it would need to have a really atrocious effect to make it worth considering.
It’s exactly because it’s a runaway success that people care about repairability, environmental impact etc.
Even if that was entirely true, I am fine with regulation leaning on manufacturers to make products that aren't full of soldered ram and storage, glued shut so even their own techs have trouble repairing them, because of the implications for generating mountains of avoidable e-waste. The ability to fix to fix your own gear is just a nice plus of that arrangement, I agree it won't be of use to most people, but it's still a plus.
I have been of the same opinion (and I guess I still am, albeit less strongly). However, user wants aside, easily repairable products are better ecology-wise.
I want Apple to be allowed to create any device they want, but I think iPhone and Mac repairability can be currently improved without noticably hurting features. Prioritizing it would be the right trade off to do. In that case they should go for it (as they apparently decided to do).
Even without fighting for regulation, we can still celebrate companies when they decide to create repairable products with long term software support and complain about them when they don't.
A regulation that I would like to see would be to perhaps force 'makers' to sell genuine spare parts to anyone (same goes for Tesla and others).
Repairability and device thinness are by no means mutually exclusive IMO.
When LTT did a review of the Framework laptop for example they also did a size comparison with a similarly specced Dell laptop and found that the framework both thinner and sturdier than the Dell laptop, next to being obviously more repairable ¯\_( ツ )_/¯
If any company can figure out how to do it and be a tight integrated product that works amazingly, it's Apple.
Let's not forget, this is also about reducing e-waste and it's not an option anymore to dump new phones because one part broke and you can't repair yourself.
If there's any company that cares about e-waste and could do this, it would be Apple. They're the only company, from what I can see, that does any kind of changes with regard to an eye on environmental sustainability.
Third parties are perfectly capable of making replacement parts that match the OEM parts in functionality and quality. This has no effect on integration. The other parts of the phone don't care who manufactured the part, unless they were programmed to, as long as they are functionally equivalent. The user certainly doesn't care who manufactured the part as it does not effect the user experience.
3rd parties are very much not able to match. Just do a side by side of screen quality and battery life. That is what upsets a customer more than anything - but they never know exactly why.
(Old 3rd party repair shop; thousands of data points)
I think when you look at it from a profit-driven lens, though, third-parties are always going to have to compromise on something to keep costs down in order to make a profit. Apple, historically, overcompensates on its parts and has higher tolerances so, in order for a third-party to be able to make replacement parts at significant enough profits, they need to be parts that don't match the OEM in quality or function, by definition.
Just look at screen repairs. Apple checks in software to verify the integrity of some of the hardware in screens and, in the past, it led to people being locked out of their devices when they were repaired with screens that had dummy FaceID/TouchID sensors.
There are substantial externalities to commercializing products that cannot be repaired. Fantastic amounts of non-biodegradable waste, overconsumption of nonrenewable material resources, and of course financial loss to consumers and opportunity cost to the secondary market. "Just choose not to buy the product" is only sensible if choosing not to buy the product fully insulates you from the effects of its existence.
Regulation places the cost of those externalities and/or the responsibility to prevent them back in the lap of the manufacturer.
Couldn’t recyclability and repairability be mutually independent, though? It sounds possible to me that a product that is not highly repairable could still be highly recyclable just because its shattered parts can still be reprocessed into new products.
Repairability and reusability precede recyclability in effectiveness. Anything you can take to a shop to swap a broken part, or list on a secondary market as a "fixer upper phone" beat out whatever Apple's internal recycling process does.
The iPhone 14 more or less proves that you can build a device as thin and sleek as Apple and still have it reasonably repairable.
I think the same is true of Macbooks. There is no real reason that the SSD has to be soldered to the motherboard, Apple could easily put the NAND chips on a slim socketed daughterboard (they already do this on the Mac Studio).
I won't say that every laptop needs to be built like the Framework, but I do think that any component that could be considered a "wear item" (batteries, NAND flash, OLED screens) should be designed to be replaced.
Right to repair is a societal and environmental topic. You personally not seeing a benefit to it is mostly beside the point: think about battery disposal laws, toxic material regulations, wireless power limitations, available frequencies, etc. These mostly matter at scale, taking input from single individuals would probably not land on the right trade-offs for the society as a whole.
"Right to repair" laws don't require manufacturers to design their products to be easy to repair. It is about mandating the selling of replacement components to third parties. Just because they sell replacement components doesn't mean the products need to be designed to have their components easily replaced.
I think for me repairability comes down to: how long do you think this phone is supposed to be usable? Even if you don't own it (have gifted or sold it). Probably an ecological argument there.
Primarily, given there is no up-to-date free/opensource phone OS (not to mention baseband software updates) after Apple iOS support ends... the phone can realistically only last till then unless you want to use legacy software (I have one relative who has such a device - but I'd not want one myself).
Imho you're missing the point, or at least, you've stated a valid conclusion but the point lies below.
Sure, by tightly integrating you are getting material benefits (size, consumption, optimization, etc). But by doing this, you go further down into high-tech, which means complexity and energy intensive build/repair/dispose [1]. At this point i'm reformulating your tradeoff, in which you choose the material benefits.
Now, one part of the right-to-repair movement comes from "low-tech" underpinning and objects the material benefits. Indeed, the point of a smartphone is not to crunch some machine instructions, it's to communicate with friends/family/world, interact with network services etc. Crunching code is just a byproduct of reaching this goal. It's even the same with supercomputers which one could think as performance-oriented: their goal is not to do the peta-flops, it's to solve some simulations at a given precision level. Nothing is built just for fun (or should): if you build a tool you better have a problem. And if you forget the goal, your tool will most likely be garbage. This is the objection of the r2r/lowtech movement: it's an assertion that a lot of high-tech has lost the sight of it's actual use and hence is hindering progress more than anything else.
This is a direct opposition with the pov which is widespread in modern western tech thinking that "if you build the tool they will use it". Obviously this pov has some depth to it, it's not completely nonsense (in the sense that creative and explorative processes are useful, i know i'm myself doing research in foundations of math). But this pov is also very extreme, and is in fact a corner-stone of the offer-driven production that is hegemonic today (with market economies). This same offer-driven production is also posing many social problems because of the need for aggressive marketing, problems with long-term stable availability of basic goods, with the focus on big/fast/shiny. We've gone too far into that direction and that a part of the reason for the pollution and resource exhaustion crisis (being themselves big parts of the climate and biosphere crisis going on rn).
The position of r2r/lowtech is obviously not to go to the other extreme which would be completely planned production based on somehow knowing what needs to be done (which we already see cannot really work and is very conservative by nature). But there has to be a balance. My position: the bulk of the energy-intensive and stable mass-manufacturing of basic known-to-be-useful-and-desirable goods should be done by planning, with open standards, user-groups, cheap repair, and some fraction of the resources should be reserved to the free-for-all market-driven exploratory research. Obviously this poses a couple problem with the fat cats running mass-manufacturing and other commodity services.
Hope this was a balanced explanation of the position.
[1] The matter will be ordered on a smaller scale so: (1) to build it you need to put a lot of energy into putting everything in order (entropy!); (2) to repair you both have to diagnose a complex thing and then act on it precisely; (3) to dispose of properly you need to put a lot of energy into separating everything again (entropy again!). Here i say "energy" in a large sense, this energy might be embodied as direct energy put into the process but also as human time, dependency on high-tech tooling (hence cost), etc. Another concept linked to this is "capital intensity".
> I’m not sure I care much about repairability. For me, makers should have the freedom to design products as they wish.
No one should have the "right" to create products that turn to garbage when any part of it breaks. A clean planet is more important than "great user experiences". The second thing that they did it only for profit, is ergonomics of new repairable iphone any worse?
Also "software locked" parts should be banned by EU regulators.
The EU preserving the rights of people to steal your phone and sell it for parts would go well with their trying to preserve the rights of people installing malware on it.
I also think that makers should have the freedom to design computers whose software tightly integrate with the hardware. Repairing a broken part with a third-party is exactly the opposite of tight integration. If people didn’t want tight integration, then products that are built specifically for tight integration are just not the right tool for the job that they want to do, and I don’t understand why they can’t simply choose not to buy the product. It’s not like the phone and computer markets are monopolies either. Androids and PCs of all form factors and OSes exist.
It would make more sense to me to call for regulation against pricing abuse for the repairs of tightly integrated products. The Right to Repair movement as it stands just doesn’t resonate much with me, nor do I agree with it, because integrated products that come with everything you need make for great user experiences.