Why Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/3/16087628/apple-e-waste-environmental-standards-ieee-right-to-repair

by PleaseHelpMe • 9 years ago

231 248 9 years ago

zzalpha6• 9 years ago

That's a long article to point out the obvious: if you can't fix it, you have to buy a new one.

I would've changed the "Why" in the title to "How", since that's where the article really illuminates some industry dynamics I wasn't aware of. Of course, if LIBOR taught us anything, it's that industry shouldn't be left to regulate itself...

jpttsn4• 9 years ago

What does LIBOR have to do with regulation? What does regulation have to do with the OP?

zzalpha6• 9 years ago

Did you read the article? If not, search for "Macbook Pro".

It spends a lot of time talking about voluntary standards bodies for eco-friendly/sustainable technology development, and how those standards are manipulated by participants, rendering them utterly meaningless.

jankotek• 9 years ago

Top comment under article:

This is such bs. iPhone is one if not the only smartphone the oem support for about 5 years. My son is rocking a 5s currently with the latest os update. About a year ago, I swapped out the battery myself.

zzalpha6• 9 years ago

Which, while poorly phrased, at least does raise a valid point that the story is complex. There are some things Apple does very well (e.g. supporting newer versions of iOS on older gear, ensuring it continues to have a life), and some things they do very badly (no replaceable batteries).

Other vendors have the exact opposite problem (my LG G5 has a replaceable battery, but I have no idea how long it'll continue to receive OS updates from my carrier).

rubatuga• 9 years ago

The Samsung Galaxy A5 I bought in 2015 stopped getting security updates after the summer of 2016. If that isn’t pure planned obsolescence, I don’t know what is. On the contrary, my dad’s iPhone 5 from 2012 got five years of updates. I foresee that since the iPhone 5S is a 64 bit processor, it will see at least six iOS revisions before being EOL’d

alkonaut4• 9 years ago

Every iPhone I had has had a "replaceable battery". Sure - it's a fiddly job usually done by a technician, but I think that is a small drawback these days. In 5-ish smartphones I have replaced at least one screen each, and only 1 battery. So if something should be user replaceable why focus on battery? Ability to expand storage (even only internally) would have been a useful iPhone feature.

pat_space• 9 years ago

They have a point. My 2013 rMBP is still solid and I don't foresee replacing it for years.

gambiting• 9 years ago

I still use a late 2009 MacBook Pro on a daily basis and I have absolutely no need to replace it. It's fast enough to browse the web, watch videos and do light programming work. I've only replaced the hdd with a 128GB SSD few years ago and everything else is stock and still works.

thearn4• 9 years ago

Still using a 2011 MBA. I just had to change out the magsafe charging port/IO board, but other than that its held up great.

6d6b73• 9 years ago

And my 2011 Dell I use for networking has only gotten better with time. Larger battery, more ram, SSD hd, Blueray DVD RW. I will take something that can be updated over something that is just a few mm smaller any day.

scriptkiddy• 9 years ago

And I still have a toshiba satellite from 2008 that works as well as the day I bought it. I think reliability isn't something only high end manufacturers offer.

IBM• 9 years ago

The second top level comment is much better:

This is basically an advertorial for the Right to Repair legislation. I continue to be amazed by how uncritically this topic has been covered. Jason Koebler at Vice has basically been an activist on this issue, rather than a journalist.

And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc.

This may be fine for vehicles (and even that is questionable now that cars are becoming more advanced and require more expertise to repair), it would be silly for consumer electronics which is a much more dynamic and fast changing industry.

And as for the story about environmental standards. EPEAT is a shit standard if it would have prevented Apple from creating a unibody Macbook Pro. It was right to change. The real reason that Apple lobbied them to change it isn’t some silly conspiracy about making them harder to repair, it’s about making better products.

I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR. Whenever a silly environmental story about Apple pops up, he’s the go-to guy for a negative quote.

jogjayr• 9 years ago

This may be fine for vehicles (and even that is questionable now that cars are becoming more advanced and require more expertise to repair), it would be silly for consumer electronics which is a much more dynamic and fast changing industry.

Sorry can you explain why it's silly because the electronics industry is more dynamic?

And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal. Right to Repair legislation is purely about the third party repair industry lobbying to have manufacturers officially support them: with parts, blueprints, manuals, etc.

From an environmental standpoint that doesn't sound like a terrible private interest group. If 3rd party repair gets support from manufacturers it lowers barriers to entry to the repair industry. Which would make repairs cheaper. That in turn would encourage more consumers to consider repairs over replacements. In theory, at least.

I have to congratulate Kyle Wiens and the iFixit team on having stellar PR.

The saying "doing well by doing good" comes to mind.

bo1024• 9 years ago

And unlike what the name implies, Right to Repair isn’t about giving you the right to repair your devices or products. You already have that. It’s not illegal.

I don't think this is completely true. Wasn't a big part of the John Deere controversy about exactly this, i.e. using copyright or some such law to effectively make diagnosing and repairing breakdowns illegal?

Companies can also push consumers into contracts or terms of service that disallow repair or modification.

falcolas6• 9 years ago

Counter anecdote: I have never been able to swap out a battery in a sealed Apple device. Even attempting to remove the screen is a much bigger financial risk than I am willing to undertake.

And my six year old 5 has long since hit the proverbial trash. It was too slow about four years ago.

copperx• 9 years ago

Even the 6 is excruciatingly slow today.

Too• 9 years ago

Does ios still become 2x slower on old phones every time they update it for a new phone release?

I remember previously fast iPhone 4s becoming close to useless when iPhone 5 came out after an os update.

scottlegrand2• 9 years ago

As long as we have Shenzhen, no tool/screw will remain proprietary for long...

criddell8• 9 years ago

I don't understand what can be proprietary about a screw. Is the design of the screwdriver protected by a patent or something?

falcolas6• 9 years ago

Limited need, and thus availability, of driver heads. While possible, it's not simple (as in I have a set in my house already, or can get them as part of a regular set of drivers) to get pentalobe and tri-wing driver heads.

NikolaNovak2• 9 years ago

Few years back Apple 'silently' switched to a variation of Pentalobe screw which some thought might be patented. Stories also abounded about people going to their store for unrelated repair, and coming out with their regular screws replaced by pentalobe screws.

There are of course "compatible screwdrivers" out there, per the original post, but whether patented or not, it was a fairly transparent way of Apple keeping people out of their own hardware.

dawnerd• 9 years ago

Yep. Well, they try to keep it that way at least.

(First google result) https://www.google.com/patents/US20140150613

criddell8• 9 years ago

From the article, Apple's statement:

“Highly-integrated design allows us to make products that are not only beautiful, thin and powerful, but also durable, so they can last for many years,” the company said. “When repairs are needed, authorized providers can ensure the quality, safety, and security of repairs for customers. And when products do reach end of life, Apple takes responsibility for recycling them safely and responsibly.”

Sounds reasonable to me.

backtoyoujim• 9 years ago

So durable that they cannot withstand being disassembled doesn't sound right to me.

redial6• 9 years ago

I cannot disassemble my 20 year old soccer ball without sacrificing it. Still has lasted 20 years tho.

ivanbakel9• 9 years ago

What's the justification for anti-consumer practises like proprietary, uncommon screw designs? The difference between a Phillips and a 5-clover is the bill Apple gets for repairs.

When repairs are needed, authorized providers can ensure the quality, safety, and security of repairs for customers

Do you think this is reasonable when Apple tries as much as possible to minimise the alternative at the cost of consumer choice?

eridius7• 9 years ago

It's not all that hard to find screwdrivers for the fancy screws that Apple (and other companies) use.

And the justification is that it's not at all anti-consumer. Allowing consumers to disassemble the devices will practically guarantee that they break (and in a manner that voids the warrantee). The only people who should be disassembling them are people specially trained to repair them, or experts who have a lot of practice disassembling electronics safely. The former have the screwdrivers already, and as I already said, it's not that hard for the latter to get their hands on the screwdrivers.

jws2• 9 years ago

Tiny Phillips screws are not optimal for assembly. The Phillips head is designed to cam out before a screw can be twisted off, which is great of you are screwing boards together, but not really any sort of criteria you care about for automated assembly where the finished product needs to be blemish free.

This is why you see a lot of Torx heads on electronics and automobiles.

As far as the penalobular screw goes… yeah, that is I think deliberately weird, but when you buy your replacement battery or screen or whatever part, the company will either include for free or minimal charge the pentalobular bit, so it isn't really stopping you from repairing. What I think the bit does prevent is consumers opening and peeking around in their phone. Curiosity is great for learning, but it generally doesn't come with a grounding strap. The ICs in the phone are trivially damaged, not necessarily immediately destroyed, but set on a path to future failure by static charges too small to be noticed by the curious finger. Apple finds themselves on the warranty hook to replace these failed boards. It is certainly in their interest to keep sight seers out of the phones.

criddell8• 9 years ago

What's the justification for anti-consumer practises like proprietary, uncommon screw designs?

Remember the (probably apocryphal) stories about Van Halen's contract requiring a bowl of M&M's with one color removed? It was supposedly a signal to them that somebody had actually read their contract closely.

Maybe there's something similar going on with the screws. Could it be a way for Apple to better ensure that Foxconn is using the hardware that the contract specifically calls for?

Clubber• 9 years ago

If they wanted to make them unserviceable, they would use one way screws. I assume the pentalobular screws improve mass production through more efficient torque or something like that. I have one in my toolbox, they are cheap.

yoz-y2• 9 years ago

I never understood the problem with pentalobe screws. Yes the head is uncommon but it is trivial to get a screwdriver with the correct head. I came across several screws that were too small for the heads I had in my toolbox and never accused the assembler for using uncommon screws. Is there a patent on the pentalobe head so the screwdrivers are illegal?

Grustaf• 9 years ago

Exactly, their behavior can be explained perfectly well by this, the fact that they don't want to be dinged for low repairability does not prove they are opposed to repairs per se, just that for other reasons they will necessarily be making decives that aren't very easy to repair.

It seems to me that people buy new phones because they want the latest, I mean a lot of people just keep using their phones with broken glass or home buttons. Beaides, resell value is very high.

anonmoose123• 9 years ago

Example of another article to help you along: https://9to5mac.com/2017/02/15/apple-nebraska-right-to-repai...

"According to the source, an Apple representative, staffer, or lobbyist will testify against the bill at a hearing in Lincoln on March 9. AT&T will also argue against the bill, the source said. The source told me that at least one of the companies plans to say that consumers who repair their own phones could cause lithium batteries to catch fire … "

Sound a little more fishy to you yet? Oh no sorry, we can't let you repair your own car, there are dangerous corrosive chemicals inside. You must take it back to the dealership for service.

You should read up on Louis Rossman, a guy who runs a YouTube channel to help people repair Apple products.

To be fair to Apple- People were trying to sue them when 4chan had a campaign telling people you could recharge your phone in the microwave (look it up). Yes, it sucks how people will mess up their own devices and then try to sue Apple. But that's part of the cost of doing business.

To be fair to the repair shops- Apple and other companies constantly try to use dodgy legal efforts like copyright claims to keep repair shops from posting schematics from computers in an effort to diagnose and repair components. Louis Rossman talks about these battles constantly.

Yes it's messy. No, there's not a perfect answer. But the car analogy is a good one. Manufacturers could make "better" cars if they could seal the engine compartment against service. They could also make cheap cars that break constantly and force people to come in for service.

Given my experience in the field, Apple's reliability and support is not nearly as good as people claim it is. At my work we constantly have problems, not the least of which are Apple's dodgy power connectors so virtually everyone in the office is limping along with black tape covering a frayed power cable waiting until the day it breaks or starts to spark and the need a new one.

Or when they lied and said you couldn't upgrade the RAM, so when we slap in more RAM for work, we're violating the warranty and have to take it out to get service.

And and and...

tarboreus• 9 years ago

It sounds reasonable, but their policies influence people to throw away perfectly good phones for the next big thing. You might say, "That's their prerogative." If they can convince us to buy new phones with new features, then fine. If it's by making replacing the battery illegal, then I say not fine.

The real issue here is not so much with smartphones, but with printers, cars, and other devices that have more predatory business models.

jjoonathan• 9 years ago

Apple forces "authorized providers" to gimp their offerings and push you strongly towards buying a new device.

That's not a hypothetical, btw. Louis Rossman (an unauthorized repairman) has some good youtube videos where he calls around to get quotes from authorized vs unauthorized repair centers. The difference in what they are able to offer is dramatic and repeatable.

scottLobster4• 9 years ago

Except for the fact that (at least the authorized repair part) is a bald-faced lie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR5ZUl0Q-NI

Domenic_S3• 9 years ago

The only "Authorized provider" is Apple itself, because they don't provide repair parts to the general public.

Something that was surprising for me to learn is that e-waste recycling, while better than throwing something away in the garbage, is actually not great at recovering metals -- and it's orders of magnitude worse than just fixing the item and using it longer.

sbov• 9 years ago

This applies to all recycling. The phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle" has recycle last for a reason.

pavanred• 9 years ago

What's unreasonable is the cost of repair which was quite conveniently not mentioned here. And, this is not just Apple. I owned a Moto X and my display cracked after over a year and half of use. The warranty doesn't cover it anymore and authorized repair was going to cost me an estimated $120 (excluding taxes). The phone had not reached it's end of life, but by then the phone it self is quite cheaper and it made sense to just buy a new phone instead of investing more into a phone that will probably not be supported with updates for long. And, the old one is now catching dust in my house.

Paul-ish• 9 years ago

How does having my lithium ion battery die without being replaceable allow my device to last for years?

mulmen2• 9 years ago

It is replaceable at an authorized (or just capable) service center.

tomc19854• 9 years ago

Should be:

“Modular design allows us to make products that are not only beautiful, thin and powerful, but also user-serviceable, so they can last for many years,” the company said. “When repairs are needed, Official Apple Service Manuals mean users are assured of the quality, safety, and security of repairs of their devices. We do not build with a short end-of-life in-mind, and we encourage a thriving aftermarket of parts and repair services for all Apple products.”

One can dream...

cwyers2• 9 years ago

There are tradeoffs. Modular hookups take up more space and have a failure rate compared to just soldering something down. You can dream, but unless you're willing to make tradeoffs, that's all you can do.

mamcx2• 9 years ago

I need to replace my old iMac. I can't stand to not use SSD anymore. I can't upgrade the new iMacs to SSD, and the prices that Apple give me are too much. I can't afford it, and I can't change to SSD later.

So, I go hackintosh or find a way to be rich somehow. The first look more possible.

thescriptkiddie• 9 years ago

Depending on the year, you should be able to retrofit an SSD into an older iMac. I've done it with a 2011 27" model myself.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/DIYIMACHDD09/

mulmen2• 9 years ago

Marketing generally sounds reasonable at first glance.

SamReidHughes• 9 years ago

If consumers wanted an easy to repair product, they would have bought them. What they really want is thin, lightweight phones that are new enough not to be slow.

falcolas6• 9 years ago

Consumers can't buy what isn't available.

Also, what consumers want, and what is good for the environment, rarely mesh very well.

jpttsn4• 9 years ago

Meanwhile, what consumers don't buy isn't available for long. It's a chicken and egg situation.

Unless, of course, you're arguing that the suppliers have coordinated to screw consumers. But that would be illegal, wouldn't it?

br_smartass• 9 years ago

Or maybe all companies saw the better strategy for the profit of the industry was for people to need to keep buying new phones frequently and so they all removed that option from the customer hands, on a backdrop of design efficiency and 'innovation' and then it was done because consumerism is a big pile of bullshit.

Most people when I see they talking about it, and I suppose most people in general, would like stronger screens and more battery even if it meant a thicker phone, but the illusion of "last generation" and stuff like that make so, for marketing purposes, supported by the profit motive, that it should not be this way because "customers"... I'm sorry, I just think it's absurd that people take those tales uncritically like that.

My current phone is a middle-end Sony, it's screen already has that kind of shatter that starts to spread, the p2 connector stopped working these days, and after I bought it I could not find any of the accessories to help me preserve it(screen protection, cover, etc), had to buy some chinese stuff online that were worthless, it's less than a year old. We're systematically made of idiots. I still have an S3 that I used for 3~4 years, it's screen is intact and all the rest works fine.

scarface742• 9 years ago

That line of reasoning makes some sense for Apple - an iPhone user will probably replace an iPhone with another iPhone -- but makes little sense for an Android manufacturer.

There is no great likelihood that Android user is going to buy another Android device from the same manufacturer two years later.

On the other hand, Apple also gets continuing revenue from Its customers after the phone is sold. It has every reason to keep the software updated. I've never replaced an iPhone for poor battery life. It's been because I wanted more speed, more storage or a larger screen.

StillBored2• 9 years ago

Its not just about repair-ability, its about software support too.

Apple, when compared with the android phone manufactures is probably a better choice for long term use. That is because while my android phone (asus) has a battery I can replace in under 1 minute, the software support probably won't last for 5 years like my daughters iphone5 which after a new battery is a perfectly functional updated device. So if you want to do something about the throwaway culture, minimum support periods might be a good thing to look at too.

icebraining3• 9 years ago

Yeah, at least for security bugs. I'm still using a Nexus 7 (2012) with Lollipop and it works fine, including the apps, even if their developers hate my guts for having to stick with older APIs :)

numenor• 9 years ago

Mine is a humble Galaxy S3, bought when it first came out, now running Android 7.1.2. Since neither Android nor the handset maker has a chokehold on me, I can choose to upgrade/downgrade, muck around in general. It is my device to do whatever I wish. Plus the lovely external SD card to put whatever I want and not rely on any @#$% cloud.

amelius• 9 years ago

Its not just about repair-ability, its about software support too. Apple, when compared with the android phone manufactures is probably a better choice for long term use.

Meanwhile, I can still run Linux pretty well on an old i386 machine.

StillBored2• 9 years ago

Uh, 386 support got dropped with linux ~3.8 IIRC.

Besides, you don't really want to try and run a modern kernel on anything less than say a pentium3 due to RAM constraints. As someone who tries this kind of stuff in an effort to keep some older hardware running, even when you do get it up, the experience can make it basically unusable. Waiting 30 seconds for a login prompt/whatever isn't "usable". Sure, you can disable 95% of the kernel, but all kinds of stuff actually have hard-coded dependencies on things you normally never use, simply getting the kernel up isn't the same functionality that was achieved (full X/WM/browser/etc) on the same hardware a decade or two ago.

jrs952• 9 years ago

The durability of an iPhone seems way better as well. Within 48 hours of me getting a new Galaxy S8+, the screen had gotten scratched to hell just from being in my jeans pocket. By itself. Now I can hardly read 20% of the screen in direct sunlight with the brightness all the way up, and I'm wondering why the hell I paid $650 for this. Before this, I had the jet black iPhone 7, which was supposed to be very prone to getting micro abrasions, and yet its in better much better shape than the phone I've had for just a couple weeks.

If it were affordable, I'd just have this fixed and put a screen protector on it. Unfortunately, it's not, so I guess I'll be buying another iPhone in a few months...

Froyoh2• 9 years ago

There have also been conspiracy theories about Apple nudging users to buy the latest devices by slowing down old devices through irreversible software updates...

alkonaut4• 9 years ago

I have only had good experiences repairing iPhones. Most everything can be fixed within an hour and at a reasonable cost.

A key factor is the large user base (many million) for each model of the iPhone, so 3rd party parts are usually cheap and diagnostics for almost any problem is easy to google.

Compared to e.g washing machines it's a pleasure to have a broken smartphone.

falcolas6• 9 years ago

This is hardly universal. Repairing an iPhone is a 2-3 week affair involving mailing it off and hoping I get it back. I do live in the US, just not in or near a major urban center.

alkonaut4• 9 years ago

Wow. I realize you have huge distances but in the town I was born (pop 40k, 100 mile drive to next town which is similar. Basically the same geography as Alaska or Canada in northern Sweden) there is at lest 4 or 5 places that fixes it while you wait. It's not a big town but phone repair shops are about as common as barbers. So if a town is big enough to get your hair cut you can fix a screen... We are probably extreme in Sweden though.

devy2• 9 years ago

It's a shame that smart phones are so hard to repair these days. Ben Evans from a16z even argued that "selling smartphones is a subscription business" and that "You pay an average of $700 or so every two years (i.e. $30/month) and Apple gives you a new phone." [1]

I think the car industry is probably similar in that so many parts become more electronic and less mechanic and if a sensor is gone, the entire part has to be replaced. (Not a car geek, but the ones who are, please feel free to chime in here!). And with the EV revolution, that trend is going to be accelerated.

[1] http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/7/13/content-isnt-ki...

scottLobster4• 9 years ago

I'm not sure the analogy is all that apt. Sensors can fail all the time for reasons beyond the company's intention or control.

Phones on the other hand should be an easy-battery swap away from future usefulness. And that's just from the hardware perspective. There is no functional reason my Nexus 5X should stop receiving security updates next year, other than the fact that Google wants to sell more Pixels (which I will probably buy because going without security updates is cutting off my nose to spite my face).

digi_owl7• 9 years ago

The updates thing may change once Android 8 becomes more common, as they have now taken a clue from their ChromeOS experience and decoupled the UI/app layer from the core OS layer.

Thus getting updates out there for the UI layer will not be hampered by having Qualcomm etc drop support for their SOCs 12 months after initial introduction (meaning 6 months before they start showing up in the first devices).

And frankly i don't see how much difference there really is between Apple and Google here.

Google offer a bunch of compatibility tools etc that allow new APIs to function (up to a point) on older devices.

Similarly Apple will regularly leave out big ticket items on their updates for older devices, meaning that if it is something the app dev wants to make use of they can only support the newest Apple is shipping.

Never mind that i hear again and again that getting the latest iOS on an older device makes said device slow as a slug.

topspin2• 9 years ago

""$700 or so every two years""

I don't think most people are doing that. They're buying much less costly phones. You can get a new, unlocked Nokia 6 (3GB/32GB LTE) with Android 7 from Amazon, Walmart and others for about $230. If you wish you can suffer lock screen ads and Amazon will sell it for $180. And they aren't replacing them every 24 months either.

I know the folks that frequent HN don't hesitate to spend $900-ish every 18 months, but this is not representative of most people.

When you get to $200 for something that lasts 3-4 years it approaches disposable. Most people will replace it rather than try to get it repaired. This isn't me advocating manufacturer's behavior. It's just the reality of the phone market; most people aren't going to care about this.

digi_owl7• 9 years ago

The price the customer sees, and the one they pay are two different things. In large part because of carrier subsidies.

One thing i love about living where i do is that stores are mandated to list the total cost of the device once the contract duration have been accounted for.

Quite often the sticker price would be as close to zero as they could get away with, but the total after contract is often 1.5x or higher than just paying for the device up front.

devy2• 9 years ago

To Ben's point, what you described here is exactly a hardware subscription business where average consumer shell out a few hundred bucks every few years. The amount may vary but it's still is a hardware subscription business.

mattbrewsbytes• 9 years ago

I understand the sustainability concerns but what is the answer? More regulation from the government that would impact their designs? That doesn't sound right, I don't think there are smart phone designers working for the government.

I have replaced screens and batteries on iPhones, it isn't wizardry but does require technical acumen and some special screw-driver/pry tools that won't break things.

It isn't an open standard like PC parts but there are lots of other industries that are mostly closed and engineer their products to only last a certain usage threshold. Engineering them to last longer costs way too much.

franciscop• 9 years ago

On the other hand you can make a full iPhone by buying each of the components if you know where to find them (disclaimer: I've met Scott before):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leFuF-zoVzA

yodon• 9 years ago

I fail to see the validity of all the conspiracy theory evil claimed around modern manufacturing techniques. The overwhelming majority of consumers have spoken, and what they have said is they will pay more for smaller lighter devices and will not pay more for consumer repairable devices.

Manufacturers have responded in exactly the way the majority of consumers asked them to, by making smaller lighter devices rather than repairable ones. Connectors add space and weight, making devices bigger and heavier and less desirable to the vast majority of consumers.

programmertote2• 9 years ago

My cousin's iPhone 6 stopped charging a few days ago. Everything works, but it seems like the port for charging is worn out or something and wouldn't recognize/charge when being plugged in. He is visiting from Australia and he took a lot of pictures lately with his phone. So he went to the Apple store in New York to get it fixed (in the hope to save his photos/data). They told him that they'll give him a discount for a new iPhone 6 (same model) for just ~$270 or there's no way to fix it.

I thought changing the charging port should be relatively easy. Now it is certain that my cousin will lose all of his photos in the old phone unless he gets it fixed at an unauthorized repair center.

bpicolo3• 9 years ago

I've had to pick dust out of the port with a paperclip a few times

k-mcgrady• 9 years ago

This. They cleaned it for me at the store but it sounds really similar to what's going on here. It is a very common problem though so it would be weird of them to miss it.

programmertote2• 9 years ago

Yeah, he told me that he did similar thing in the past before and it worked. Now that trick no longer works for him unfortunately... Thanks for the tip though!

scarface742• 9 years ago

With all of the things that can happen to a phone -- damage, loss,theft etc. I would never trust any data that I cared about to remain on the phone.

I would be auto syncing like crazy over iCloud or Google Photos.

digi_owl7• 9 years ago

Why i love having the SD there, because it allows me to yank the storage out in case i didn't have time to get the sync going before something died (syncing over the mobile connection can be expensive and unreliable).

icebraining3• 9 years ago

In the smartphones I've seen (not iPhones), the port is directly soldered to the main board. It's not hard to replace if you're handy with a soldering iron (I've done it myself, and I'm no pro); my uninformed guess is that Apple only allows replacing full parts, rather than do invasive fixes.

chiph2• 9 years ago

Have him take it by Louis Rossman's shop. He does board-level repair on Apple products.

https://www.rossmanngroup.com/

chrisco255• 9 years ago

There's a trade off between modularity and sleek design as Apple has proven better than anyone.

They were arguably the first PC manufacturer to take design seriously and while Macs began to become more difficult to repair beginning with the iMac in 1998, there's no questioning that the component choices (from the external to the internal) lent itself to an increasingly sleek design that eventually led Apple to create the best-in-class laptops and desktops.

This push towards sleek design also gave Apple the chops to create the original iPod in the first place...which eventually lead to the revolutionary iPhone...which completely upended the mobile phone industry.

As a PC fan, I love creating and building my own box...carefully selecting my motherboard, case, processor, and memory in the process...and I rest easy knowing I can upgrade my machine over time...

But I wouldn't question the value that highly integrated designs that Apple and others have brought to the table. You can feel the quality in the products they make. There's a lot of careful thought and design. Modularity and repairability are a necessary sacrifice to build products that sleek.

Take a look at the failed Project Ara by Google: https://atap.google.com/ara/. It would have brought modular parts and design to the mobile phone industry. While a great concept, and something that appeals to my custom rig PC roots, it may not actually have been that useful in practice for the vast majority of the general public.

jaytaylor• 9 years ago

My MacBook Air is sleek and also very easy to repair and service.

This aspect of products is not so black and white, and comes down to the design decisions made by the product people and engineers.

crispyambulance2• 9 years ago

Yeah, "easy" is in the eye of the beholder. For some folks a BGA rework is a piece of cake, for others it means "scrap". Depends on your tools, skills, time, will-power, documentation and tolerance for screw-ups.

Mostly skill.

I've seen techs performing successful BGA replacements on laptop MOBO's in repair stands in Mexico with pathetic equipment.

redial6• 9 years ago

As sleek as the MacBook Air is, the new 12" MacBook leaves it in the dust.

chiph2• 9 years ago

You can say that difficult-to-repair Apples started with the original Mac, which required a long-handled Torx driver to open the case (which no one had). The Apple ][ was the last truly user-serviceable Apple product.

ngneer• 9 years ago

Got one of those to play with that others left for dead. Ended up gluing the bit to a long pencil and it worked!

tracker13• 9 years ago

Until the trash-bin Mac Pro, most of that line has been pretty user serviceable. People are still getting really good money in resale for 2010-2012 Mac Pros, while the trash can units aren't doing nearly as well (accounting for age).

I mainly notice as I've been considering getting one of the older models and upgrading cpu, maxing ram, newer gtx1080 etc.

michaelcampbell2• 9 years ago

led Apple to create the best-in-class laptops and desktops.

Other than profit for Apple, best at what?

ksk3• 9 years ago

But I wouldn't question the value that highly integrated designs that Apple and others have brought to the table.

And yet nearly every single person I know has had their power cable for their iphone and/or macbook fray after a year or so. Meanwhile the "ugly" Sony one that I have for the past 7 years, continues to work just fine. Apple do make well designed products, but they're not above sacrificing functionality for looks, and when they do, its kinda embarrassing. Especially rookie mistakes like not having proper heat dissipation for their laptop GPUs. Also.. didn't the first unibody macs have several design flaws with the hinges and the battery bulging, etc ?

Modularity and repairability are a necessary sacrifice to build products that sleek.

Apple can already repair it themselves. They're artificially restricting the supply of parts so others can't repair it. Apple repair costs are substantially higher and its unfortunate that they're against other repair shops competing with them.

always_good4• 9 years ago

It's just about unforgivable how long Apple sat on their Macbook charger til they finally let us swap out the brick<->laptop stretch of wire -- the part that actually breaks.

Astonishingly wasteful (both in dollars and electrical waste) to buy a new $70 brick when it was never the brick that broke.

Now you can just buy a $7 cord from Amazon when it breaks. Of course, go for an off-brand if you want one that won't fray in <1 year.

wickawic• 9 years ago

Isn't that stuff about the cords just anecdotal? I have every power cord I've ever owned for my various Apple products; sometimes I feel like they are taking me over. Totally agree on your other points though.

bobwaycott• 9 years ago

And yet nearly every single person I know has had their power cable for their iphone and/or macbook fray after a year or so.

You don’t know me, but in 12 years of solely using Apple laptops and phones (obviously < 12yrs for the phones), I’ve never once had a cord/cable fray or fail. I’ve had 4-5 laptops and 4 phones.

SpikeDad5• 9 years ago

So "every single person you know has had their power cable for their iPhone and/or Macbook fray after a year" is some kind of legitimate sample set? Let me answer that - no.

I find comments from folks like you ignorant and of low quality. I'm sorry you and your friends have had issue - I can just as easily say that me and my friends have never had any issues with their Apple cables (which is true by the way). What does that mean? Nothing.

If you're going to make 50 million of something then your quantity of scale in production is UNIQUE and you can't compare the product of that production to other people that can a) source much lower quantities b) produce them slower and c) have less distribution and support issue.

As for your repair comment you think Apple takes defective motherboards and reworks them? Haha. Even back in the 80's when I was an Apple Certified Repair tech and went down to the North Carolina Level 3 center for repairs the folks there loved to show us the "motherboard" closet - a room with hundreds of motherboards waiting for rework "if they have time". Even then it was cheaper to make a new motherboard than take the time to diagnose and rework an old one.

If consumers want reliable and cheap (yes cheap) technology then manufacturers are going to choose those qualities over repair-ability. I for one would choose cheaper over more repairable considering the methods for mass producing electronics go hand in hand with more rugged electronics.

You'll need to prove this statement - "They're artificially restricting the supply of parts so others can't repair it" but you can't so I'm going to ignore it.

michaelmrose3• 9 years ago

"Modularity and repairability are a necessary sacrifice to build products that sleek."

This is too silly to even deserve a comprehensive retort. It's about small cost savings that add up over massive units sold and the money to be made on new units. Essentially you can be paid significantly more for making slightly worse items. It is wholly 100% about money.

SpikeDad5• 9 years ago

Except of course it's true. Naturally price is a factor but consumer preferences as well and scale of production are enormous factors. Sorry you can't see that.

solatic• 9 years ago

Design and maintainability are not mutually exclusive.

The original Thinkpad design is the laptop equivalent of blue jeans - functional, comfortable, durable, fashionably flexible, and timeless. Are blue jeans as "high" fashion as an evening gown? No. Does that make them "bad" fashion? No.

I for one want more blue-jean electronics.

bmaupin2• 9 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I'm a huge fan of the ThinkPad T series. They may not win any awards for design, but I'm impressed with how thin and light mine is considering without any tools I can pop off the bottom cover, exposing access to the user-replacable battery, CPU fan, and hard drive. A couple additional screws gives you access to user-replacable RAM.

walterstucco• 9 years ago

Design is maintainability and reproducibility.

Everything Apple is not.

Two things Apple did good on their laptop: the touchpad (not the pizza tray they've put on latest models, the smaller one) and the friction of the lid, that is perfect.

Other than that unibody is a heating disaster, retina screens are useless and created (another) double standard, keyboards got worse and worse up to the point they don't have real keys anymore, the UI, well, classic Apple UI, hide everything behind the curtain, if we say you don't need it, we'll forbid anybody else from even trying.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

SpikeDad5• 9 years ago

And naturally everyone that buys Apple products are zombies and a victim of Apple's irresistible marketing.

Funny but most folks are not like you - they want their computer to do stuff for them without drama.

It's easy to throw out a bunch of hackneyed Apple insults and to use your own personal preferences to stand in for the majority of folks who use and enjoy the form and function of Macs and other Apple gear.

cable2600• 9 years ago

After Jobs was fired or quit Apple in 1985 because the Mac was a flop and the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST came out for a lower price with color. Apple had to redesign the Mac and came up with Nubus slots for the Mac II and Mac SE line. They used the 68020 CPU and expandable video cards with up to 16 million colors to rival the Amigas 4086 colors.

IBM countered with VGA and the Adlib and Soundblaster cards came out to have better sound and Windows 3.x sold a lot and Windows 95 basically put competitors to near bankrupt or almost bankrupt status.

Jobs came back and saved Apple using a BSD Unix solution that used the Mac GUI aka OSX.

acd• 9 years ago

There is only one planet earth. Either we decide to take care of the planet together or we do not care.

PC computers can be repaired easily and use standardized parts that are user replaceable. Why not make phones the same with standard hardware and open boot loaders?

digi_owl7• 9 years ago

Sadly the development i am seeing is that PCs are becoming phone-like faster than phones are becoming pc-like...

krylon2• 9 years ago

I am reminded of that company from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy whose products were built so they could not possibly fail - and then it turned out they were impossible to repair when they did.

It's a shame companies do this, not just to phones. Laptops and small-form-factor desktops have the same problem.

A few years back, a coworker had a problem with a laptop, Lenovo R500, I think, that required replacing something inside the laptop (I forgot what part exactly). I found this maintenance manual, and it was exemplary, with lots of diagrams and drawings that made taking this machine apart and putting it back together a cakewalk even for somebody as clumsy as me (meaning, I successfully performed the "operation", with hardly a clue what I was doing guided solely by the excellent manual, and it ____ing worked!)

That is the standard, vendors should aspire to. And I think, Douglas Adams was on to something - if you design something with repairability (is that a word?) as a goal, I would not bet surprised if the result was also more reliable.

jventura• 9 years ago

HP is also a well-behaved player regarding repairments. For instance, here's the service manual for my HP DV5 laptop: http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02666786.pdf. You can find the replacement procedures for almost all components after page 48..

Unknoob• 9 years ago

Years ago, my mother's old HP pavillion was overheating, so I decided to open it up and clean the dust from the cpu cooler and re-apply thermal paste. After that I vowed to never buy anything HP again.

It took me more than 5 hours to perform a simple cleanup task.

It's not much use giving us step by step instructions on how to service each part when it involves removing more than 60 different screws.

Those things were definitely not build to be serviceable.

salgernon• 9 years ago

Here's one for a similar vintage MacBook Pro, which is similar:

http://manuals-apple.9manuals.com/a38175/686191APL.pdf

(Hope the link works for anyone interested)

Then there's the service manual for the first edition ipad:

http://manuals-apple.9manuals.com/a38175/380639APL.pdf

Where they describe the sim tray as the only user serviceable part.

FWIW, I have both of these devices and they both work still work fine...

khedoros18• 9 years ago

I've got one of the variants of an HP Envy. There's a long rubber foot on the underside of the computer, which covers up a few of the screws to open the bottom. The problem is that you're going to tear up the strip when removing it (beneath the rubber is a separate, padded adhesive strip that tears easily). Mounting a SATA drive required purchase of some model-specific adapters and a rubber drive caddy. Either the caddy or the adapter came with an extra rubber foot, but I think that each of those parts came out to about $30.

Pluses: Individual parts are available to order directly from HP. Once you've identified your machine's exact variant, you can get the service manual and replacement part numbers. The actual disassembly+reassembly was (in my case, at least), really easy, with just a few screws.

Minuses: The parts are expensive, model-specific, the correct model number is sometimes confusing to find. Opening the machine can be a destructive operation, for some models. Internal connections don't always use standard interfaces. Close to every model seems to have customized parts, and there are a lot of model variations, so finding second-hand replacement parts is difficult.

As seems to be the usual trend, I'm sure that the business models would be a better experience and the consumer models would be worse.

digi_owl7• 9 years ago

Much of the stuff in Hitchhikers seems to have been a commentary on contemporary times.

On a different note, i worked for a while at a local repair shop. And one task i had was to file the various repair manuals they received. They were massive tomes stuffed with wiring diagrams and whatsnot, and usually they came some 10 or more at a time. A corridor wall was basically dedicated to the cabinets to house them.

QAPereo• 9 years ago

That, or it was essentially prescient.

peckrob• 9 years ago

It's a shame companies do this, not just to phones. Laptops and small-form-factor desktops have the same problem.

This isn't unique to technology either. Making a simple repair to most modern cars is an exercise in frustration even if you have all the necessary documentation.

I just recently replaced the headlight assemblies on my Toyota Tacoma. I had to disassemble the entire front of the truck to get them out. The grill, bumper cover, and wheel well liners all had to come off just to get the headlight assembly out. I had a bucket full of screws - many of them those garbage plastic ones - a garage full of parts, and a bloody hand by the time I even got to the meat of the project. It literally took me about four hours and 14 pages of directions start to finish.

Twenty years ago I did this same thing on a Dodge Spirit. Three easily reachable bolts and the headlights came right out. New one popped right in, and tighten three easily reachable bolts. Took like 15 minutes.

It seems like everything is becoming more complex and difficult to repair.

LordKano3• 9 years ago

Last year, I replaced the alternator on my Ford Escape and you have to either disconnect the U-joint going to the front passenger side tire or remove the air intake plenum and fish the alternator up the back of the engine by the firewall.

It was a four hour job when on my older cars it would have taken less than one hour.

It's maddening.

Mister_Snuggles• 9 years ago

Replacing the headlight bulb (let's not even talk about the headlight assembly!) on the driver's side of a Chrysler 300 is very difficult.

The "easy" way involves removing the air filter housing. Fortunately that's only held in by one screw.

LambdaComplex• 9 years ago

Sounds like Toyota's given you plenty of incentive to take it into one of their shops (and, thus, give them more money). The system is working as intended ;)

bmaupin2• 9 years ago

I know next to nothing about electric cars, but I've heard they have a drastically smaller amount of moving parts. I'm curious if that would make them any easier to work on.

jeena• 9 years ago

"Thinkpads are the easiest machines to dissolve into atoms and back."

I did that too with my ThinkPad, a couple of times, and I got at least two more years out of it! https://jeena.net/repairing and https://jeena.net/thinkpad-t410-speakers-fix

cjsuk• 9 years ago

I've just given up on my X201 which is 6 years old. I maintained it just with a #00 Philips driver! It still worked - just fancied a new unit. Now I have a T440 and it's exactly the same when it comes to maintenance.

aleem2• 9 years ago

This is a short term strategy at best.

Apple generates 7bn from services with 700mn active phones. Without "planned obsolescence" the 700mn number would be much higher as would services revenue.

Edit: services is iTunes, music, App Store, iCloud, etc. 7bn for comparison is bigger than Netflix (2.5bn) and aws (3.5bn)

rifung3• 9 years ago

Why do you say that? People seem to still be buying Apple products regardless. I'd argue the strategy seems to be working for them because now you're both paying for services and new devices.

s3nnyy• 9 years ago

And still, the net promoter score for lenovo is 23 while for apple it is 88.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

When an article is filled with "Advocacy groups say .." and "report by the <we dislike this state of affairs> organization" you can expect it to be filled with poorly sourced 'facts' and weakly reasoned 'conclusions.' And this article does not disappoint in that regard.

The industry got hooked on 'upgrade every year or so' it did wonders for the bottom line because you could sell the same high margin product to the consumer again and again. It isn't surprising when you consider the people who designed and built your product are sitting there at the company still, and now what do they do? You can't really just lay them off (not and expect to catch the next wave of what ever) so you start them off designing and building the next version, which, as a requirement is "make it so that someone who owns the old one will want to buy the new one."

Great but that is then conflated with the challenge of disposing of the previous one which, for all intents and purposes, can't really be 'recycled' so much as separated into recoverable metal [1][2] and then either burying the rest or incinerating it.

And that gets conflated with the 'If you would just support it I could keep it' story line, where new features can't run on the old device (I've got an older iPad for example stuck on IOS 6 for that reason but its a great media player) and of course the FOSS community saying that if you document the device they would build alternative software packages for it.

And that gets conflated with 'if I could get it fixed I would' which would support repair shops (which seem to flourish in places like China but less commonly in the US) where problems are diagnosed down to the chip level and fixed on the spot. But that interferes with warranty calculations (you crack a screen and have a shop replace it, but then the mainboard develops an intermittent, was that a manufacturing problem or a repair shop problem? can be impossible to know.)

And all of that burys the state of the art which is that most of the toxic stuff has been taken out of electronics, and caveat people who violate the laws, or places which care to little to enforce the laws, the stuff is reasonably disposed and what can be recovered is.

What is missing is any sort of vision by either one of the agencies or organizations they talk with about what a better system would look like from an implementation level (we know about lax enforcement of the current stuff).

[1] https://www.oecd.org/env/waste/Case%20Study%20on%20Critical%...

[2] http://services.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2014/05/UL...

Lagged2Death• 9 years ago

...at a certain point, the tech industry’s chemical suppliers were enlisting family members to pay for IEEE memberships to help vote down new environmental measures.

Nothing to see here, just the free market regulating itself. Good job!

pointytrees• 9 years ago

I think the consumer frustration stems from the desire to buy once, then use it for 10+ years. I'm driving a 17yr old vehicle with 350k+ miles, and just keep taking it in for quarterly tune ups and it runs great. Sure I would love an auto-pilot tesla, but I'm more than happy to save loads of money by maintaining my existing vehicle.

indigo0086• 9 years ago

I only see this as a good thing. Breeds competition as consumer trust and loyalty degrades. Rather than allow a company to continue doing this and have us still fund their companies, anyone should come forward and provide better products and they'll get the message.

Zenst• 9 years ago

In many aspects in ever decreasing size tech the balance between repairable and size come into play.

One way to see this aspect would be a PC compared to a laptop One is larger but you can replace many components with ease to a laptop that has a more limited and indeed costly replacement/repair factor and even then you are constraints limited compared to a PC. But it does get better, I can't but help feel that the lack of standards limit the drive to swap in and out parts. More so when those standards are driven by SOC manufacturers more than most and help to lock in phone manufacturers into certain brands of SOC.

paulmd• 9 years ago

Smartphones are highly "engineered" products (in the sense that they are more than a simple combination of off-the-shelf parts). And typically the more "engineered" a product is, the more difficult it is for an end-user to service. That goes double if it's extremely space-constrained, as engineers are forced to get "creative" to fit their constraints.

As a relatable example, consider PC building. In a standard PC case, you can pretty much throw together any selection of (compatible) parts and expect them to work. In contrast very compact mini-ITX builds can be very challenging, not all combinations of parts will fit in a given case, heat becomes challenging to dissipate without excessive noise, and assembly can be very fiddly, with exactly one right order to put all the parts together. And even if you are doing the smallest fiddliest case you can buy, you still will not actually approach the sizes that are possible with an engineered product like the MSI Trident 3/Corsair One/Zotac Magnus let alone the noise profiles.

That said, Apple definitely crosses the line from "compact product that is necessarily difficult to service" into actively obstructing service efforts, which is a problem. For example I accept that soldering parts down is thinner than socketing them, but it's an asshole move to glue components into place.

Apple is certainly not alone here, however. It's virtually impossible to find a phone without an integral (non-replaceable) battery nowadays, and MicroSD slots are rather uncommon as well (yes Google, I know there's a lot of bad flash out there, that's why I source nice stuff from camera stores).

I don't have any good suggestions to fix this, there's no "but wait there's a better way" at the end of this post. There was a prototype phone a while back that was built from pluggable "modules" but obviously it hasn't taken off. The closest thing is probably a dedicated hacker/tinkerer phone like the Neo900 but you will definitely have to live with it being 3-4x as thick as an iPhone. The iPhone is making enough compromises in terms of functionality (eg battery life, external antenna connector, etc) that there might be a niche for a more full-featured device but it's clearly not what the mass market wants.

csours• 9 years ago

I've spent some time thinking about this from an automotive manufacturing perspective (I work for an automotive manufacturer, previously on the shop floor).

Engineering is all about trade-offs - both physically/materially/technically, and in time and money.

As an engineer/designer you have a set of requirements to meet: Product Safety, Customer Needs, Marketing Needs, and Technical Requirements.

Then you can spend some time on Serviceability - but any time and money you spend on Serviceability is time you are not spending on improving the product and hopefully reducing the need to repair and replace parts in the first place.

Then you start manufacturing the thing, and problems come out of the woodwork. If you put a thousand parts together that's at least two thousand things to go wrong (and often many more). So you spend time designing for manufacturability/assembly - add an alignment slot to this connector, color coordinate these parts so it's obvious what goes together, make this bolt/fastener easier to insert. This is called Poke-Yoke, or idiot proofing. You spend a lot of time on this because there are a lot of idiots.

If you are good at manufacturing you learn how to make the thing quickly, with high quality, and with a small number of workers. This is called Lean Manufacturing.

The upshot of all of this, is that the connectors, parts, assemblies, fasteners, adhesives and all of that are designed so that the widget goes together right the first time, in such a way that an idiot can put it together, and it should work for a long time.

limeblack2• 9 years ago

On top of this Apple is forcing Recyclers to shred Phones and Laptops https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yp73jw/apple-recy...

Not exactly a green thing to do in my opinion.

abalone• 9 years ago

This is a super disingenuous article from the Verge. It's based on a highly biased "report" by the Repair Association trade group led by iFixit, whose business is impacted by this approach. They are now attempting to make an environmental argument. Pay close attention and you'll note that their premise, that user-repairable devices are better for the environment, is entirely unsupported.

Where do you think most user-removed parts end up? In landfill. Whereas devices traded in to Apple can be recycled properly. Apple even has a custom-designed robot to disassemble iPhones to achieve maximum recyclability.[1]

They also offer zero support for the claim that Apple's approach shortens the lifetime of devices. Apple offers a battery replacement program![2] You can extend your iPhone's life! And they recycle the old battery properly. iFixit just doesn't like that they can't sell you the kits to do it yourself.

Apple's obvious motive, which this sensational article fails to dispute, is to make their devices smaller, watertight, and generally better. That is why they pack and glue the interiors with custom parts and seals.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc

[2] https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-power

Animats• 9 years ago

One alternative is "impossible to repair, but rugged". Encapsulate the whole thing and make it watertight, dusttight, and airtight. (Yes, you can get microphones and speakers for that environment.) Lose the connectors and have wireless charging and audio out. The problem with Apple's products is fragility, not repairability. Nokia had this nailed over a decade ago. I have a Caterpillar B15 phone, which is the modern equivalent of "doesn't break".

Here's one of my projects, restoring a Teletype Model 15 from the 1930s.[1] This one was in bad shape. Those machines are 100% repairable; any part can be removed and replaced with common hand tools, usually just with a screwdriver. It took about a month to overhaul. I have it running, connected to a laptop computer. The typing quality isn't very good; I could do a rebuild on the type basket but haven't done so. The price of this repairability is a big, heavy machine.

There are people in Shenzhen who repair iPhones at that level. They un-solder chips with a hot air rework station, put down a solder paste stencil, put in a good chip from another broken phone, heat up the new chip to solder it in, and have a working board. It's feasible because it's such a monoculture - there are so many identical phones, and you don't need a broad parts stock. For brands with a lot of models, and a smaller markup over parts cost, few people bother.

[1] http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,43672.25.htm...

justforFranz• 9 years ago

Doesn't Apple already have more money than god?

Why Apple and other tech companies are fighting to keep devices hard to repair

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