Apple backs national right-to-repair bill, offering parts, manuals, and tools | Repair advocates say Apple’s move is beneficial, but also strategic::Repair advocates say Apple’s move is beneficial, but also strategic.
Yeah, this isn’t suspicious in any way. Totally on the up and up.
Probably marketing, and hoping California doesn’t make it worse for them.
No, the right to repair apple supports is the one they can control. You have the rights, but you need to buy the parts from them, you need to buy the specialized tools from them, with their terms en conditions.
In other words: you’d be better to let Apple repair the stuf cheaper instead of repairing it yourselves.
Ars did the math (it’s in that article), and they said that people with the know-how will be financially better-off renting the tools and doing the repairs themselves than getting them done at Apple. It’s not a great deal, but it’s probably enough to get California regulators off their backs. Which, again, is the goal.
I suspect that they have found a loophole in the current bill’s wording and don’t want it to be changed.
They charge an insane amount for you to rent a repair kit for a short time to also order parts and do it yourself with no training. It’ll be ‘available’ you can self repair, but not likely.
Plus, you will still need their software to enable a replacement chip due to serialization. From my understanding, this entire aspect isn’t addressed in the current wording of the bill.
Wait, so pigs can learn to fly?
I mean yeah, cops have had helicopters for years now.
Totally getting a handle on the narrative. But actual RTR? Nahhh…. This is Apple.
Just waiting for Louis Rossman
Idk why everyone is so damn suspicious, it seems really straightforward and it makes complete sense business wise. Let people repair their stuff, charge them an amount equal to what they’d pay to send it to official repair centers, and fire all your repair staff. It’s just stonks and these people aren’t trained so they might fail at repairing it and need to buy more. It’s easy money and makes the consumer happy
A couple years ago, Apple announced a program to let people buy replacement parts for their devices just as Congress was talking about right to repair. The program ended up having tons of limitations: very small part selection, and prices identical to Apple’s own repair prices, etc. It was clear that this was an attempt to make it seem like they allowed end-user repair, while doing as much as possible to prevent it. Apple still uses software pairing so that you can’t use working components from donor devices. You can’t swap the camera module between two identical iPhones without getting errors, and this can only be fixed by getting Apple’s help. They are going out of their way to stop independent repair, and have been for some time.
So what’s the catch this time? I suspect it’s probably more software restrictions. Currently, nobody can sell aftermarket parts for most phones, so any replacement parts need to come from Apple (and with Apple’s restrictions). I’d want to see legislation to ban software locks and enable third parties to make replacement parts for phones.
