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Comment by sinak | Hacker News Reader

This is Apple trying to avoid real Right to Repair legislation by taking actions that look like they support independent repair.

Consider taking a moment to donate to https://repair.org/ - we're pushing to get Right to Repair laws passed in state legislatures across the US.

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Apple's workaround may work in US but don't think it will get very far in EU

I don't know. It's infuriating what Apple gets away with in Germany. For example right now to maybe get my 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard fixed, I have to relinquish the unit for a minimum of five workdays. Mind you nobody guarantees me that they will actually do the repair within the time frame or that it will in fact be covered by the extended warranty. This is just the minimum time they will hold the unit to have a look at it and tell me what's up. Cool.

I actually just handed in my 2016 MBP and got the keyboard replaced under their extended 4 year “butterfly mishap”-warranty. The new keyboard feels so much better than the last one. Plus they also replaced the battery because it’s all soldered together, so battery life got like 50% better. It cost me nothing and they did it when I was on vacation anyway, so it wasn’t much of a nuisance. No data loss at all.

I live in Sweden but I think they sent it to Czech Republic for the replacement. Handed it in Monday evening and got it delivered to my door Tuesday the week thereafter.

All in all it was totally worth it, but I’ve only had it for a few weeks now so who knows how long it’ll last this time.

Would you take vacation the next time your laptop breaks?

I'm not an apple fan and never owned an apple laptop but, even with other brands unless you buy their enterprise models (e.g. dell latitude, lenovo thinkpad) with the appropriate warranty you won't get same day hardware support in most of Europe.

And even with onsite support with Dell I had a case when the battery died completely and the laptop could only work when plugged in, they did show up at the office, they checked it out diagnosed that the battery is dead (no kidding), and came back 2 days later with a new battery.

> unless you buy their enterprise models (e.g. dell latitude, lenovo thinkpad) with the appropriate warranty you won't get same day hardware support in most of Europe.

This is the case in the US as well, but I think it should be said that Apple is trying to compete with those classes of computer, not low end consumer grade models. I don’t know if I’d say they’re doing particularly well, but most of why Apple computers are so expensive is because they are designed to last and work well for business.

With other brands you can get 3rd party repairs done on a much quicker basis.

Heck, HP and Dell publish freely available technical manuals that you can look at and fix the device yourself.

I am a real believer in right to repair. But I wonder, if we are unable to achieve legislative results, what can be done to build hardware on open standards?

People have tried and failed.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/2/12775922/google-project-ar...

I think there is no money in letting people repair and upgrade components.

Google kills off a lot of things lol! I'm more concerned with raspi and ARM and etc :)

Only functionality missing would be valid cell tower functionality. Wifi and satellite would work just fine

Project Ara was so overdesigned that I'm almost convinced that it was a false flag.

That was a dumb idea to begin with. We don't need phones that work like lego. Just reverting to how phones worked 5 years ago would be a massive improvement. For almost all users all they will ever need to do is replace the battery. We used to be able to replace the battery with no tools or skills and the screen was pretty easy if you had some skill at all.

The problem we face now is that the user can't fix anything at all, repair stores can fix things with great difficulty but they can't get new parts, and apple themselves can't even fix most things because the individual parts can't even be replaced on their own without replacing the whole thing. (The macbook keyboard which was prone to fail was attached with 50 rivets)

All we need is user replaceable batteries, and for service centres to have access to all the parts they need. Lewis rossman can't get access to a chip that was >$1 on the old macbooks and is prone to fail. The newer version of the chip is impossible to source meaning those macbooks either get binned or pay apple for a whole new mobo which costs more than the laptop is worth.

For real, all I want is for us to go back to the time where you could pop off the back cover of your phone by at worst unscrewing some screws, and the easily replace the battery.

Then maybe Apple wouldn't need to send out a backdoor patch to underclock old devices. People that still want the long battery life the device had on purchase could go out and purchase a new battery (or attempt to force Apple to give them a new one) - those folks that are fine being tethered to a power outlet can choose to ignore the shortening battery lifespan. Either way, it'd move the decision into the hands of the consumer instead of Apple making that choice for you. And don't forget that Apple did get into trouble over their stupid underclocking "We hope no one notices that we don't allow people to repair things" patch.

Then you could vote with your wallet and take a Fairphone :-)

This doesn't work. You can't rely on individual action for massive scale initiatives. Look how far that got us for the ozone layer (solved through governmental action), climate change (unsolved, because there is no governmental action), decent working conditions (everything achieved was through unions, protests and government intervention), etc

It just isn't something most people buying electronics care about, and there are real tradeoffs with size, weight, and aesthetic design choices. Combine those factors, and it's easy to see why the economics don't work. Making your device easily serviceable makes it more attractive to a tiny segment of the market, while making it less attractive to a much bigger segment.

Right to repair is not about redesigning products to become easily serviceable, its about access to same tools and parts manufacturer uses for its own internal service.

That can lead to a full on 'only replace' strategy, as you can see with canon's consumer printers.

Unfortunately 'only replace' does seem to be workable for many devices, like TVs. At most you will be replacing entire boards.

I disagree that making your device easily serviceable necessarily makes it less attractive to that portion of the population. I think that making your device brittle, fragile and easy to tamper with makes it less attractive to that portion of the population - having open documentation about the ways to approach repair and then letting the electronics repair shops all be able to repair your device makes it really attractive to pretty much all of the population.

If your ease of repair comes at the cost of quality people will complain about the lack of quality - but nobody specifically wants something that can only be repaired by one market entrant that has full control over the price of repairs.

Also, if you really want to emphasize quality you can run a repair certification program that distributes high priced stickers to aide in people's confidence.

I think the point was that making it easier to repair will compromise something like device size or weight, making it less attractive to the larger portion of the population.

If they could provide the same form factor and make it easily repairable, then I think you would be right that would be attractive to all, however I think small size and repairability are mutually exclusive properties.

Ten minutes watching YouTube will demonstrate that amateurs are certainly capable of repairing todays devices, even down to something small like an apple watch, so small size and reparability are clearly not mutually exclusive. Why would they be anyway? Certified repair technicians aren't magic, they just have access to training, parts and tools that help.

You should see the insanely tiny pads I had to solder to on my Xbox 360 to install the RGH mod. With a 10$ solder iron, homemade flux, miracle I was able to do it. But I did repeat it and given the same incentive even if they made it smaller next time I would get some jewellers glasses and a better iron.

There's a difference between intentionally making a device harder to repair and making design tradeoff to satisfy certain consumer preference.

Apple is hardware maker. Of course it make sense for them to design the hardware so only they can repair it. It is part of their business model.

Except.. They're not the only ones who can repair it (even though they act like it). And their efforts to hurt independent repairshops show signs of antitrust, which is the topic at hand.

But in many cases this is achieved solely by supply-side restriction of replacement parts - stopping IC manufacturers from supplying those chips to people who could easily repair the device given those parts (macbook power IC springs to mind - same device as a commercial one, just a different pinout for the unobtainable Apple version), or making replacements locked down (such as on new macbooks - you can't just swap a screen now).

Should we also have to pay $990 for oil changes on a leased BMW? ^.^

The market could fix this issue if a significant enough chunk of consumers comprehended what they were losing when going with Apple and were willing to put their money where their mouth was. That's simply not going to happen and a market based solution is unreasonable - this is a time where subject matter experts need to help make an informed decision for the population at large.

This has the same problem I've seen with other such proposals: it joins together "you should have the legal right to repair" with "manufacturers should be forced to make only devices with modular replaceable parts". The latter sounds good in theory, except if it means thicker, heavier, less optimized devices. By all means offer such devices, but don't take away the option of devices at a different point on the tradeoff between modularity and thin/light/optimized.

You should absolutely have the legal right to open, tinker with, repair, or otherwise mod any device you own. That doesn't mean prohibiting the legal right to manufacture, sell, purchase, or use devices whose design trades off simplicity of repair for some other property that people purchasing it want more.

> except if it means thicker, heavier, less optimized devices

Speaking specifically of my MBP Retina, and looking inside, I fail to see how eg. a soldered NVME would make the laptop any thinner. There is plenty of space created by the much thicker heat sink, leaving room for a bunch of components to be modular.

The reason all these components are soldered in is to make it hard for users or small shops to do quick repairs and cheap upgrades.

You must buy a new laptop for a RAM upgrade.

Apple negotiates with component suppliers as a single buyer, drives the price of components down, keeps all the savings to itself, and re-sells the components at an exorbitant markup.

It is ridiculous for anyone to think this has got anything to do with quality.

A modular battery would make the laptop bulkier. If a modular NVMe drive wouldn't, it's because other components have already have. And beyond that, you should be comparing to an Air or MacBook, if we're talking about devices that have been optimized at the expense of modularity.

Also, soldering down RAM means you don't have to include support for negotiating the properties and quality of arbitrary RAM sticks, which you'd have to do with socketed RAM; that can mean booting faster and providing more performance.

There are good reasons to design components to work specifically with other components. There are also good reasons to make devices more modular. Both have value, to different users with different use cases.

> There are good reasons to design components to work specifically with other components. There are also good reasons to make devices more modular. Both have value, to different users with different use cases.

If your point is that there is a trade-off to modularity, I'm not sure who it is in response to. It's obvious that modularity has a tradeoff. And I don't see any significant group in this conversation contending that. Nobody is asking for a user-replaceable RAM on an iPhone.

My own point (and R2R's I think) is that Apple, in most cases makes hard to repair products not as a tradeoff in favor of simplicity/compactness/robustness, but to increase profit.

> If your point is that there is a trade-off to modularity, I'm not sure who it is in response to. It's obvious that modularity has a tradeoff. And I don't see any significant group in this conversation contending that. Nobody is asking for a user-replaceable RAM on an iPhone.

I've seen many people in "right to repair" discussions arguing for legal mandates that every device must have a replaceable battery, for instance. That goes beyond having the right to repair, and into restricting the manufacture of devices.

If we start legislating technical architecture, we limit the possibility of innovation and competition, and we drastically reduce the chances that anyone will ever dethrone any of the current market leaders by building something nobody saw coming.

> I've seen many people in "right to repair" discussions arguing for legal mandates that every device must have a replaceable battery, for instance.

That's actually a good example of choosing the right tradeoff in demanding right to repair. Again, people are asking for replaceable batteries, not interchangeable RAMs (which would effectively disallow SoCs). This seems to limit the downsides of regulation to pretty much nothing.

A common worry about regulation is that it'll snowball [0] and stifle innovation. But R2R isn't asking for generic regulation. It is asking for specific and imo sane things like replaceable batteries. That is not too much to ask.

[0] As in: "If we give them batteries, pretty soon they'll ask for generic SoCs on phones" or something like that.

I actually do support the right to repair. I even donated at the link you provided. But, as a hardware designer myself, the devil is in the details for something like this and people need to be really careful.

https://repair.org/policy

"Unlocking: Legalize unlocking, adapting, and modifying any part of the machine, including software."

The backdoor tools the FBI is asking for could easily fall into that category.

I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying, be very careful what you ask for.

Are you referring to the secure enclave?

That’s a part of the machine therefore it would technically be included by the statement given on the right to repair policy page.

Obviously that page is meant to be a high level statement, it’s not law. But hopefully you can see my point.

The secure enclave might end up being where the trap door goes. :(

nonono.

This is not the right place for that restriction at all. You should have the right to install backdoor tools on a technical level. If you install backdoor tools on equipment without permission from the owner or a properly executed warrant that is the crime and what must be prevented.

Don't conflate restraining the FBI with being allowed to treat the device you paid for and own exactly as a device you paid for and own and is entirely your property.

The FBI can commit crimes with impunity, that much has been made clear. So given that, the best thing you can do to your hardware is make sure that even criminals can't get in, which also restrains some of the rights of the original owner.

Right because everyone knows that rootkits and other malware are just a hypothetical issue - no one ever deploys them against unsuspecting victims because that would be against the law.

Illegal actions - especially by the government - must be punished. Otherwise our laws are just a polite suggestion. I agree that it's problematic to conflate Right-to-repair with technical issues that are supposed to be solved by the legal system.

The trivial solution to this is you have to unlock the bootloader/etc via a command/option which is only available on an unlocked device.

This is how google phones work. You can flash whatever you want when the bootloader is unlocked but it is locked by default and can only be unlocked while the phone is unlocked.

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