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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t think it is related to antitrust, but I do think it is related to the growing “right to repair” advocacy.

That's my point. The customers shouted, and Apple actually listened this time. And this has been happening more lately. Why?

It's because an exec at "old" Apple would say: "sure, the customers want to be able to repair easily, but won't this hurt our revenue growth and my bonus next year? What if they stop upgrading hardware as often?"

An exec at "new" Apple is now incentivized to think: "well, even if they keep their hardware longer, it doesn't matter. Because the customer will still be in the ecosystem and we can get them to spend more via Apple Pay, iCloud, Apple TV+, News+, Advertising, App Store, etc. etc. and all these new services!"

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Thats a good spin by the exec, but it’s more like “the people shouted, governments listened, began legislation, apple protected themselves by getting ahead of it”

I don’t really think that this was a direct reaction to customer demands but a forced hand with good spin.

It also leaves them open to make it still a scam.

Independent repair shops: Apple won't sell us parts so you have to pay them $69 for a repair we could do for $49 or you could do yourself for $20 because it's really $20 in parts and $29 in labor.

Apple: Okay, here's the part you wanted, you can have it for $59 or have us do it for $69. No need for any new laws.

Yep, this is entirely "we can give you the right to repair your device. You don't need that silly law." The law is about giving consumers and repair shops the right to repair, but Apple is pretending that "right to repair" is just about giving individuals the ability to repair their stuff.

It's especially safe for Apple because Joe Q Public is not going to even remotely think about DIY'ing this, and they get to charge a price that assures they don't lose money on it. The parts are cheap, the instructions are cheap. It's the labor that is what is expensive.

Apple parts are unnecessarily expensive though. And they've already started rolling out new firmware in place to reject parts from third party sources. This will essentially force you to buy parts from them at high prices - I remember when I bought a Mac Mini, Apple RAM and SSD was nearly double the price of its competitors for similar or better specs. (I naturally chose to buy the non-Apple parts. Ofcourse, they've already made sure that your loyalty to them doesn't go astray by soldering the RAM and SSDs now!). And they will continue to make even more hard to repair devices. Nothing will change on their part here - Apple will not give you the ability to customise your hardware or software from non-Apple sources, as that will give you the freedom to leave their ecosystem.

Jeff Williams, quoted in the press release, joined Apple in 1998. Tim Cook joined about the same time. So old Apple and new Apple are actually the same people.

Also it’s not accurate to say these are things Apple would never do before. I have an Apple MacBook Pro from 2009 and it was quite intentionally designed for users to upgrade and repair. And that was when they were much more purely a hardware company, with little services revenue or goals.

I just don’t see the overarching narrative that you do.

> and it was quite intentionally designed for users to upgrade and repair

Only for the battery.

Failure rates on the memory and hard drive components were far higher than we have today. And it didn't benefit Apple at that time to be soldering them to the logic board since thinness wasn't a concern i.e. due to the DVD drive dictating size.

I replaced both memory and HD in that machine myself easily. The HD was under the same hatch as the battery.

Out of 320 comments only one notice this PR quoted Jeff. And not anyone else.

I read this as Jeff is on the supporting side and pushed for it within Apple. ( Which is inline with Post Steve Jobs PR pattern ) And Despite both Jeff and Tim Cook joining at about the same time and both in operation. Jeff and Tim Cook has a very different personality. At least Jeff has a product mind set.

Jeff is the COO why would anyone else comment on this?

> "sure, the customers want to be able to repair easily, but won't this hurt our revenue growth and my bonus next year? What if they stop upgrading hardware as often?"

I honestly think it was closer to "the customers will screw up the repair, burn down their house and then for two weeks the headlines will be about iPhones torching poodles." Between right-to-repair laws and the proliferation of unlicensed repair shops, however, their hand was forced.

At what point was Apple operating like the first quote here? I've never seen them as a revenue growth chasing business. Sure they print cash, but that doesn't say anything about how they go about earning it. I would like to see some actual proof that Apple works/worked that way, rather than concluding the cause from the outcome.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

This is the latest example and they have had previous lawsuits before about intentionally throttling devices which leads to people buying the latest devices.

Their earnings reports depend on volume of iPhone sales, so the incentive exists to push for more.

> I've never seen them as a revenue growth chasing business

Apple is always chasing revenue growth. They're notorious for it. Most businesses are..

> https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

This just links to a manifest.json

> intentionally throttling devices which leads to people buying the latest devices.

As the battery ages, internal resistance goes up, leading to voltage sags under high CPU usage, which is called "brownout." By lowering the maximum CPU frequency when they detect voltage sagging, Apple prevents the device from crashing or randomly rebooting. The iPhone gets slower, but it keeps working, and replacing the battery restores it to full speed.

It allows you to use an iPhone without replacing the battery significantly longer than you would be able to otherwise. It was customer and environmentally friendly.

Chasing revenue growth, indeed.

Oh, and by the way, this is what I'm typing this reply to you on: https://i.imgur.com/ShDwshe.png

At the time I bought this computer - now eight years ago - one of the reasons I bought it was because the battery was a new type that was rated to have 80% or better capacity after 1500 cycles. It exceeded that, by the way, handily.

About the only laptop that could manage similar battery durability would be a Thinkpad, with its min/max battery charging controls.

Apple throttled devices to prevent devices shutting off unexpectedly when an aging battery couldn't sustain the power draw. And they later added a setting to led users control this.

If this was done out of nefarious reasons, don't you think doing nothing (devices switching off when the battery degrades) would have driven more sales of new devices?

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