Hacker News Reader

Comment by onphonenow | Hacker News Reader

Six or seven years ago I was in Chile for a few weeks as a language-learning exercise. While I was there the power adapter to my MBP broke, making it unusable. At the time there was no Apple store in the entire country! I had to go to Brazil or Argentina to get "authorized" repairs.

I needed my laptop and so I ended up fixing it in my friend's backyard with duct tape and superglue. (Works to this day, AFAIK -- but no more Macs in this household anymore!)

I am taken aback by this attitude against "right to repair" people. Do you guys seriously believe that we must all nuzzle up to Apple to fix our stuff?

> They make devices that last

Seriously beg to differ here. My MBP fried its nvidia graphics chip from overheating and all of my iPhones have had battery issues after 2 years (despite battery health reporting 80-90%). In fact now that I think about it the neither the earpiece nor the bottom speaker are working right either.

My point is simply your Acer notebook is even LESS likely to have parts available in country, they are going to be harder to find etc. The number of Acer stores are going to be FEWER.

So on almost every measure (parts, access to stores, etc) apple has a reasonable story. Now when apple starts going direct to consumer with parts and tools to repair you are claiming "bad faith". It's pathetic really.

I may be confusing things, but a power adapter for a MBP should be readily available on ebay etc.

So how is Chilean eBay then? And who's to say I'm going to have a consistent postal address during my time there? Or that the postal/parcel system is reliable? Or that the package will even arrive in time?

And, ironically, generic parts for an Acer notebook may in fact be more available in less-developed economies, due to their relative cheapness and increased reliance on industry standard parts like hard drives and memory. Plus, in my anecdotal experience, there are a lot more people around who are able to do repairs in places where "making do" is a fact of life.

Apple customer support sucks. I had a macbook air with a dead battery under warranty that I wanted to get replaced. It took a month of discussions with their customer support before the Apple Store (University Village) actually got the damn battery. And then to add insult to injury, the "genius" accused me of damaging the laptop with water and acted like he was doing me a favor by giving me the battery I was owed. I'm certain he was trying to scare me into buying a new computer.

The whole thing made me think back to my old thinkpad, for which I could perform a battery swap myself in seconds (plus two days for the battery to arrive in the mail.)

More recently, my Dell XPS 13 died while under warranty. After a three minute phonecall with Dell customer service, they had a perfectly polite repairman come to my home the next day to replace the motherboard.

I worked with an educational institution that did tons of apple devices.

AppleCare claims were pretty frequent given use case, and hassle free. I honestly haven't even HEARD of months long replacements. This was some time ago though so things may have changed, but something seems off.

My own experience was simply, how can apple be making money with this service?

I believe the cost is $6/month currently. Highly worth it if you are concerned about service.

Dell does a 16/month support offering, but limited to 2 years.

Apple's repairs are extremely expensive for certain things like non-display cosmetic damage (it costs more to fix a broken back glass or housing scratches than an actual broken screen) and relies on an Apple Store (or AASP) being available and you being able to get to it and back or ship your phone off and wait for days.

I have the skills & equipment to do my own repairs and would like the option to do so (in fact, I'm doing so anyway using knockoff or grey-market parts that do the job just fine, but would consider using official parts if the pricing & terms were acceptable).

Than this new offering may be useful to you? I'm not aware of that many companies doing something like this.

The right to repair folks and their criticism of offers like this ("bad faith" etc) seem weak to me still.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com