[natch]

OK it's true there are also more issues at play.

Since you mention battery, that's a big one. When Apple cannot control which batteries get swapped into their devices, their brand is at risk due to fires caused by bad batteries.

You can generalize this point to other components and quality in general. If people swap out third party parts, which some repair shops and end users will do to save money, the products end up looking bad and it damages Apple's reputation, which is valuable to them.

[mqus]

This is really not a good argument.

If I swap the parts myself, I either get the new parts from apple themselves (in which case it IS their fault if something goes wrong or they can blame it on me for wrongly assembling it; e.g. "You were holding it wrong")

If I go to a shop or a friend to get my phone repaired and they replace parts, this would be different. If the device malfunctions I would obviously blame the guy who last fiddled with it first. Look at car repair shops, household appliances etc...

In the case of batteries its even more simple. If its an apple battery, its obviously apples fault if the device catches fire. Because either the battery was bad or the manuals were. If the swap is so terribly difficult that many users will damage the phone while swapping batteries, it's also apples fault, but they will (as usual) deny any claims so no harm done.

If it's a third-party battery, I can't see how the blame would fall to apple.

All in all, the reputation argument is on them. I don't see how e.g. Ford can be blamed for a car where the independently repaired brakes didn't work and caused an accident.

[natch]

All your theories about blame being properly assigned go out the window when the news media gets ahold of any “Apple device caused a fire” story. You aren’t going to personally be there to correct the facts for every reader and viewer, nor do you have any incentive to be. So Apple’s brand gets put at risk.

[natch]

>This is really not a good argument.

But it is, and your counterpoints do not hold up.

[simion314]

>When Apple cannot control which batteries get swapped into their devices, their brand is at risk due to fires caused by bad batteries.

I never seems this argument when you install after market car parts and install the parts yourself or your neighbor or some random car service, if you changed your lightbolb in the car and the engine breaks 1 month later you can't void my engine warranty. When I install a cheap battery, the pone burns and I bring it to warranty then the warranty people can photo the phone, show the problem, show the faulty battery and I am at fault.

If you are concern that evil people are out to get Apple, those evil people have many other ways to do it, there is no good reason to screw 99,99% of your user because some random guy install a cheap battery and then puts a photo and rand on the internet, that does nothing, there was a need for thousands of people to complain about the keyboard issues before most(but not all) of Apple fans believed that Apple could make a mistake(so a few rants won't have any effect).

[natch]

It’s incredibly naive to think that when your house burns down and gets reported in the media, or your device bursts into flames in your luggage on a plane, all the media people sensationalizing the story and all the readers are going to get the key fact that you personally replaced the battery. Information gets distorted and the phone maker ends up looking bad.

[simion314]

This is not true,if it was true, some fan hater would hack an iPhone and made it to get on fire into an airplane or some other place. The evidence shows that we have many batteroes for MACc books catch fire or get inflated, keyboiards breaking, GPUs not working and if there is no class action lawsuit the blame is alwys set on the user that he is using it wrong.

Please show evidence for the contrary, one isolated incident and Apple got the blame and not the user when in fact the user was at fault.