[mrtksn]

I am a big fan of iFixit and dig their teardowns just as much as the device releases themselves but their "Companies should prioritize on ease of repair even if it makes the devices less portable and less secure" narrative flips me.

I never, ever buy devices for repair purposes or to resell them without bothering to do a factory re-set. The ideal device is one that doesn't need a repair and I do not accept for my devices to be re-purposed without my permission. The whole "this is garbage and this company should make this in a way that we like" is really annoying when it is written in an authoritative tone and rallies a mob.

I think they are stuck in the "When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mentality. I see a similarly annoying tone in the more techie social media personalities too, they don't just explain what's not working for them, they actually lecture the engineers that made this thing. The number of followers is not an engineering degree’s GPA.

It is like a flavour of anti-intellectualism.

iFixit is great but I don't buy that they are speaking on behalf of the user. I would have been more supportive if they were saying something like "This hurts our business, it would have been great if Apple took some steps to make things more repairable"

[EpicBlackCrayon]

> I think they are stuck in the "When you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mentality. I see a similarly annoying tone in the more techie social media personalities too, they don't just explain what's not working for them, they actually lecture the engineers that made this thing.

Fair point.

>The number of followers is not an engineering degree’s GPA. It is like a flavour of anti-intellectualism.

I disagree here though. The engineers and product managers who make this stuff are often so detached from what's going on the ground or how people are actually using these products that someone who speaks for the layman is truly needed. There's also a wide variety of tech influencers out there, some who make cogent arguments about the product (Dieter Bohn comes to mind) and others who parrot those arguments absently mindedly. That latter group could conceivable be called anti-intellectual.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not especially shocking that the people doing repairs are the people talking about repairability.

And you're taking it from the perspective of someone buying a new device from Apple who doesn't care about anybody else. Consider the perspective of a low income person who would otherwise buy a refurbished phone which will now be unavailable or more expensive, or the environmental perspective of having to manufacture new phones (future landfill) instead of reusing what already exists. If we care about other people then we should care about the consequences of what Apple is doing here.

[scarface74]

No, that person would be able buy a refurbished phone from a source like Gazelle that insures that the rightful owner has deactivated the phone and knows that it isn’t stolen.

[AnthonyMouse]

There are a zillion phones that come to be refurbished because they originally had corporate owners. The IT department issues new phones and ends up with a giant pile of old phones, many of which are damaged, which aren't worth their time to sort out and resell, so they get thrown on a pallet and go in bulk to an electronics recycler.

The recycler sorts the phones from the PCs from the laser printers and the phones go to a company that refurbishes phones. Now they've got a thousand iPhones from a dozen companies, legally-obtained, which are locked to the personal Apple account of some salesman three deep in the supply chain and they don't even know which specific company they're from, much less which salesman.

So none of those phones can be refurbished, that person can't buy them, and the remaining phones they could buy -- which necessarily can't go to as many people as the larger number of phones -- cost more as a result of supply and demand.

[scarface74]

How do you propose you fix that and still keep shady refurbishers from selling stolen phones? Even if the refurbishing company is trustworthy what is to guarantee that all of the employees are and they don’t get kickbacks for mixing in stolen phones with the legitimate ones?

This isn’t far fetched. Many SIM swaps are done by employees of carriers taking bribes to help thieves perform SIM swaps. They aren’t all done by social engineering.

Now suppose none of that occurs and Apple unlocks phones. Now a phone that has user data on it that was formerly encrypted is available to a third party.

Yes Apple could perform a remote wipe, but again why would Apple want to get in the middle of that? What if someone was being malicious and copied someone’s serial number and asked Apple to do a remote wipe?

Long story short, if the phone wasn’t unlocked before it was given to the refurbisher, you have know way of knowing whether the phone was stolen.

[mrtksn]

My first iPhone was a used one, obtained from a willing seller who unlocked the device upon my purchase.

My purchase was not a freak one, it was not an exception to the rule. The rule is, the willing party unlocks the device when sells or gives it away.

Framing it as if iPhones or Macbooks are tied to the original owner and becomes e-waste after when the original buyer no longer needs it is not honest. Especially with the Apple products, the 2.nd hand market is very healthy and Macbooks and iPhones change hands until they become obsolete.

If we are going to turn into a socialist utopia where we share the resources willingly or not, I don't believe that it's Apple's device lock that's stopping us.

The same goes for the repairs, it is not true that manufacturers make devices unrepairable. In some cases, it might require more skill or equipment than other cases but these devices obey the laws of physics, therefore can be repaired. In some products, the miniaturization is way beyond what manual labour can handle but for those products companies and governments offer proper ways for disposal. IC's took over transistors and made things hard to repair, you throw away billions of perfectly fine transistors just because one transistor in the CPU went bad and this is OK because of the reliability is much better and the miniaturization made the material waste much smaller.

[dwild]

> The whole "this is garbage and this company should make this in a way that we like" is really annoying when it is written in an authoritative tone and rallies a mob.

Don't your whole comment do the same? They are giving their opinion based on their preference. For sure it will be bias toward their goal, just like you want them to stop, so that your goal, keeping the statu quo, win.

I prefer repairability because I want to be able to repair my own things and not depends as much on others. I don't expect them to do it, but I will say it loudly so that people know that my market exist. I also consider that better for the society in general, thus I will also push the government to go toward that too, because I consider the government should work toward the society better. Does it means my position will win? No, but I still have the right to defends it, just like you have the right to defends yours.

[mrtksn]

Not at all, these are products that I paid for. They were made for me in order to take my money, I have all the rights for strong opinions because of these transactions.

The repair shops are 3rd parties that are trying to inject themselves in the transaction pretending to be on my side when they are actually irrelevant. They advocate for thicker less secure products so that their margins increase if they win my business.

It's simply not true that the devices are not repairable, the issue is that repairing is low margin business. What they want is to have a low touch component business.

[dwild]

>They advocate for thicker less secure products so that their margins increase if they win my business.

They advocate with me (a customer) for a more repairable product. Just like Apple advocate with you for a less repairable product.

They are also the trillion dollars company against a billion dollars industry... seems like you are with the one expert in increasing margins.

> It's simply not true that the devices are not repairable, the issue is that repairing is low margin business.

No one's arguing that they aren't repairable, we are arguing that they makes them harder to repair. Why do your comment keep being that dishonest.

[mrtksn]

Sure, you are also entitled for an opinion! We simply have different expectations and that’s O.K.

And as for repairability, it’s subjective. I have a soldering iron and my dexterity is not bad at all, therefore many things deemed hard to repair by some are easy for me. I bet there are people who are much better than me and have better equipment, so let’s not pretend that there’s an universal repairability score or something like that.

[dwild]

> We simply have different expectations and that’s O.K.

I wasn't arguing about your opinion on repairability, I was arguing about you stating that ifixit shouldn't defends my case.

> And as for repairability, it’s subjective.

And ifixit does a pretty good job explaining their scoring and show how something is more repairable than others.

> let’s not pretend that there’s an universal repairability score

There's no universal score, but there's definitely things that make repairability easier or harder, tools or no tools.

[j45]

It’s fine you don’t like to take apart devices.

For others it’s part competency (d they have the skills to and part preference.

Many technologists in software included some experience in hardware, including device repair, building or servicing servers, etc.

[mrtksn]

I like taking apart stuff, I always do repair my devices by myself. That being said, what I expect from a device is to excel on its purpose and not compromise on it in the name of repairability. It's simply not true that things are not repairable, just harder. If anyone wants easy disassembly, can buy Lego.

[AWildC182]

> but their "Companies should prioritize on ease of repair even if it makes the devices less portable and less secure" narrative flips me.

Everything wears out eventually. Nothing made in the past ten years is made to last forever and the trend is accelerating. Everyone uses their devices differently whether they're carefully stored in a laptop bag when not in use or sit out in a machine shop and everything in between.

Processors aren't really getting that much faster so devices can last a lot longer than the did in the past. To spite this, build quality is getting worse and everyone is gluing batteries into their devices that WILL degrade to uselessness after 2-3 years of regular use.

This mentality has to stop if don't want to create mountains of useless e-waste.

Edit: also, nobody is asking for less security. Device theft isn't that big of an issue. This is just apple trying to screw with the resale market because they're struggling to sell more new devices when their existing ones aren't being obsoleted at the rate they used to.

[rrdharan]

> Device theft isn't that big of an issue.

On what basis are you making this claim?

At least for phones, activation locks had a noticeable impact on reducing device theft (which was rampant for a while earlier in the smartphone era and a real public safety concern in cities).

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/11/apples-activation-lock-lea...

[AWildC182]

I'm making that claim on a personal basis. I've never had a device stolen and I know of exactly one such incident with a person I know. I just don't consider it a problem that trumps right to repair and if you do, I hope apple starts potting their devices in epoxy.

[kstrauser]

Two of my coworkers in the room with me right now have had their phones stolen. I know that's just as anecdotal as your story, but I assure you that phones are stolen. Less so now that activation lock ruins much of their value, thankfully.

[eschaton]

“I don’t believe the data because of a couple anecdotes.”

[AWildC182]

Never said I don't believe the data, I just think it's irrelevant. If 10 people had their phones stolen out of 10,000 that doesn't justify draconian anti-consumer measures.

[scarface74]

The consumer can easily deactivate the lock and sell the device. How is it anti consumer?