[ThePhysicist]

Apple seems to be one of the worst offenders in terms of repairability of their devices. You can watch e.g. Louis Rossmann's videos on Youtube, he goes into great detail on how Apple tries to make it impossible for anyone except themselves to service their laptops, even going as far as to restrict market suppliers from selling specific microchips (that were not invented by Apple) to anyone but Apple.

I imagine this will only become worse as they switch to their own CPUs in the near future. I expect that Macs will become more like iPhones in that Apple will restrict more and more which software you can easily run on them and how you can extend the devices.

Other manufacturers like Dell or Lenovo do a much better job in terms of repairability IMHO: They build their machines with mostly standard components that can be easily replaced and make them easy to open and service. Compare that to recent Apple devices: If you want more RAM or storage in your device they charge you 5-10 times the market price. They also make sure you will never be able to upgrade those things yourself by soldering them to the mainboard.

[theandrewbailey]

I watched one of Louis' videos[0] yesterday where he doesn't think Apple's ARM transition won't make things harder. He mentions that CPU failure is rare, and replacement CPUs aren't easy to get today, because they are salvaged from other machines, and can't be ordered from places like Newegg or Amazon. Almost all of his repairs involve components that aren't the CPU.

[0] https://youtu.be/T_2LnFAGypM?t=175

[barrkel]

Switching away from a PC architecture is the issue more than moving to using an ARM CPU in particular.

[rasz]

Not to someone already repairing ipads/iphones.

[Scoundreller]

On the other side, Apple’s approach means I’ve been able to re-capture about 50%+ of my 3-4 year old MacBook Airs by parting them out, instead of nearly 0 for commodity laptops.

It really reduced my TCO instead of letting that get captured by 3rd party manufactures.

[_ph_]

I don't think it will get especially worse with the switch to their own silicon. It is not as if you could exchange the CPU in your current Mac either, with the possible exception of the Mac Pro. Same with the software. The pure fact that they demonstrated a Linux VM in the keynote shows, that they understand at least the requirements of the Mac users.

[m0xte]

I'm really not bothered by this.

While I appreciate the right to repair, I don't think a lot of stuff is repairable with any reasonably easy to obtain equipment these days. It's limiting all repairs to FRU replacement. I can rework everything down to 0402's and MSOP packages but BGAs and things like that, forget it.

We really should be fighting for better consumer rights legislation in our respective countries where we don't have to resort to repairing our own devices because they had designed in lifespans. You should be able to walk into the store you bought your device from in 5 years and say "it failed" and get an unconditional repair or replacement without a single argument.

We have that here in the UK under CRA 2015 and Apple have honoured repairs I've taken in there up to 5 years old without question. In fact I got given a brand new 6s after 3 years when the display developed a cosmetic backlight fault. The old one was recycled I assume and turned into other iPhones. That's where we should be.

Fear of things breaking is really a big problem with expensive technology items. Removing that fear and cost though legislation changes is the best outcome. Not the right to repair which is honestly beyond most people I have encountered, including so-called professional repairers. Involving third parties and self-repairs is walking around the problem which is why the manufacturers are surprisingly silent on this. It's a better outcome for the manufacturers than actually forcing the manufacturers to support their devices for a reasonable lifespan.

[rvense]

"Recycling" in the context of electronics means that a few rare minerals (gold) get extracted, and the rest (ie. almost everything) ends up in landfills or as filler for roads at best. It's a very energy intensive process with often murky environmental effects, and defintely not just "used to make nee iPhones". Unfortunately!

That's why the phrase is "reduce, reuse, and if all else fails, recycle" and why Apple (and others) are indeed in the wrong when they don't design their products for repairability and long life.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Unfortunately modern computing trends make "reuse" pretty difficult too, what with software bloat and increasing layers of abstraction ensuring that everything becomes slower and slower over time, possibly just so that you will buy new hardware. Wastefulness in computing is a decade+ long epidemic.

Not that long ago users here were talking about 3 seconds to launch a word processor being "pretty good", which is an insane statement to make when you're taking about multicore processors that can execute multiple instructions per cycle and run at 3 billion cycles per second. Modern software is the computing equivalent of burning rainforests to roast marshmallows.

[nitrogen]

Wastefulness in computing is a decade+ long epidemic.

Comedians were making songs about endless upgrades back in the 90s.

[tomatotomato37]

Isn't that just for the boards and more awkward components though? It seems like it would be trivial to strip most of the surface mounted components off via just heating and shaking

[rvense]

For manual repairs it's certainly viable for some components, but it takes some care to not end up with tiny passives stuck to everything - if you literally just shake (or more, likely, scrape) everything off the board you'll get an absolute mess. And then you don't know if things end up damaged (or were damaged before, if you're talking about e-waste). It's not really something that works at scale. Even in the simplest case it's labour-intensive, so it's not economical in the vast majority of cases. Not for SoCs, certainly not for smaller things that cost singular cents, or less.

To reuse components in new products you'd have to harvest, clean off the old solder paste (reball in the case of BGAs), and sort everything, and then repackage them for pick-n-placing again. And if you're talking about more than just Apple reusing Apple products, there's also quite a lot of varieties of components.

[encom]

>but BGAs and things like that, forget it.

Sure. But things like batteries should be replacable in all devices. It's a consumable item, and it shouldn't even be counted as a repair at all.

The fact that modern electronics, and especially phones, is designed to be disposable is infuriating. And Apple says they care so ooh much about the environment, but wants you to throw your headphones in a landfill when the battey dies. Disgusting.

[m0xte]

Completely agree there. With respect to the earphones I think Apple etc should buy them back at a percentage of the original cost and have recycling targets that that are independently audited.

[_ph_]

The right to repair should at least cover trivial things like replacing the battery, keyboard, ssd, fans. Things which are going to wear down and can be cheaply replaced, if they can be replaced at all. But charging $600 for a keyboard exchange and even more for a new LCD (which is worth $100-200), that is entirely wrong.

[m0xte]

Yes I agree.

[C1sc0cat]

I think its an attempt to keep developers who want to develop directly on their laptop.

Personally I am not taken with the idea of running a vm on a different hardware arm to the to the one I will deploy in production.

I much prefer developing and testing on identical hardware

[Shivetya]

Right to repair never covered upgrading an item. We cannot upgrade memory or storage in many devices so limiting the rule to say "this item type must allow for use upgrading" limits the flexibility of the seller. If you don't like their limits then buy the other brand.

One could make a good argument that circuit board repair is outside the realm of right to repair as in many applications you simply buy a new module or board; see automotive repairs, appliance repair, and similar.

It is the difference between swapping out the a water pump and repair one yourself. Right to Repair makes it possible to get new water pumps from any vendor as that is the extent by which the common consumer would need. So in the case of Apple products Right to Repair would include replacement circuit boards which could include a mainboard, battery modules, and any individual component which simply plugs in. Also covered would be the ability to open an close an item without having to damage it to do so to get at the internals.

[ThePhysicist]

I don't think so. Letting the manufacturer decide which parts of a system "belong together" will not enable an effective repair, as companies like Apple will just say that their whole logic board is a single unit and to "repair" it you need to throw it out and get a new one (actually that's exactly what they are doing already by restricting repair shops from buying specific chips they use on their boards; many board problems would be easy to repair with the right 30 cent IC, Apple just won't let repair technicians have those). That's a bit too convenient maybe. A better approach would be to see what is practically possible in terms of repairability without significantly compromising other aspects of a design, and mandate this to everyone. Another way would be to create fore-runner programs, where the most innovative and efficient solution becomes the standard for everyone to follow. This worked well for products like cars so I don't see why this wouldn't work for computers.

Also, saying "if you don't like their limits then buy the other brand" is not a strong argument against standardization and regulation of technology, that stance would basically give a free pass to manufacturers to do anything as long as there is customer demand for it. Any industry that can produce significant external negative effects like waste or pollution, which are not primarily experienced by the consumers (think of pollution produced by cars; not very inconvenient to each individual consumer, but harmful to people in cities due to the large number of cars), needs to be regulated based on environmental and sustainability factors as well.

[_ph_]

The ability to upgrade would be a bonus and usually comes automatically, if you have the ability to repair a device. OWC is well-known for offerings of upgrades for Apple computers, which were not officially upgradeable, as well as of course, repair kits, like for the battery in some models.

A right to repair should be one of the fundamental customer rights. In this case, not only protecting the customer, but also the environment. Customer rights exists for multiple reasons. First of all, to protect against undue forcing of customers into something. Even if a company doesn't have a monopoly in the strict sense, they might try to force you into situations, where you cannot just choose a different brand. Especially if all brands go on a similar course.

[bzzzt]

About the soldering part: memory prices don't plummet as hard as in 2005 anymore, so when you need more RAM, just buy it. By soldering it you also make it more robust. Most DIMM troubleshooting begins with 'reseat the modules'. And users won't place cheap modules which will cause issues and give your products a bad name.

[ThePhysicist]

Of course, you can select a 16 GB memory upgrade from Apple for 400 $ when you buy your laptop. On the other hand, a user-serviceable laptop would just enable you to buy that RAM yourself for around 100 $ and put it in the laptop. Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years. With an Apple laptop you're just out of luck in those cases, the only thing you can do is sell it and buy a new one. Same story with the hard drives or almost any other component. I don't think that the reason they do this is to make the laptops 1-2 mm thinner, I think it's just economically way more interesting to be in a position where your company controls the entire value chain from software to hardware. That's where Apple is headed and it's great for them as a company, for end users it's not so great though. I would really like if the EU restricts this kind of behavior as I think it would be good for Apple users as well.

[cesarb]

> Also, you could do that after you buy the laptop, as sometimes people just realize they need more RAM or storage after using a laptop for several years.

An example of that: when I started working at my current company, the 4GB of RAM I had on my several years old laptop was no longer enough (I could work fine, but it got annoyingly slow when I used the IDE). Since said laptop is a Dell, I just bought a matched pair of 8GB RAM sticks (dual channel, total 16GB), followed the instructions on the repair manual (available as a PDF on the manufacturer website, no login required) to open the back cover, and exchanged the memory. Took me only around an hour, and would have taken only a few minutes if I hadn't insisted on running the full memory test to make sure the new sticks were good (built-in hardware test program, launched from the BIOS, no installation or operating system required).

I some time later used that 4GB stick I had removed from the laptop to upgrade another computer from 4GB to 8GB. That is: even the part I had to remove for the upgrade wasn't wasted.

[_ph_]

Yes and no. I am all for buying the maximum memory you can order for a laptop, but Apple makes this an issue by asking a huge premium for upgrades. And of course, with ssd-storage, there is the question of wear, eventually you would have might have to replace it.