[nudgeee]

The idea of OEM repairs is to get the product back as close to factory quality as possible with as little margin for error as possible by the operator. This often requires custom tools and jigs to maximize repeatability at a high quality standard, especially on something as complex and highly integrated as a smartphone.

The gripe of the right to repair movement isn’t that tech should be made less complex, it is that the access to parts, information and schematics/designs should be made more accessible for repairs — useful if you have the necessary skills required to carry out repairs without OEM tools.

This is coming from someone who does board level repairs on the side.

[fartcannon]

Mostly I don't want to have to worry what booby traps might trip in a device I payed a substantial amount for because of some petulant CEO.

[Bud]

This may be the gripe of your particular highly-skilled niche of the right-to-repair movement, but wide swaths of said movement are agitating for products to be wholly redesigned in the ways they prefer, to aid in much easier repairs. Never mind what the other 98% of the market might like.

[ClumsyPilot]

I disagree with both claims you are making - that right to repair folks are agitating for redesign, and that 98% of the market is happy with the status quo.

If I go out and ask everyone I know, if they are happy with the current unrepairable appliances, the amount of people who answer yes is < 10%.

The only people I know who are happy, live in extreme privilidge where they can afford replacing devices annually.

But let us say that both claims you are making are true -> so what? What are the economic and environmental implication of unrepairable equipment?

[quesera]

> If I go out and ask everyone I know, if they are happy with the current unrepairable appliances, the amount of people who answer yes is < 10%.

I find this incredible.

Most people have been throwing away / replacing perfectly repairable appliances since long before mobile phones.

What makes mobile phones different?

(Obligatory Framing: I'm all for RtR. I don't think it's practical to require Apple to dumb down their design or construction to fit what a consumer could accomplish at their basement bench. But if I, or my neighborhood repair shop, is sophisticated enough to perform the work, I do think parts should be available.)

[gruez]

>If I go out and ask everyone I know, if they are happy with the current unrepairable appliances, the amount of people who answer yes is < 10%.

The question seems pointless because it's a combination of asking something that people always want more of (who doesn't want more repairability, at least in the abstract?), and fails to mention the trade-offs (eg. price, thinness, water resistance).

[ClumsyPilot]

They don't have IQ of a mushroom, we don't understand the tradeoffs

Anyway, is your result from doing simiar diffetent?

[Bud]

Who said anything about replacing devices annually? Could we at least argue honestly and in good faith?

iPhones and iPads are very easily good for, at a minimum, three to four years of very heavy use before any battery replacement would be necessary at all.

Your numbers are sourced from a very atypical population, and you are obviously smart enough to know that. My numbers are accurate, as evidenced by, um, people still buying hundreds of millions of iPhones a year and Apple still having the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry. Astronomically high ratings.

As for the environmental implications, that is of course a fair question, but have you taken some time to familiarize yourself with Apple's extraordinary efforts to build robots for the specific purpose of fully disassembling its devices so that materials can then be recycled? You should. You might be impressed.