It's not as if Apple didn't do everything they could to not do this. They were forced kicking and screaming by the EU to do this, and now they are trying to take credit for doing it.
Let Apple embrace this forced change. Let them squeeze as much money as they can out of doing the right thing. This is no time to be petty, it's win-win.
It's not the right thing if its prohibitively expensive and inaccessible. The right thing is doing it without the inflated costs and expensive leased equipment. The right thing is not building your product in such a way as to require specialised equipment in the first place.
No specialized equipment? So an iPhone / Mac has to be repairable with a consumer Phillips head screwdriver? Full size? Or is a T6 screw allowed? How about glue?
Who is to make the call about what specialized equipment and level of expense is ok enough by you? If people are buying the phones for the features they offer and the way they're constructed, and they offer a repair path, what do you suggest we do now, to satisfy your criteria?
For starter they could use 0.1mm thicker glue pads so that they won’t break so easy. If anyone tried to change battery on iPhone then knows how easy they are to break then you have to resort to using dental floss or fishing line as an improvised saw to remove the battery.
Seriously there is enough space to make it just 0.1mm thicker
Exactly, they glue is that thick for a reason, they very carefully design everything to be a perfectly integrated device. If everyone got their 0.1mm we are looking at a phone that feels substantially thicker.
Apple know better than random people on hacker news about what makes their phones sell, they don’t make them thinner for no reason.
So, that's one part out of thousands. You're going to write up the 100 page list of all the considerations for how it has to be done, just for the iPhone? And that's going to be enacted into law/regulation?
Why is Apple unable to make sane decisions about their product to make it legitimately repairable? Do we need to result to specific laws for every common sense thing?
I don't think you're arguing from a good place - specific concerns have been called out about pretty specific design flaws from Apple. Instantly upgrading those criticisms to a full generalization about all components in the phone doesn't feel particularly constructive.
Do I think that Apple shouldn't use some proprietary thermal paste to mount their heatsinks? I don't really care and I don't think anyone here does either - but the tools to get general access to the device body are a different matter... they're necessary for a wide range of relatively simple repair operations.
> A product like this would not be popular because it would be thicker, heavier, and have worse specs.
This is not a statement you can just make with no evidence and expect people to take at face value.
At least for laptops this is a myth. The Framework laptop has the same dimensions and weight as a Macbook air (give or take a few tenths of an inch on width/height but same thickness - I believe they kinda did this intentionally to call out Apple) and is fully repairable with individually replaceable parts.
Many (most?) of the decisions that Apple make that make their systems less repairable are not things that meaningfully impact weight or size, it's just an excuse that they've been very successful in seeding in the minds of consumers.
I think it's a tall order to argue that worse performance is a necessary requirement of repairability and height and weight are constantly obsessed over but very few people I've met actually care about it (and a fair number like the Mac interface but would be happy to trade height for keyboard improvements).
Id claim it’s the products bought without clear alternative choices or understanding in the disposability of the designs. When I bought a MacBook Air around 2012, I didn’t expect the battery to be so remarkably difficult to replace as every laptop I had owned prior had removable batteries. Given the choice of a bigger computer with a replaceable battery/ram and probably better cooling, I’d choose that instantly.
That sounds like a picture perfect argument for industry-wide regulation. People don't want thicker phones, but if it must be done, then the market should compete to do it at the lowest overall cost.
Have you looked inside an iPhone? There’s barely any extra space at all for anything. Adding slots for people to take things apart, put in new commodity parts, and then seal the device up so it’s waterproof again are not zero-cost.
Sure, but mind you Apple's phones have gotten thicker over the past 5 years (as have their laptops), and that certainly hasn't impacted sales in any meaningful capacity. People don't really care, and I don't buy the arguement that it's impossible for Apple to design things to be more repair-friendly. Simple changes like socketing the battery or limiting OEM component DRM would make all the difference, but Apple actively fights against any changes that would threaten their authority over the iPhone and it's aftermarket profitability. Maybe there is a technical limitation here, but I'm not convinced the world's largest engineering team can't fix it with their 100 billion dollars in liquid R&D funding.
A 2021 Macbook is barely thinner or lighter than a Frame.work laptop. The difference is negligible. And the latter is made to be super easy to open and self service.
Nonsense. This isn't prohibitively expensive, as anyone who has googled it for 5 seconds knows, so why tell that kind of lie? And it's also obviously very very accessible.
Something that always felt strange upon seeing critiques of Apple's execution of guaranteed self-repair rights is that those critics are complaining about cost, about money.
To whom I say: Bitch, you asked/demanded Right To Repair and y'all finally got Right To Repair. Money shouldn't be a concern, because that was never part of the demands. If you are going to forsake self-repair because it's (relatively) cheaper to get Apple to do it instead, you never truly cared about Right To Repair.
Right To Repair was never about fixing something for cheaper than the OEM, it has always been about having a practical and realistic option to effect repairs yourself. How much it ends up costing you is an unrelated matter.
Similar to Microsoft's volte face supporting Linux after over a decade spent trying to destroy it by bankrolling SCO's lawsuit and peddling their own bogus Linux patent racket.