| > they would just start selling the damn parts so people could repair their phones. They do. Have you been living under a rock? https://www.selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home And there’s no way for Apples policy to fuel theft when the stolen phone and parts from that phone can’t be used for anything. You might have had a point a few years ago when they neither sold parts nor did the pairing stuff. I think they’re moving in the right direction. But like many here have pointed out they should allow you to unpair parts in a phone you own. There are comments here from people who have been robbed at gunpoint and forced to unlock their phone and disconnect it from iCloud. I think Apple could solve it by making it a 24 hour process that can be reversed. But that just illustrates that it’s actually a hard problem to solve properly. I don’t care at all about 3rd party parts. I’ve been burned too many times. It’s not environmentally friendly if you buy a brand new shitty part that you end up discarding along with the phone a few months later because the part was bad. Just force Apple to sell good quality genuine parts at a low price. The sum of the parts should equal the price of the phone. Yes that will be unprofitable for Apple, but governments can force it through regulation in the name of sustainability If they stop selling parts then they should be forced to disable parts pairing for that model… then relying on 3rd party market as a fallback is an fallback |
Louis Rossmann used to beat Apple on the price of repair specifically by desoldering individual chips and swapping them, which is far cheaper per repair. But it's more expensive to train workers to do this kind of repair, and Apple doesn't like paying for skilled labor in America, so they just make the consumer eat the cost of whole assemblies.
At the same time Apple has also insisted on locking down their supply chains so that you cannot buy factory original components at all. They don't want you to be able to buy the chips that go into their phones, because they're worried you might pull a Strange Parts and cobble together a whole iPhone out of them.
It's oddly convenient how all of these things - the need to stop iPhone chop-shopping, the need to stop product cloning, and the need to have cheap labor costs - all just so happen to result in a really shitty repair experience that makes buying a new one always the best option.