“It feels like the Berlin Wall of tech repair monopolies is starting to crumble, brick by brick.”
Feeling like that just screams how corrupt our government is. Apple shouldn’t get a vote, and their approval is the last thing that should be required to approve this.
Corporations should have to work in whatever environment consumer protection laws let them have, instead of dictating what protections we get.
The only “Apple” that I will believe when it comes to supporting right to repair is Steve Wozniak.
Apple just wants to get in on the ground floor so they can shape the legislation to benefit themselves. There’s no way in hell a company as blatantly anti-repair as apple has suddenly decided to shift it’s priorities when it makes them absolute bank.
They don’t have to pay people to repair their phones if they let people go somewhere else to get their phones repaired.
They make far more money on margins for their tightly controlled parts doing the repairs themselves in house than letting independant repair shops do it for them. There’s a very clear reason why companies like apple/john deere are so anti right to repair. They make shitloads off of being the place to go to “repair” your device at an insane markup(to discourage repair in the first place.) And if you don’t like it, you can just buy a new one of their products. So they win either way.
Letting independant repair shops replace a chip for a couple bucks in parts andmaybe $50-$100 in labor absolutely eats into their margins and they see none of that money. It’s a big reason why they control their supply chain so tightly and do stupid things like serializing parts and programming/pairing parts together. So other shops can’t do the repairs they themselves can do.
When imposter is sus.
I haven’t gotten a chance to look at it yet, but Lewis Rossmann’s comments are usually very helpful for things like this. I don’t know what apple is playing at.
“Backs” it… yeah nah
Part is the same price as just sending it to apple.