Apple Is Lobbying Against Your Right To Repair iPhones, New York State Records Confirm (vice.com) 235
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Lobbying records in New York state show that Apple, Verizon, and the tech industry's largest trade organizations are opposing a bill that would make it easier for consumers and independent companies to repair your electronics. The bill, called the "Fair Repair Act," would require electronics companies to sell replacement parts and tools to the general public, would prohibit "software locks" that restrict repairs, and in many cases would require companies to make repair guides available to the public. Apple and other tech giants have been suspected of opposing the legislation in many of the 11 states where similar bills have been introduced, but New York's robust lobbying disclosure laws have made information about which companies are hiring lobbyists and what bills they're spending money on public record. According to New York State's Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Apple, Verizon, Toyota, the printer company Lexmark, heavy machinery company Caterpillar, phone insurance company Asurion, and medical device company Medtronic have spent money lobbying against the Fair Repair Act this year. The Consumer Technology Association, which represents thousands of electronics manufacturers, is also lobbying against the bill. The records show that companies and organizations lobbying against right to repair legislation spent $366,634 to retain lobbyists in the state between January and April of this year. Thus far, the Digital Right to Repair Coalition -- which is generally made up of independent repair shops with several employees -- is the only organization publicly lobbying for the legislation. It has spent $5,042 on the effort, according to the records.
My right to not buy iphones (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm exercising my right to not buy iphones.
Re:Well DUH (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop dissing America, it has the best democracy money can buy.
Re:Sounds like a job for crowdfunding! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:futility (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the most disingenuous post I have read on /. for quite a while. And that's saying something.
Exactly what types of broken states of a phone are you requiring a company to publish guides to fix, and make parts available for? Do you even know how many different ways a modern phone can fail? And what level of fix are you requiring they make available, and for what level of user capability? It's going to be pretty much useless if grandpa can't manipulate the microtweezers to fix the parts of the rear-facing camera module, so what then?
The law would require the company to make the exact same guides that they give to their "authorized" repair centers available to the public. And no, grandpa is not going to repair anything himself, but he will have the option to take his malfunctioning gadget to an independent repair shop which will fix it for a fraction of the price, since that's what competition does.
But you already knew that, because it says so very clearly in the text of the proposed legislation, only two clicks away.
Re:futility (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not just about phones. It's also about laptops.
Here's a link to a Dell Latitude manual that explains how to replace parts:
http://downloads.dell.com/manu... [dell.com]
Please provide a similar link for a Macbook repair guide. Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.
Got to sell new equipment somehow (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets hear a story about a client of mine from two weeks ago.
She was using her computer one day. Goes to turn it on - and the hard drive symbol is flashing on the screen.
So she books an appointment with a Genius. Takes her 2010? 2012? IMAC to the Apple store for a hard drive replacement.
Only to be told "I am sorry. They do not make parts for that model anymore". Disappointed and a little suspicious she contacts my company. I advice her that not only did they mislead her - but I am going to make her computer faster than when she bought it by throwing in an SSD. I am sure you know what the results were.
It was very evident then and it is evident now that the reason why they do not want people to repair their products is because they want the customer to have to shell out money for a new device.
If greed is going to be the sole motivator for the majority of these businesses. As consumers we are going to be left in a very awkward position in a few years when the big business has managed to squeeze out all other competitors.
Re: The goold ol' days (Score:4, Insightful)
The deathblow that killed the American TV-manufacturing industry was LCD TVs. LCDs are something profoundly subject to economies of scale... especially in larger sizes, with few/no dead/stuck pixels. The LCD panel accounts for most of the BOM cost. With Asian companies making basically 100% of consumer LCD panels, there's basically no real profit for a company to buy those panels & assemble them into TVs in America. Or Europe. I doubt whether many TVs are even still made in JAPAN (Japan hasn't been a 'cheap labor' country for at least the past 25+ years).
DLP TVs were the dying gasp of the American, European, and Japanese TV industries, because they were so big & heavy, the shipping logistics ALONE made assembly within surface-transportation-range almost a necessity... and even then, "American" TVs were mostly assembled in Mexico by Japanese companies.
Zenith ultimately fucked ITSELF out of business. ~10 years ago, DirecTV wanted to make a "whole house" DVR that rebroadcast recorded content over the customer's existing rg59/rg6 coax using ATSC (so you wouldn't need a box per tv... you'd just tune one tv to channel 2, one to channel 3, and so on, then associate the RF remote for that room with that channel. Everything went well when the prototypes were developed... then Zenith quoted them a jaw-dropping price for the 8vsb modulator's chipset that was so outrageously expensive, the American satellite tv industry just abandoned the whole idea of ATSC modulators in favor of ethernet (or MoCA, or HomePlug, or wifi) networked mini-STBs. Basically, Zenith and what was left of the American TV industry figured they could collectively milk consumers for ATSC-related royalties, and didn't expect DirecTV (and Dish network) to do an end-run around their broadcast-related ATSC patents.
Re:My right to not buy iphones (Score:2, Insightful)
Smartphones are useless pieces of shit. No, wait. They are worse than useless. They are harmful.
- They distance people from each other by taking away reasons to meet in person.
- They are designed to break.
- They are designed to be hard and expensive to fix.
- They cost so much the price alone ties the user to the product because he does not want to just throw it away and buy another.
- They are somebody else's cashiers the user voluntarily carries around just in case he wants to give some more of his cash away by buying immaterial crap. That's right, the users give away part of their paycheck to buy stuff _which_does_not_exist_. They put in their time, part of their lifetime to make the paycheck. In short, they buy nonexistent crap with their life.
People. Stop trying to fill your empty lives by shopping new stuff.
It. Does. Not. Work.
It won't make you happier.
Holy crap is this company ever user hostile. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, a long time ago I used to feel like Apple actually cared about me as a user. They made some neat stuff that was genuinely easy to use, and whenever they came out with new stuff, it was generally worth upgrading to. If not, then you could be sure that your current hardware would continue to work as well as the day you got it until it broke. They didn't go out of their way to make it easy to service stuff, but they didn't make it hard either- anyone with half a brain, a copy of the service source manuals, and a few tools could pretty much fix 99% of the issues their hardware encountered after a reasonably long life of use.
I look at Apple today, and I just have to shake my head.
The iPhones are now being cryptographically paired on an internal component level. This is being done in the name of "security", which is bullshit, it's just great for their bottom line. You can't install any other software on them other than iOS, which again, is being done in the name of "security", but that too is bullshit- they just want to force upgrades down your throat to the point that your device becomes an inoperable mess (like the 4S and iPad 2 running iOS 9).
The iMacs have gone from a 100% modular, user serviceable layout (which was quite a remarkable feat of engineering) to a 100% user unserviceable built-as-cheaply-as-possible-in-China system, complete with all the major components soldered to the system board and non-reusable foam sealant all around the glass panel (which you have to break and replace to open up the system).
The Mac Mini has gone from a 100% user serviceable system that you could literally open up with two thumbs- to a system with half the power and soldered RAM on the main board. You can no longer open up the case without using special tools.
The laptops all have built-in permanent batteries adhered to the entire upper chassis. You need a new battery? You get a whole new upper chassis. The keyboards aren't even designed to be the least bit liquid resistant, and they're manufacturing them so thin now you're pretty much screwed if you ever drop the machine and warp the chassis (which you will, because it's made out of an extremely soft aluminum).
Then there's the Mac Pro, which went from a gorgeous silver tower that screamed "POWER" to... A tiny cylindrical machine that's prone to thermal throttling when loaded down to 100%, and the 2nd GPU is only accessible through an API that never quite worked right (OpenCL) and is now in the process of being depreciated and dropped.
Now I hear of stuff like this, and them insisting on recycling facilities shredding (yes, shredding) used Mac systems... What the fuck happened to this company? I've never seen a corporation so hell-bent on producing user hostile hardware before. I don't know why people continue to buy their stuff.
Re:My right to not buy iphones (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a portable computer and communication device, nothing more. You can buy a decent one for as little as $150 and as much as $800, and typically last for several years if you take reasonably good care of it. If it's causing some existential crisis in your life, that's all on you, not on the smartphone.
The manufacturers are designing irreparable phones (Score:4, Insightful)
IP67/68 water resistance pretty much requires a sealed device, and sealing smartphones pretty much guarantees they are irreparable. Sealing with adhesives, thermal or other, denies the average consumer a means to disassemble the phone just to change the battery.
And we will accept water resistance because the phones are so expensive we don't want a brief moment of strawberry daiquiri exposure to cost us even the deductible.
And while battery life isn't on everyone's mind when they buy a new hot phone, it's a fairly common problem to see battery capacity diminish after 2 years. That is, for most of us, at least 800 charge cycles. Nothing is on the horizon that will do better. So we are mostly on a 2 year life cycle for most smartphones, especially the hot fast cool ones. 30 bucks a month in the US.
By design. For a long time to come. And more not less.
To be able to repair current design phones will require compromises, either design compromises or feature compromises. Water resistance the first.
When I laundered my M7 I was really, really peeved. Mostly because I could not disassemble it sufficiently to dewater it. Well, actually mostly because I even sent it through half a dry cycle... But I could, then, replace the display on my wife's iPhone 6s. The M7, impenetrable. And now my Android choices are limited, if I want to skip a generation of CPU and step up to the most current chipset. Which of the options I have are fixable? Oh, and support my carrier's better radio bands, WiFi hotspot, WiFi calling, oh that gets difficult.
We are being designed into losing the ability to fix stuff that could be fixed otherwise. I've been a two-way radio technician, calculator and tape recorder repairperson, typewriter repairperson, then PCs, but I can't see how to repair most smartphones for a living. The tools. The techniques. Impenetrable.
Re:Holy crap is this company ever user hostile. (Score:4, Insightful)
Further, it can't be too easy to pair a different scanner because then the attacker could just do that.
So only allow pairing a new scanner when the device is unlocked. Install a new scanner? PIN/password unlock, enter the service menu (which shouldn't be accessible on a locked device in the first place) and select "Pair Fingerprint Scanner".
If the reason for not allowing it is so that someone can't use an altered or imposter scanner to unlock the device, requiring the user to be able to unlock the device first is sufficient security, as it proves that... well... the user can unlock the device. Preventing a user who can unlock the device already from pairing a new scanner doesn't prevent that user from unlocking the device... because... that... user... can... already... unlock... the... device...