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iFixit is Breaking Up With Samsung (theverge.com) 13

iFixit and Samsung are parting ways. Two years after they teamed up on one of the first direct-to-consumer phone repair programs, iFixit CEO and co-founder Kyle Wiens tells The Verge the two companies have failed to renegotiate a contract -- and says Samsung is to blame. From a report: "Samsung does not seem interested in enabling repair at scale," Wiens tells me, even though similar deals are going well with Google, Motorola, and HMD. He believes dropping Samsung shouldn't actually affect iFixit customers all that much. Instead of being Samsung's partner on genuine parts and approved repair manuals, iFixit will simply go it alone, the same way it's always done with Apple's iPhones. While Wiens wouldn't say who technically broke up with whom, he says price is the biggest reason the Samsung deal isn't working: Samsung's parts are priced so high, and its phones remain so difficult to repair, that customers just aren't buying.
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iFixit is Breaking Up With Samsung

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  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Thursday May 23, 2024 @11:45AM (#64493563) Homepage

    Just like they were in every dumb and feature phone before the sealed up iPhone came along. You slid or popped the back cover off and there was the battery, no dismantling required. Apple could easily have done this for the iphone but no doubt to save money on a more complex case and lock people into an upgrade cycle they didn't bother. Cynical doesn't even begin to describe it.

    • Just like they were in every dumb and feature phone before the sealed up iPhone came along.

      Supermodel philosophy: You can never be too thin. Or too addicted to heroin.

  • Samsung Care (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slaker ( 53818 ) on Thursday May 23, 2024 @12:13PM (#64493625)

    Samsung Care in the US is something that can be purchased within a month after retail sale on any new Samsung phone or tablet, or at time of purchase with direct sale from Samsung. In the USA, Samsung's repair partners are (were?) Best Buy and iBreakUFix.

    My S23 was killed by, of all things, getting splashed with salt water by a dolphin, but my Samsung Care policy includes accidental damage because I am NOT trying to fix a device that's glass on all sides in the best of cases.

    What I found out in the aftermath of this was that 1. Almost no Best Buy can actually repair Samsung phones. I visited nine of them before somebody leveled with me to say that the people qualified to do the repairs don't stick around and in any case they don't keep the parts on hand as a matter of policy. You have to find a store that is currently employing a qualified tech AND willing to order the parts for you. This is a very unlikely confluence of circumstances, and Best Buy will basically tell you to go away if you pull out a clearly broken Samsung device.

    ibreakufix locations aren't nearly as easy to come by but they are apparently the only authorized repair provider that will consistently work on Samsung devices. In my case, I just needed someone to verify my phone was completely inoperable in a way that's not worth fixing so I could get trade-in value on a new S24. The closest location to me was about an hour's drive, but I'd spent an entire day driving between Best Buy locations before somebody finally told me the deal with it.

    All of this is intensely frustrating. I used to be able to fix my own goddamned phone. LG phones prior to the G8 could be fully disassembled to discrete parts in under a minute with an eyeglass-sized screwdriver. I just don't want to mess with delaminating the glass off the back of newer devices.

  • by Targon ( 17348 ) on Thursday May 23, 2024 @02:34PM (#64493981)
    You know how that glue makes it difficult to disassemble a Samsung phone, and how easy it is to break the screen if you are incompetent when it comes to taking apart a Samsung phone. That's a given, yep, it's not EASY, but then, many who have the experience to do it without cracking the screen forget that 95 percent of the people trying to repair a Samsung phone WILL break the screen in the process. So, the Samsung solution, don't let people buy a battery without also buying the screen at the same time. That just avoids the people complaining that because they broke the screen while trying to replace the battery, Samsung should now give them, free of charge, a replacement screen.

    That's the reality of it, that most people are incompetent when it comes to doing phone repairs. I don't agree that iFixit should have to go through it, but iFixit should then have had to suck it up every time they break a screen while trying to replace a battery, instead of making Samsung provide screens due to phone repair techs who are incompetent.

    • by higuita ( 129722 )

      first, not everyone is incompetent doing repairs, second, professional repair shop can do that without any problem... so samsung can sell the battery/screen bundle, but MUST also to sell those in different parts for the previously named groups. But they don't do that, they don't really want to support right to repair, they want people to buy new phones, just like apple... samsung and apple are mostly the same, they only want is money and don't care about their customers nor the environment... but they like

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