Apple’s brand is so strong that anything that happens on an Apple device is perceived as Apple’s merit, but also more often as Apple’s fault.
Apple is aware that its main competitive advantage is also their main Achille’s heel, unless they keep control.
When it comes to software that’s easy, and that’s why they’re so against side loading.
When it comes to hardware that’s much harder.
When someone goes to a random store, gets their screen swapped with a random part and that starts behaving uncontrollably and degrading the experience, who do you think that customer is holding accountable for that? Themselves? The repairer? Nope, it’s Apple. If you want proof, ask any acquaintance who works at an Apple Store about the complaints they get from customers.
Pressured by a growing outrage about repairability, Apple found a smart way out: sure, repair it yourself, these are the parts and tools you should use, if you mess up it’s your problem.
It can still dent Apple’s brand a bit but it’s better than forced regulation for them.
This argument wasn’t in Apple’s defense, but an attempt at showing that Apple’s approach doesn’t come from an ideological dislike of repair per se, but from pure business calculation based on their current status as a brand and user-experience-focused company.
Now, if you want the ideological bit, that’s a different one and more generic and it’s the old Steve Jobs tenet: users don’t know what they want until you show it to them. I personally believe that’s still true, and yes I believe it applies to the right to repair when taken beyond a small bubble of entitled electronics enthusiasts.
Edit: oh no, I dared say something against the right to repair! Hasten! Bring in the downvotes!!!
> who do you think that customer is holding accountable for that? Themselves? The repairer? Nope, it’s Apple.
This is disproven in these very comments by people blaming the repair shop for doing a poor job. People know whether or not they took their phone to the Apple store to get it repaired.
These arguments also seem... odd? From a marketing perspective. "Our customers are much too stupid to know where they had service done, so the only solution is to prohibit them from having it done by anyone independent." (Pay no attention to the effect on our repair margins or that increasing the cost of repairs often causes people to buy a new device instead.)
The comments in this thread come from a very privileged subset of highly tech savvy users, who incidentally believe their higher opinions are somewhat objective when applied to hundreds of millions of Apple users. I think what you say about the comments here “disproving” my arguments is actually proving how skewed the perspective is in here.
Software developers aren't a higher life form where only they can remember where they took their device for service. Plumbers and teachers and nurses are perfectly capable of it even if they don't know how cryptography or RAM works, and it's the tech company attitude that they can't which is extremely patronizing.
The list of what kind of services/repairs the phone had is “erased” once it ends up at its next owner though. At that point you either have “apple shit”, or “fuck that seller, he lied”, none of which is a happy path.
It would be completely reasonable for Apple to detect whether a part is non-Apple and then warn about it on each boot but otherwise cause no impairment of functionality. The second hand buyer would know as soon a they turn on the device.
But also, Apple has a certified refurbished program. The buyer of a second hand device also knows whether they bought it from Apple or not, and so "fuck that seller, he lied" is actually in their interest.
> who do you think that customer is holding accountable for that? Themselves? The repairer? Nope, it’s Apple
Nope, the repair shop absolutely gets the blame, even when the fault is coming from Apple, like the fake software errors which got introduced in the last models in order to blame third-party repair shops.
This argument wasn’t in Apple’s defense, but an attempt at showing that Apple’s approach doesn’t come from an ideological dislike of repair per se, but from pure business calculation based on their current status as a brand and user-experience-focused company.
Now, if you want the ideological bit, that’s a different one and more generic and it’s the old Steve Jobs tenet: users don’t know what they want until you show it to them. I personally believe that’s still true, and yes I believe it applies to the right to repair when taken beyond a small bubble of entitled electronics enthusiasts.
Edit: oh no, I dared say something against the right to repair! Hasten! Bring in the downvotes!!!