A display probably costs Apple about $100 when they buy it. Now you have to keep it in a warehouse in sufficient quantities and send it to a customer or repair shop when they need it. Add taxes to this and suddenly you are awfully close to that $300.
New devices are just too cheap, because it's much more efficient to build a new device. Labour and logistics are much cheaper when manufacturing millions of the same device.
I believe the cost for repairing electronic devices in the next 5 - 10 years should partially be paid upfront. Making new devices slightly more expensive for everyone and making the repairs considerably cheaper for those who need them.
I recently broke the screen of my fairphone. I went to the official website, ordered a genuine screen for 70$, it came by mail two days later. They sent me an email showing how to do the repair, it took me about 10 minutes to replace it with only a screwdriver. Note: the phone is water resistant.
My point is, repairable phones are totally feasible, if fairphone can deliver this service, why couldn't Apple ? (I know, because of profits). This fairphone may not be as sexy as an iPhone Pro, but it is still a very capable device. With the amount of R&D cash that Apple has, they could make a sexy repairable high end phone, but it is not in their interest.
> I believe the cost for repairing electronic devices in the next 5 - 10 years should partially be paid upfront. Making new devices slightly more expensive for everyone and making the repairs considerably cheaper for those who need them.
absolutely. and apple does this - you just described applecare. and that money prepays (heavily discounts) a couple repairs and maintains the parts supply/availability, and helps maintain a massive network of first-party retail locations to perform those repairs and keep those phones out of landfills. The parts go back and can get recycled or serviced and maybe used again (like the refurb phone cycle).
but y'all ain't ready to talk about that yet.
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apple's repair program is much more extensive than virtually any other phone vendor, can't go buy a OEM google repair tool or a first-party samsung phone screen off the website. And applecare is the "pay upfront to get cheap repairs later" model that does exactly what you are describing, pay the (averaged/amortized) cost to maintain those parts stockpiles and the repair staff networks etc and then basically just pay labor if you have an accident, and if you have any other accident in those 3 years you come out way way ahead.
OEM 16" XDR Liquid Retina screens have an estimated BOM cost of $250, versus applecare at $350. If you have a broken screen that costs you $100 with applecare or $450-750 without. So basically you are prepaying one screen and then if it happens you just pay cost of labor.
But like, as much as people whine, $200 above BOM cost for the screen replacement isn't awful for labor + facilities + parts supply maintenance for an extended lifecycle. And that's why people like rossman complain when apple launched the self-service, apple's parts prices are so good he can't actually compete with the labor costs involved unless he's using non-genuine parts to get the cost down. Apple isn't screwing consumers, they're actually dumping in some situations (battery replacement) and providing things at/below cost. But that's a good thing for repair, it keeps phones out of landfills! and like, are we optimizing for e-waste reduction, or optimizing to keep rossman in business here? what's the goal you're looking to solve for?
Again, y'all ain't ready to talk about that either, but "right to repair" is not the same thing as "right of rossman's business to exist". Apple is not going to sign off on people drilling/repadding/reballing their parts at scale. They have actually accomplished an extremely green overall lifecycle with higher levels of software/parts support, refurbishment+reuse, and repair service accessibility than anyone else on the market, they just do it in ways that people like rossman don't like because rossman doesn't get paid in that model.
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but yeah if you want to equalize the "logistics advantage" of new devices, that's easy, just tax new devices at time of sale. we already do this for TVs to account for the cost of disposal etc. make it a bigger tax to make repairs more financially attractive.
you could theoretically put that money into some subsidy or other but you don't need to, the point is just to remove the financial disadvantage of n=1 repair/logistics and a pure tax accomplishes that.
> apple's repair program is much more extensive than virtually any other phone vendor
The Fairphone? The Framework?
> OEM 16" XDR Liquid Retina screens have an estimated BOM cost of $250, versus applecare at $350. If you have a broken screen that costs you $100 with applecare or $450-750 without. So basically you are prepaying one screen and then if it happens you just pay cost of labor.
Why is the range so variable? If part ($250) + labor ($100) is $350, why is the minimum $450 and how could the maximum possibly be $750? Where does this extra 100-400 dollar cost originate, if it's not only being applied artificially?
> And that's why people like rossman complain when apple launched the self-service
Who is Rossman? Maybe you're right here but the way you invoke this guy and claim his intent without stating his actual complaint makes it feel like you're attacking a strawman. From your post I gather that he wants to be able to use third party parts on the cheap if he would like and that the Apple system somehow impedes that, which seems valid.
To be clear, I am of course against e-waste and very much in favor of having the right to repair my own devices with whatever parts I can make work. If Apple is swinging that way, great, but this post comes off as accusatory for a reason I'm having a hard time discerning. It's still hard to trust Apple on something like this when there is so much obvious money to be made by behaving subversively when it comes to pricing out their repairs.
PS: the other way to equalize the logistics advantage is to simply build the cost of the repair into the device. Require that all devices be sold with a bumper-to-bumper 10-year warranty with zero deductible.
Drop your phone in the water? Free. Smash the screen? Free. People will bring their stuff in and fix it and keep it out of landfills, and vendors themselves will be incentivized to find ways to support their product lifecycle efficiently, because it's their own bottom line (and their own product sales prices).
This is one of those diffuse problems like littering or jaywalking where we've kind of allowed the industry to redefine their problem as being your problem and invert the fault/blame. If straws are constantly ending up in the water it's fundamentally ineffective to hammer down on one random person, compared to regulating the root source, the business causing the problem. Which is of course why "recycling" (and not reuse or reduce of course) is promoted as a solution instead of regulation. Regulation would be effective, make companies pay for the full lifecycle of their product. If 10% of people litter and that costs $X per year to clean it up, that's McDonald's problem.
And yes that would drive up prices quite a bit. But that's the lifecycle of owning the product, and if you want to incentivize repair over new, the price of new is inherently going to have to go up anyway. At least this way you get something out of it.
Maybe instead of unlimited incidents you only cover the 80th percentile of incident rates per lifecycle.
But again, the ironic thing is how much this looks like applecare and yet people utterly hate it.
Oh and a usb connector requires replacing the entire board, for $400. Maybe just buy a new one for $1000 instead?