This is why I support Apple's "serialization" of parts. I think the right to repair bills should prevent Apple from nerfing functionality if a new part is swapped in, but it's great being able to go to the settings screen and see the details of each repair.
Currently, I think it will only tell you if Apple did the repair or not, but it would be great to have a list of all parts that have been replaced, if the part is genuine, and if the part was swapped in by Apple and/or an authorized repair centre.
I want full disclosure of whats happened to a phone when buying used, but I don't want Apple to be able to make parts not work. If I want to buy a franken-phone full of knock off or mix and match parts I should be able to, but I should be able to clearly see that in the settings screens.
> Its a phone for christ sake, they only last a few years, where have you seen this issue even come up
On this point I don't agree. My iPhone is about to be 5 years old, it's fully functioning and I'm about to pass it to my daughter. The only repair I did was changing the battery at an Apple Store, which cost around 100$ and took a couple of hours.
For me this is a decent service and a decent device lifetime (provided it will stay in my kid's hands for a few years more).
In the past I had to deal with non original repairs (in specific batteries for HP laptop) and my experience was truly truly bad. True, it was 15 years ago, so battery technology might have changed.
I don't really care for self repairing. I understand that there are people that care for that and I respect that; for them Apple probably is not the right brand. For me, personally, a phone or a laptop must work as expected, have a decade of lifetime, and might require servicing a couple of time during its lifetime max, for a reasonable price.
Self repair is a tiny part of the market. But if I can’t self repair because I can’t get hold of parts, then you probably can’t find an independent repair shop to fix something because they can’t get parts either. That is their goal.
> Apple is probably not the right brand
How do you imagine that other brands are not doing the exact same thing? If Apple is allowed to do it, everyone will do it. Not just on phones, on cars, on dishwashers, everything.
My point is that if there is a market for devices that can be easily repaired, then there will be devices that can be easily repaired. If there is no such a market, then there will be no such devices.
If the second case is true, we can clearly mandate this by law, but then we must explain the reasons behind it, and we must also search for alternative ways of enforcing such reasons.
IMO the modern devices are way too complex to service on your own for most of the people. And those who might be able to technically do that often times are not interested into actually doing it. Also, the tradeoff that such a serviceability would imply might be not interesting (e.g. bulkier device, more complex waterproofing, less sturdy chassis, ...).
Again, it's my personal opinion, based on personal experience, but since we do have alternatives (e.g. the fair phone) and since these devices are not that widespread, I'm afraid my opinion is more common that you'd think.
Security isn't a binary. Banks are secure. Prisons are secure. In software and hardware the thing being secured against is increasingly the "owner" of the device, for the benefit of rentiers.
I might agree, but my experience with this brand in particular is that I buy much less devices, and I pay them more. All in all I think that the money I spend is similar, but the quantity of devices is lower.
Again, this is MY experience, in MY context, with MY use case. I believe that my use case is pretty common, but I might be wrong, of course.
> Its a phone for christ sake, they only last a few years
ah yes, "right to repair" was going so well, up until it led to a place you didn't like and then "it's a phone for chrissake, throw it away and buy another every 2 years".
what happened to e-waste concern, weren't you saving the planet?
like if your goals can only survive if you utterly steamroll everyone else's concerns and cross-purposes/goals that's probably not a goal that's accomplishable in a multilateral society, or at least your attitude towards those goals is unhealthy.
people want to know that a used phone isn't going to be full of shitty parts that diminish the experience, and we are trying to bias towards longer device lifecycles and more re-use. driving down cost to the absolute dropshipped-firehazard minimum isn't the only singular goal that people might have.
in fact sometimes these goals are inherently contradictory, like parts quality vs cost! cost encourages repair, but bad parts are also e-waste and every repair increases the likelihood of a total failure (damaged board, damaged back, etc). Shipping 27 batteries from amazon or china so you can replace them every 2 months is carbon-intensive and resource-intensive, on top of all the social issues it causes (like people who get upset and sue apple for "breaking their phone" when their knockoff part uses a legacy driver from an older phone that was removed from a certain iOS release).
in this situation, diminished trust in used products probably also has a negative effect on device lifespan and e-waste, and you've explicitly codified this with the "it's a phone, throw it away every 2 years" standard. That's not very eco-minded. You absolutely should care about parts, because parts keep those devices running and out of landfills.
If anything we should be pushing harder to force vendors to provide verifiable first-party supply chains with defined, long-duration lifecycles. Why can apple keep a battery or a display or a camera in stock for 10 years but google or samsung can't?
> Parts avaliability bites all the time... You are not if there are no repair parts avaliable
well, apple has better parts availability and supply lifetimes than any other brand on the market, so sleep easy. You are getting 8+ years more parts availability than most android vendors. That's great for the planet.
> As they should, it is my phone after all. Imagine your car manufacturer shows up in your garage at night and removes something because it's "legacy"
your car manufacturer is under no legal or moral obligation to support your modifications to the car.
practical example: if you replace the head unit (which ties into the rest of the control electronics nowadays) with a third-party model, and the car manufacturer does an OTA software update which changes the way the car interacts with the head unit, and it breaks the third-party integration: wow, sucks to be you.
they don't have to keep supporting legacy cruft forever just so that a third-party modification doesn't break, just like anything in the software world. if it's not advertised as being a publicly-exposed interface then it's subject to breakage at any time. Carplay is a supported interface, swapping in a new head unit and a CAN interface to try and mimic the OEM head unit's CANbus traffic is not.
if you use sun.misc.unsafe, you're gonna have a bad time, period. That's on you. Tinker all you want but don't cry and sue when the unstable ABI is changed. Linux kernel explicitly formalizes this philosophy. You're approved (in-tree), or you're subject to breakage and we don't care about the consequences, you brought it on yourself.
again, you can say that's software and it's different because we need to keep phones out of landfills, but apple is providing long-life availability guarantees of OEM parts at OEM rates for 3-4x the total lifecycle of their competitors' products.
If apple advertises somewhere that you can use older phone screens then fine, sue, but otherwise they’re under absolutely no obligation to support them when misused on other models. The fact that it worked for a while is irrelevant - you touched com.sun.unsafe.
Currently, I think it will only tell you if Apple did the repair or not, but it would be great to have a list of all parts that have been replaced, if the part is genuine, and if the part was swapped in by Apple and/or an authorized repair centre.
I want full disclosure of whats happened to a phone when buying used, but I don't want Apple to be able to make parts not work. If I want to buy a franken-phone full of knock off or mix and match parts I should be able to, but I should be able to clearly see that in the settings screens.