iFixit Says Apple's DIY Repair Program Makes MacBooks 'Seem Less Repairable'

[Danfango]

So it's okay for Apple to do the same thing John Deere does then? Just because my laptop and phone only costs 4 figures instead of six?

It’s not even the same thing. The parts are tied to the device for security and supply chain control reasons.

The people who constantly compare this to the John Deere thing don’t understand hardware and software integrity which is the entire foundation of privacy.

That’s a completely different thing to what John Deere are doing which is protecting their leased vehicles from being damaged by bad quality repairs.

Neither are invalid business cases.

 

[mansplains]

You wouldn't, but someone else might. That's the beauty of having a choice.

"I don't like/do/care about/think x, no else can!"

 

[Spaceboi Scaphandre]

It’s not even the same thing. The parts are tied to the device for security and supply chain control reasons.

The people who constantly compare this to the John Deere thing don’t understand hardware and software integrity which is the entire foundation of privacy.

That’s a completely different thing to what John Deere are doing which is protecting their leased vehicles from being damaged by bad quality repairs.

Neither are invalid business cases.

Hang on I better shift this for you

 

[Danfango]

Hang on I better shift this for you

Not really I’m telling you how your assumptions are completely wrong and that you can’t draw that analogy.

You can’t compare apples to apples or tractors in this case.

The John Deere customers don’t own the tractors. They explicitly asked the manufacturer to lease them an extremely expensive bit of kit for a monthly fee. The insurers demand that it retains a resale value should they stop paying and have to be repossessed and those are the conditions the insurer set to retain the value. No unauthorised repairs. And now they’re bitching about the terms they agree to because they are bound not to devalue the thing they are leasing.

When you buy a MacBook you own it up front. The entire reason is simply the entire security model.

If you don’t like it you can choose another product. There are plenty of choices out there. It’s a free market. You don’t have to buy either Apple or John Deere products.

 

[DblHelix]

Still 162 pages later? Seems too much.

Have you ever put together IKEA furniture?

Yea and I have repaired my laptops in the past, built my own computers, done engine swaps on my cars. I am handy and this guide is no ****ing big deal.

 

[Black Tiger]

Apple is so environmental, until it harms their business. All this to replace a battery, still? I already couldn’t believe it when they had to replace the keyboard and the housing to replace the battery on my mbp in 2012. ridiculous

In what possible way could Apple be considered environmental? We are talking about a company that is the king of forced obsolescence and disposable consumer products. Apple’s Chinese sweatshops pump huge amounts of pollution out every day. Let’s stop pretending that any consumer product company is environmental. This myth is harming real efforts to combat climate change.

 

[TheOneWhoKnocks]

And you’ll get the option to buy just the battery in the future, as the site says and iFixit chooses to ignore.

Louis sums it up pretty well.

 

[jwdsail]

My PowerBook 540c and PowerBook G3 both had hot swappable compartment bays for batteries. It is sad that these days people can only dream about such a great high-tech feature. It is borderline obscene that swapping a battery is considered to be a "repair".

I still have my G3/300.. somewhere... Was such a solid machine.

 

[gund1234]

Surely you are capable of replacing a car battery. The main point is that a phone battery should be mandated that it is easily replaced like a few years back. Likely a laptop battery could be similarly done if Apple was foreced to make it so.

Problem is all the tech websites care so much about water resistance, we have to determine what's more important, water resistance of replaceable battery. Difficult to have both.

 

[gund1234]

"Inner value? I don't understand.
Increase profits at the expense of our customers, that I get"

T. Cook

I am fine as long as some one won't sue Apple for breaking the battery and causing fire during replacement.

 

[gund1234]

This seems to be Apple's new motto - "sure, we'll comply... but on our terms."

It's just like how Apple only added wireless charging when the EU threatened to mandate USB-C on all phones sold in Europe.

My guess is Apple made this repair process intentionally and needlessly complicated, specifically to dissuade customers from going the DIY route. I bet in most cases, Apple is hoping that customers will simply abandon their "broken" device and opt to just replace it with a shiny brand new unit, rather than deal with the hassle of repairing it (DIY or repair center).

this shows that you never worked in manufacturing/assembly line/designing products.
It is all about priorities.

 

[nicolas_s]

Honestly, most DIY repairs are crap, done with cheap, fake parts and most of the time it's done the wrong way. It can't beat a professional repair with trained staff.

It does more harm than good to the entire fleet of devices if you look from a global perspective.

My previous iPhone was used, and I realised that a crappy repair was done on the screen, making it less water resistant, less durable and of course it wasn't mentioned anywhere when I bought it.

You end up with a crappy device you can't sell because it has water in it and will likely die soon, what are you supposed to do with it? How many devices have been thrown away because of a bad DIY repair?

Part of the "premium" brand experience is not to have to worry about this kind of thing when you buy a used product.

It's the same thing for cars. Do you prefer buying a used car that only went in dealerships, or a car that was repaired using DIY tutorials with parts nobody knows where they're from?

 

[gund1234]

A battery in a Mac doesn't have to be designed to be swapped out as easily as one would on a remote. However, gluing a battery down when it could be screwed in place or forcing you to remove several fragile components to get to the battery is not good design.

The underlying issue here is that electronics need to start being built to be more easily repairable. This era we live in where you can buy a replacement every other year and throw your old device in the trash is just not going to last.

And that will come with some limitations, nothing is free when designing a product or working on how to assemble a product. There will be lot of compromises made.
Electronics don't have much space inside them.

 

[jarman92]

Surely you are capable of replacing a car battery. The main point is that a phone battery should be mandated that it is easily replaced like a few years back. Likely a laptop battery could be similarly done if Apple was foreced to make it so.

The iPhone battery is easy to replace, though, particularly if you don’t care about preserving water resistance. It’s like 2 screws and a few adhesive pull tabs. The new MacBook batteries are also pretty easy to replace. But I still wouldn’t recommend that average users attempt to do it.

I think the car battery example is actually pretty apt. Can the average driver do it? Of course. Should they? Depends on their experience and comfort level. Can you cause serious damage if you do it wrong? Absolutely.

 

[gund1234]

My 2011 MBP was a delight to service. Replaced the RAM, battery, storage drive. Easy peasy.

Soldering SSD and RAM or even integrating SSD and RAM would improve performance.
So Apple made the decision to compromise and choose performance over repairability,
I am sure if Apple preferred customers to replace SSD & RAM this same tech websites and youtube influencers would say performance is bad even though we don't need all this performance.
Goal is to create new sensational news everyday to get more clicks.

 

[jarman92]

Honestly, most DIY repairs are crap, done with cheap, fake parts and most of the time it's done the wrong way. It can't beat a professional repair with trained staff.

It does more harm than good to the entire fleet of devices if you look from a global perpective.

My previous iPhone was used, and I realised that a crappy repair was done on the screen, making it less water resistant, less durable and of course it wasn't mentioned anywhere when I bought it.

You end up with a crappy device you can't sell because it has water in it and will likely die soon, what are you supposed to do with it? How many devices have been thrown away because of a bad DIY repair?

Part of the "premium" brand experience is not to have to worry about this kind of thing when you buy a used product.

It's the same thing for cars. Do you prefer buying a used car that only went in dealerships, or a car that was repaired using DIY tutorials with parts nobody knows where they're from?

Good point, and that’s definitely Apple’s reasoning (or part of it) when they require replacement parts to be verified. Maybe the current owner doesn’t care that they’re replacing their beautiful OLED screen with a garbage LCD from Alibaba, but subsequent owners have no way of knowing that.

 

[Mystic-Micro]

While I get all the commotion on this, tbh the logic board repair costs are pretty reasonable and is actually cheaper than the Framework Laptop drop in replacements for Logic boards.

The bigger undiscussed issue is.....

Our laptops will stop receiving updates (security) after 5-7 years anyway. At which point, even if you could replace EVERYTHING, you are still software capped.

Shouldn't the focus be more on software support, especially if the hardware is pretty long lived/reliable to begin with?

 

[femike]

Apple doesn't care about the environment, being green, sustainability or whatever you want to call it. It only cares about its number 1 and 2 customers, institutional shareholders and the execs. Once you understand that you will anticipate their actions. Of course, Apple likes to give good PR and perception that they do care about the environment, they spend alot of money doing that and people fall for it, especially their fans.

 

[ProfessionalFan]

Yea and I have repaired my laptops in the past, built my own computers, done engine swaps on my cars. I am handy and this guide is no ****ing big deal.

That's great but you'd be in the minority here I bet with that skill set.

I am jealous of your handiness. To most people, this does indeed seem like a very difficult task and I'd personally never attempt it.

 

[BillyBurke]

Surely you are capable of replacing a car battery. The main point is that a phone battery should be mandated that it is easily replaced like a few years back. Likely a laptop battery could be similarly done if Apple was foreced to make it so.

You know, some Car Batteries are not easy. The Porsche Macan (my car..) Battery is buried inside the spare tire well.It requires re calibrating to the car as well as simply reconnecting the cables. Yes, I agree. The Computer Battery should be as easy to replace as it is on my 2012 MacBook Air.

 

[DanteHicks79]

Soldering SSD and RAM or even integrating SSD and RAM would improve performance.
So Apple made the decision to compromise and choose performance over repairability,
I am sure if Apple preferred customers to replace SSD & RAM this same tech websites and youtube influencers would say performance is bad even though we don't need all this performance.
Goal is to create new sensational news everyday to get more clicks.

Does soldering and integrating components improve performance? Sure. Anytime you can build an entire SoC, you are guaranteed to increase performance. But you also risk MBP/MBA units with 256GB storage options having noticeable and demonstrable r/w latency issues since they went with one 256 chip, instead of two 128s.

It also greatly restricts customer options. If you think you'll maybe need 64GB of RAM, or 4TB of storage somewhere down the road, you better buy a machine with those options up front, or you'll be hosed in the future (or forced to buy an entirely new computer, which is Apple's ultimate desire).

It's not even remotely a secret that Apple charges ridiculously over-inflated prices for SSDs and RAM - it's a great way to recoup some of the revenue/profit that they lose if customers can go buy components from third-party vendors for less than half the cost Apple charges for.

Especially when most SSD chips are all made by Micron. Apple can provide whatever excuse they want for marking up the cost on components you can buy for fractions of what they charge - it's still pure, unadulterated greed at the end of the day.

 

[collin_]

This whole program is an obvious case of malicious compliance.

 

[StyxMaker]

Designing your battery attachment so that replacement requires replacement of the entire top case is a staggeringly anti-environmental move. What a wasteful, thoughtless move by Apple.

Wasteful it might be, but definitely not thoughtless. I’m quite sure a lot of thought went into the change.

 

[Wanted797]

Apple is so environmental, until it harms their business. All this to replace a battery, still? I already couldn’t believe it when they had to replace the keyboard and the housing to replace the battery on my mbp in 2012. ridiculous

2012?! I have a 2011 I’m pretty sure the battery just lifts out?

 

[Snake111]

Ifixit loves to whine about Apple