I think some of Apple’s initiatives around the environment and in other areas demonstrate they are willing to give up profit for what I would perceive as good. There are obviously tight bounds around this. Regardless, they operate in a largely capitalistic environment where the default position of any corporation is to extract as much money as the market will allow/bear (within the bounds of law). This shouldn’t surprise us of any corporation in capitalistic markets.
There have been attempts to make modular phones that would be much more repairable (and configurable). Such a system would be great except that it leads to products that are larger, often less reliable due to additional connectors, etc... These projects have generally been unsuccessful. If you want high repairability, I’d recommend investing in these projects to make them successful. I’ve worked on small handheld devices where our customer desired this, until they understood the consequences.
The iPhone packs an incredible amount of technology into a very small space with a large number of components — many of them proprietary. I’m not at all surprised that Apple doesn’t spend much time making sure non-authorized service centers can repair it. This would require additional engineering effort and, perhaps, changes in manufacturing, which would add cost to every device. If Apple decided to give priority to repairability, it would take engineering time to at least contemplate — even if there were not product changes made. They would, also, have to invest more time into determining when they decide to repair a product where it has been repaired by someone else as it would become more common. The majority of Apple’s consumers don’t seem to prioritize this concern.
I don’t suspect Apple did this to reduce repairability as been shown in a few other cases where Apple has restricted parts exchanges. You may think their claims of security or safety not did rise to the level you would think appropriate, but I suspect these were truly the reasons for their decision. They probably put little or no thought into non-authorized repairability. I’ve had quite a number of lithium batteries vent in other devices. I want TouchID (and FaceID) to be secure.
It’s easy to do Monday Morning Quarterbacking — to design after the fact — without knowing all the decisions that went into design and without knowing the factors that were set aside due to time, money, practicality, feasibility, etc.
I do wonder as I posted on the first page whether Apple did this to allow calibration. The calibration parameters would be determined at the factory (iPhone or camera assembly), stored on Apple’s servers, and saved to the phone at manufacture. These could be around color calibration for HDR10/Dolby Vision or as another poster has indicated due to some of the computational photography or coordination of the camera sensors with LIDAR. None of these would suggest a microprocessor in the camera assembly as has been argued by other posters.
I do agree with another poster that you can buy from another manufacturer if you think they do better at meeting your interests for repairability — or start your own company to make such a product. If you get enough traction in the market, you’ll prove out the approach and other manufacturers may follow. You could contact Apple to promote repairability, but it likely does little in these forums. While I concerned about our impact on the environment, I wouldn’t advocate for a law to require companies to support repairability by groups they haven’t trained and authorized. This will very likely increase the cost of the device, perhaps increase its size, and limit innovation for new features or greater security or greater safety.
