In a historic about-face, Apple publicly supports right-to-repair bill

Taleya , 10 months ago

Great thanks for your supoort.

You still get zero say in the legislation

southsamurai , 10 months ago

In its letter, Apple lists a few bill provisions that were crucial for the company’s support, including language that clearly states manufacturers only have to offer the public the same parts, tools, and manuals available to authorized repair partners, and the bill’s exclusive focus on newer devices.

They’re planning on finding weasel room in that, somehow

stevehobbes , 10 months ago

Probably not. I’m sure the tools and parts are prohibitively expensive, and they don’t need to weasel out, AppleCare will still make more sense.

nous , 10 months ago

They don’t really offer tools and parts to their partners, which is how they will weasel out of it. Authorised repair centers are basically glorified mail outpost. Anything but minor repairs or whole assembly replacements will not be possible if that is the wording. But they also want to restrict anything that might touch on security, which they will be able to just serialised any part and claim it cannot be repaired because of bogus security concerns.

cantstopthesignal , 10 months ago

iPhone 13 will now require a DRM screwdriver and a DRM ply tool to change the battery or it bricks the phone.

Alto , 10 months ago

EU says otherwise

orclev , 10 months ago

available to authorized repair partners,

Apple has no authorized repair partners. That’s the trick, only Apple provides repair services and I use the term repair very loosely. They should be required to make their own parts, tools, and manuals available to anyone, not just ones they sell to other companies.

thantik , 10 months ago

So they can carve a special exception into the law that negates the entire point of it to begin with. They are a trojan horse.

Dariusmiles2123 , 10 months ago

Good as everyone should be able to try to do some repairs when something is broken.

But programmed obsolescence is even worse as you have perfectly working devices which you can’t use anymore because they are officially not supported (by an os for instance).

TimeSquirrel , 10 months ago

That's kind of different. I mean, how long should a computer or OS maker continue to spend resources to support a device? 20 years? 30? Computing systems and software rapidly changes because that's just the nature of the still evolving and highly innovative field of computing. That hasn't changed since the 70s.

For those things we can't modernize, we have virtual machines and emulators for.

You can still use a hammer from the year 1600 to pound in a nail from 2023 because the hammer itself has not changed in all that time, but a computer from 2023 barely resembles one from 1975. The only thing they have in common is they'll have a CPU and data storage of some kind.