Apple announced today that it will offer genuine parts, diagnostic tools, and repair manuals to independent repair shops. It’s a bold move from a company that has lobbied against Right to Repair bills, and a concession to the reality of iPhone owners’ needs. But we still have questions.
There’s some ‘scorpion and the frog’-ness to Apple’s major concession here, and I’d be incredibly wary of the fine print. On top of that, this seems like a classic case of Apple trying to prevent proper right to repair legislation from gaining even more steam by offering a stripped down version of what said legislation would demand of them, so they can point at this news and claim legislation isn’t needed.
The biggest takeaway is this is only for hardware Apple deems to old for them to fix. Once the actual paperwork appears, no one will be surprised by there being some sort of anti-competitive “you must abandon all other Apple hardware repairs” terms in the contract.
dark2,
Yeah, hopefully it’s for real, but it could be a case of “the devil’s in the details” and more scamming by apple. If a shop has to sign any kind of exclusivity contract barring them from fixing devices or anything like that in order to get parts & info, then it flies in the face of the right to repair movement where we’re entitled to repairs without conditions. People are definitely right to be skeptical given apple’s history of abuses. We have yet to see if this is just a press piece or if apple is making real concessions. I hope for the best, but I don’t put much faith in it at the moment.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, what we need is for legal consumer right to repair protections in the auto industry to be extended to include other consumer technologies.
Louis Rossmann has a great first take on this program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=921&v=3tRq5niOM7Q
Apple’s not completely opening up the market, and right to repair legislation is likely still needed, however Rossmann takes the position that apple’s baby steps are good in any case. He points out that apple already has trouble providing parts to it’s existing authorized service providers, opening up the program to too many providers could cause problems until apple sort’s out the logistics. So I guess there’s some justification in ramping up slowly, but hopefully apple actually doesn’t turn this into a permanent excuse to deny parts.
He had some interesting insider info on what it’s like to be certified with some of the other manufacturers, in particular I found it interesting how some shops are incentivized to meet new product sales quotas over repairing old products.
As a celebrity for the right to repair, Rossmann is probably personally responsible for apple’s change in policy. It is ironic then that Rossmann won’t be attempting to join the apple repair program. He won’t have first hand experience with what this program is like.
The key to remember here is that Apple is only making parts available to people that “qualify” for the program. Apple gets to decide who does, and who does not get the parts.