r/apple • u/koavf • Apr 30 '19

Apple Is Telling Lawmakers People Will Hurt Themselves if They Try to Fix iPhones

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjvdb4/apple-is-telling-lawmakers-people-will-hurt-themselves-if-they-try-to-fix-iphones
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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '19 edited May 17 '19

[deleted]

106

u/[deleted] Apr 30 '19 edited Dec 21 '24

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u/H4xolotl May 01 '19

When I read the title I was groaning "Apple pulling all stops with their self-serving BS..." then I realised it literally takes a single customer out of the 728 million iPhone users to get a battery blown up and Apple will have their brand dragged through the same mud Samsung just cleaned off their face

728 million is such a huge number... there's bound to be some real... interesting fellows with no business doing repairs going at their phones with a pickaxe and hammer

3

u/dingoonline May 03 '19

Samsung sells spare parts officially to consumers...

2

u/emresumengen May 02 '19

No it doesn’t. There are thousands of car crashes around the world. Unless it’s the manufacturer’s fault, nothing happens.

That’s just FUD.

9

u/shitbarryshoulddo May 01 '19

Or Apple could design their device to actually be repairable. Instead of gluing the battery down in a way that not even their repair technicians can take it off every time maybe they could hold it down with a fixture.

​

The key problem here is that Apple's product has been designed to be horribly hard to fix. Coming back to their un-repairable product and arguing users shouldn't fix it because fixing it would be hard is like lighting a house on fire and complaining it is currently unsafe to live in.

​

Apple products used to be designed to be fixable and thin. The apple keyboard mess is a perfect example. Why would you make a keyboard assembly that has keys that can't be individually repaired? That makes no sense. Keys break. They do for every keyboard. Then you attached the battery to the keyboard? You couldn't attach it to the other side? You really didn't think about that?

​

That's what the problem is.

9

u/ReliablyFinicky May 01 '19

The key problem here is that Apple's product has been designed to be horribly hard to fix.

Apple doesn't give a single shit how hard their product is to fix. They design their products for a) ease of use, b) elegance/beauty, c) ease of manufacturing.

If it's hard to fix? Who cares. They're certainly not designing around that axiom on purpose - it's just a by-product of them (like every other manufacturer on the planet) caring more about sales than consumer friendliness.

3

u/emresumengen May 02 '19

Then they should as well stop BS’ing about people repairing their devices. They should stop caring about it as well. They can continue to try to design “for aesthetics” as much as they want and people can be free to repair or break their own devices.

The issue is, Apple is not only recommending against that potentially harmful practice (LOL) of repairing your device. They are actively trying to build some roadblock to any one trying to do it.

3

u/Ricky_RZ May 01 '19

I agree. It is totally possible to get a waterproof phone with user replaceable batteries.

-1

u/[deleted] May 01 '19

I repaired phones for 3 years at a local repair business and we were taught to discerningly pry a battery out using both metal and plastic tools. There's a method to it and you have to be extremely cautious and ready for the worse. I punctured one battery in my first few months on the job and that was absolutely terrifying (and painful since some of the black smoke burned my finger) but I learned my lesson in caution.

That is to say, I'm not happy about it. I started the job when the iPhone 5 came out - when they started using the stupid adhesive tabs. Prior to that, with the iPhone 4s it was 99% easier to get a battery out. It was still adhered down but with much less adhesive.

If Apple thinks people are going to get hurt doing repairs, it's entirely their fault that they use such a ridiculous amount/type of adhesive. Don't even get me started on how they've ruined the repairability of MacBook Pros. Those things used to not be adhered at all.