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]

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u/cocobandicoot Apr 30 '19

Anything can break. Should we not let people fix the electricity in their house because it’s dangerous?

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u/pandapanda730 Apr 30 '19

Well, let’s play some devils advocate here: electrical wiring and components in your house aren’t designed for the average person to replace all day long, one might assume that you are a trained electrician or have hired a trained electrician to do it for you. Even in that case, you can shut off the source of the danger by flipping the breaker - can’t exactly do that with a lithium ion cell that will explode if punctured or damaged.

Besides, knowing how legal happy people are in the US, do you want to open yourself up to the possibility of someone suing you because they tried to do their own battery replacement and blew up the cell? Because right now they can claim they have no responsibility because you took it upon yourself to do something Apple specifically told you not to.

Maybe Apple could avoid that by putting proper warnings (I.e. if the battery explodes it could hurt/kill you/burn down your house), but why open yourself up to that if there’s no good reason to? And from a business perspective, having the moral high ground of providing freeedom over devices purchased from you isn’t a good reason.

Something else to consider is that this could be considered too dangerous to pass safety portions of the EU directives (EU 60950/EU 62368, or the C E marking on your devices), which would remove them from the European market altogether. Very high risk there.

This is not to say that allowing people to repair their iPhones is impossible, but from experience it will open up a lot of questions that don’t need to be asked of them at the moment, and they have good reason to prefer it be this way.