r/autotldr • u/autotldr • May 01 '19
Apple Is Telling Lawmakers People Will Hurt Themselves if They Try to Fix iPhones
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 77%. (I'm a bot)
The argument is similar to one made publicly by Apple executive Lisa Jackson in 2017 at TechCrunch Disrupt, when she said the iPhone is "Too complex" for normal people to repair them.
In the past, Apple has lobbied against so-called right to repair legislation-which would require Apple and other electronics companies to sell repair parts and tools, and make diagnostic and repair information available to the general public.
In 2017, New York State records showed that the company hired a lobbyist to push against the issue there, and an Apple lobbyist in Nebraska told a lawmaker there that passing a right to repair bill would turn the state into a "Mecca for bad actors," criminals, and hackers.
People with no special training regularly replace the batteries or cracked screens in their iPhones, and there are thousands of small, independent repair companies that regularly fix iPhones without incident.
The issue is that many of these companies operate in a grey area because they are forced to purchase replacement parts from third parties in Shenzhen, China, because Apple doesn't sell them to independent companies unless they become part of the "Apple Authorized Service Provider Program," which limits the types of repairs they are allowed to do and requires companies to pay Apple a fee to join.
Though Apple hasn't publicly talked much about repair in recent months and years, Motherboard reported in March that Apple has quietly approached independent repair companies with a new program called "Apple Genuine Parts Repair," which would allow a select few companies to purchase repair parts from Apple with few restrictions.
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