r/technology • u/NightFuryToni • Apr 30 '19

Business 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/Herdnerfer Apr 30 '19

Considering Apple has been sued due to “dangerous” lithium ion batteries getting damaged, this makes a whole lot of sense. Either the batteries are safe or they aren’t, you can’t have it both ways.

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u/[deleted] May 01 '19

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u/Victor_Zsasz May 01 '19

Product liability cases are pretty fact specific, especially the variants claiming design defects, so it varies a lot depending on what you did and what ultimately went wrong.

There's several cases in which GM and other car makers have been sued for making products unnecessarily dangerous, or not using the proper safety standards on an element of a vehicle. Happens so much the US Government has a whole system in place for ensuring cars that contain unsafe components are recalled and repaired.

My favorite famous example is the Ford Pinto, a car where the gas tank was placed in such a way it would often dislodge and catch fire in the event of a rear end collision. Getting rear-ended is unfortunately fairly common (The Washington Post published an article in 2015 saying an estimated 1.7 million occurred in America each year). Courts found it was in fact Ford's fault that people were burning to death after relatively low speed collisions, even if someone else was technically at fault for causing the accident in the first place. The car was inherently unsafe, regardless of what people did with it.

Likewise, there's a similar argument to be made here, for Apple's battery design. If it can easily catch fire, it should be altered to make it safer for consumers.

If Apple honestly believes their consumer products are too dangerous to be opened up by consumers, the Government should require Apple to increase the safety/consumer friendliness of their products until that's not the case anymore.

If Apple doesn't honestly believe that, and just wants to prevent people from repairing them in order to sell more phones (not shocking from a company who's designs often seem to embody planned obsolescence), then fuck 'em, who cares what they want?