"I Tried Apple’s Self-Repair Program With My iPhone. Disaster Ensued." - Times

[jonny]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/25/techn...phone.html

"For people like me who have little experience repairing electronics, the self-repair setup was so intimidating that I nearly wussed out. It involved first placing a $1,210 hold on my credit card to rent 75 pounds of repair equipment, which arrived at my door in hard plastic cases. The process was then so unforgiving that I destroyed my iPhone screen in a split second with an irreversible error."

[Gareth]

NY Times wrote:
"For people like me who have little experience repairing electronics, the self-repair setup was so intimidating that I nearly wussed out."

There's the problem. Let's keep our expectations realistic...

[Acer]

The right to repair should not be about access to ridiculously specialized tools. It should be about design decisions that don't require ridiculously specialized tools where they can be avoided.

[zachdog]

Acer wrote:
The right to repair should not be about access to ridiculously specialized tools. It should be about design decisions that don't require ridiculously specialized tools where they can be avoided.

THIS.

Apple makes beautiful products.
But the simplicity of the iPhone 4 has been lost.
Repairing those models was a BREEZE.

[Lew Zealand]

zachdog wrote:
[quote=Acer]
The right to repair should not be about access to ridiculously specialized tools. It should be about design decisions that don't require ridiculously specialized tools where they can be avoided.

THIS.

Apple makes beautiful products.
But the simplicity of the iPhone 4 has been lost.
Repairing those models was a BREEZE.
???

Have you replaced the screen in an iPhone 4?

I did one about 3 years ago and you had to entirely disassemble the phone. The screen came out dead last. Not user friendly at all.

[Gareth]

zachdog wrote:
But the simplicity of the iPhone 4 has been lost.
Repairing those models was a BREEZE.

Everything is a trade-off. The iPhone 4 had ZERO waterproofing.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/59751/apple-...-of-ifixit

iFixIt wrote:
Apple Tools: Optional overkill or intentional intimidation?

Shahram: Sam, you’ve been at iFixit for a while. To me all this seems designed to be intimidating. 79 lbs (36 kilos) of tools and a $1200 deposit. Is this really what Apple thinks it takes to replace the screen on an iPhone?

Sam: This is definitely not what you or I would need to do these repairs. This is Apple’s way to get repeatable factory results. You can certainly do the repair without these tools, but this is literally what Apple is using, so if you want to be ultra official, you can. The real win here is the release of those repair manuals.

[zachdog]

Lew Zealand wrote:
[quote=zachdog]
[quote=Acer]
The right to repair should not be about access to ridiculously specialized tools. It should be about design decisions that don't require ridiculously specialized tools where they can be avoided.

THIS.

Apple makes beautiful products.
But the simplicity of the iPhone 4 has been lost.
Repairing those models was a BREEZE.
???

Have you replaced the screen in an iPhone 4?

I did one about 3 years ago and you had to entirely disassemble the phone. The screen came out dead last. Not user friendly at all.
I stand corrected. Yes, it was the back that was easy to remove. And yes, they weren’t waterproof. But they were easily serviced without 75 pounds of specialty tools.

[Gareth]

zachdog wrote:
But they were easily serviced without 75 pounds of specialty tools.

You don't need 75 lbs of tools to service a new iPhone. Apple just wants you to think you do.

[d4]

An extremely miniscule vocal minority of smartphone users care to repair their own phone. I'm going to guess 5% + Journalists/writers/bloggers.

[decay]

I was working on a white plastic Macbook Core 2 Duo (2008) and I remembered how easy it was to replace the internal hard drive, RAM, and battery.