Unrepairable

I mentionned last year the 36kg repair kit for iPhone that Apple provides, that requires a USD1200 hold on your credit card, that felt ridiculous.

Now, Cory Doctorow has a long thread on Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)¹. He called that repair kit “cement shoes”.

In September last year, iFixit said the iPhone 14 was more repairable than ever², now they say: We Are Retroactively Dropping the iPhone’s Repairability Score:

We need to have a serious chat about iPhone repairability. We judged the phones of yesteryear by how easy they were to take apart—screws, glues, how hard it was to change a battery. But repairs have gotten trickier, by design. Software now limits many basic iPhone repairs.

tl;dr, yes you can physically replace parts, but you can’t make them work together without Apple’s blessing. Apple artificially locks parts, including batteries, so that devices have to be thrown away instead of repaired (Apple doesn’t do repairs), so because that’s a threat to their business. And then Apple tries to greenwash the world about being the greenest company on earth, and how they have “recycling” of devices.

• Require replacing devices because the battery is done.
• Require employees in R&D to commute by car because they hate telecommuting.
• Doesn’t refurbish devices by shredding them for recycling.

That’s just naming a few.

Tech moguls try to tell us that “tech will save the world”. It turns out it is destroying it instead. And that’s not even with the robot-takeover fantasized by science-fiction writers, but rather action directed by greed (profit maximization). Because unrepairable devices aren’t a technical challenge. They do deliberately design that way.