Usually cheap after market replacement parts in phones really act according to their price. I haven't seen a quality replacement part for these prices. Nothing close to the original anyway. As anecdata, every case I know where an iPhone screen was replaced with a cheap AM part it ended up being replaced again later with an official one. I'm not talking about Apple induced issues but problems with colors, banding, viewing angles, glare, touch response, thickness, etc. These are random articles I found while looking for pictures that highlight these issues [0] [1]. I'm sure this can very well extend to batteries or cameras.
This may be acceptable for a phone (even in the $1000 range) but in a car it poses a genuine safety risk. Also it undermines the premise of the original expenditure with the car. If you invest $50.000 in a car you may have an incentive to not use a low quality battery pack for example.
These changes are more about protecting the average user from shady repair shops that use fake parts. There are some particularly egregious examples such as cheap LCD replacements for OLED iPhone displays. Someone getting their iPhone fixed or buying one from the secondary market would likely be quite unhappy to end up with such a display on their expensive phone.
It would be nice if Apple made genuine replacement parts more generally available, but that's kind of an orthogonal issue - a shady repair shop might still go with the aftermarket LCD for $40 rather than the genuine replacement for $100.
FWIW, I upgraded a 5+ year old MacBook Air to the new MacBook Pro basically because I wanted to. I think the screen was the main driver, but really there was nothing wrong with that Air; as evidenced by the fact that a good friend is now using it as her primary computer.
Planned obsolence is another meme that needs to die.
Regarding the cost of screens for a phone, what, you wish they were lower? Me too! But they aren’t, if you want an original Apple screen. They cost a bunch to source ($110) [0], they cost a bunch for Apple to train up techs, and to have the systems and procedures and checklists such that every time you get an Apple replacement, it’s like new.
Would everyone who dropped their phone wish for a $20 replacement? Of course. Tough luck.
I’m not suggesting that non-Apple repair is different, but you have to admit that a knock-off 3rd party screen is probably not going to be as reliable. And who wears the pain and anger when that screen doesn’t work? Apple.
You can’t fault them for wanting to control this stuff. If it was my company, I would.
I'm aware. It doesn't really matter if the final repair service is cheaper than buying the part and doing it yourself and leaves a better, like new result rather than a repair job done by an amateur.
> and it's only screens, not any of the other many parts that often fail.
They repair any part of the phone that fails, screens were just the first example I found are trawling for a few seconds with google. Apple does cheap battery replacements and will swap motherboards too.
TL;DR His is skeptical. For example he needs to replace just the keyboard (not the whole topcase) to make the repair economical. He needs to replace LCD panel only instead of the whole screen assembly. It may be still beneficial to be able to buy genuine Apple parts but there is high probability that those parts would just be too expensive. And let's see if Apple will at least release tools and instructions to program those recently-introduced chips and make it possible to re-use a genuine screen from another iPhone without disabling faceID or having to desolder and re-solder that tiny BGA chip...
Out of curiosity, was having an Apple service place repair it out of the question?
iPhone screens on the aftermarket are a crapshoot, even "refurbished" OEM screens can end up with non-OEM parts that aren't functional equivalents
And Apple stores aren't the only place with the correct tools for the jobs, lots of smaller shops have done the Apple certification thing.
I agree there are some repairs that are unreasonably expensive or difficult (ironically the back glass for example), but the screen and battery are both covered by pretty reasonable repair costs
Because it's prohibitively expensive vs the cost of a new device due to the policies being discussed in this thread.
There was a time I could get a screen replaced in a phone for $40-50. Today, Apple literally bricks the device for swapping out a broken button, even if the part is an authentic Apple component. The trend has been getting progressively worse, and while this thread is mostly about Apple it affects far more industries (Farming being a big example).
> And how much could that really be increased if Apple were forced to make their parts accessible and available in the aftermarket?
I'd reckon a pretty high % of people with cracked screens would happily get them repaired if it were not either ludicrously expensive to do so, or if they felt that they could get it done by 'professionals' instead at some random corner store. These shops can't source parts and schematics "legitimately" and the whole process feels very grey market which drives people away.
On an iPhone 5S I have replaced both a cracked screen and an old battery.
The replacement battery was ~$7 USD including shipping, while the replacement screen (all-in-one digitizer/glass/screen assembly) was ~$15.50 USD including shipping.
The special screwdrivers/suction cups/spudgers/etc required to perform the procedure were included with the parts.
The swap process was relatively straightforward & lots of high quality photos/videos detail the entire procedure. Numerous guides are freely posted all over the internet.
Getting parts for a cheap Android device, however, proved more expensive than the cost of replacing the device (ignoring labor costs). The market is so fragmented it seems harder for an efficient parts supply chain to develop organically, let alone the knowledge/repair guides to effectively use those parts.
Every single case of third-party screen replacement for iPhones I've personally ever heard of has resulted in disaster down the road for the person who got their screen replaced. And that was before the edge-to-edge iPhone X screen.
Apple uses highly specialized and expensive equipment for screen replacements (at least for the iPhone X screen). Even if third-party shops had the ability to buy the same equipment, I don't think they'd want to pay for it.
Given that iPhones with OEM displays are apparently still working fine...isn't it pretty obvious that the third-party parts are the source of the malfunction?
Several years back, before Apple clamped down on this kind of commercial behavior, I made the mistake of taking my iPhone to a third-party repair firm for a screen replacement. They claimed to be “Apple-authorized,” but it’s unclear for what. The knockoff part they used to replace the screen was palpably awful-dim, purple-tinted, discolored around the edges, somehow flickering like a CRT, and a millimeter or two thicker than the real deal so that it stuck out from the body of the phone.
The guy said “it’s fine, it looks great, it’s working perfectly, there’s no problem with it.” Basically “a screen is a screen.” I suppose in some situations and some parts of the market that may be true, and I’m glad that part of the market is adequately served by commodity Android manufacturers. But part of the small premium I pay to Apple for my low-end model iPhone, I pay specifically to avoid having to look my repairman in the eye and attempt to divine his judgment and trustworthiness before he makes off with my money. Consistency and trust in the repair ecosystem is a feature, to me.
There’s a balance to be struck, sure, but I’d hate to think of somebody doing the equivalent “what, it’s fine!” type of repair to a safety- or life-critical device and claiming it’s just as good as new. Even if somebody were to track such repairers down and prosecute them after their repairs injure somebody, we’d be moving from a high-trust to a low-trust kind of environment in exactly the areas where I least want to have to worry about trust.
Anyway, as to phones, I’ve since been very happy to pay Apple the $4/month to cover quality, authentic repairs should I damage my device—and I take them up on that coverage fairly often. $48/year plus the $29 deductible per incident works out even cheaper for me than that unacceptably poor third-party repair cost me years ago.
Apple has explicitly made replacement parts non-user-servicable at this point. It's called "serialization" and prevents even OEM parts (like a screen from a different iPhone) from being recognized by the phone. [1] This is the type of consumer un-friendly behavior that R2R seeks to defend against.
I recently switched to iPhone from samsung because I was tired of samsung ads and only 2 years of OS updates.
However, Apple really rubs me the wrong way when it comes RTR. Recently, I tried replacing my wifes scratched screen on her iphone. I purchased an OEM refurbished screen. I was able to replace the screen and then was greeted with a message saying, the screen is not original. I would prefer to buy an original screen and replace myself but I cannot. It isn't rocket science, but manufacturers make it seem like it is extremely difficult.
Also, I would never purchase a Tesla. Obtaining parts is extremely difficult or impossible. They blacklist cars from supercharging network etc.
If you want to rebuild a crashed Tesla, you are better off getting a 2nd car for parts.
Every single product should come with a manual with all the part numbers, and manufacturers should be forced to have those parts or produce them for a certain period of time. However, this isn't as profitable as selling something new every few years and servicing it through a manufacturers repair center.
If no action is taken against Tesla and Apple, other companies will follow as they are leaving money on the table.
Or maybe the only way independent companies can undercut Apple is to use sub-standard replacement parts, such as screen glass which isn’t toughened. This is actually very common. And it means that people who are prone to breaking their screen get replacement after replacement after replacement — ultimately costing them more.
This exact scenario has happened to two close friends and I’ve heard of it occurring with other people. Replacement screens break easily and the cost of the first and second repairs is more than one repair by Apple.
hardware people are crafty, they find ways to transfer and combine working parts. The glass replacement and keeping the original LCD I got for the 6S is not a procedure provided by apple. Guess who doesn’t care? The repair shop that bought a machine from China for separating and re-assembly of the Glass and LCD.
Screen replacement is 50$, glass replacement is 30$.
iPhone 13 is very new, give it a few years and the hardware people will leverage the desire of not spending 1000$ on a new phone when the current one works fine except for that broken part.
It's a bit of FUD. Sure it's fucky for Apple to make glass back for no functional purpose, but breaking glass doesn't render phone useless. Mine got replaced in a dodgy shop for $130 NZD (I guess they would be able to do same in US for $50 or $20 in SE Asia). They just unglued everything and stuck new aftermarket glass.
Reality for smartphone fixes is 90% of cases they gonna replace screen, remaining - battery. Both jobs take something like 10 minutes.
> It's $79 for us to fix an iPhone 5/5C/5S screen right now
Interesting, since I have a 5s with a broken screen glass that I haven't bothered getting fixed yet. :)
It used to be quite a bit more, I think? Have you figured out how to separate the glass (etc) from the actual display, or have replacement display+glass packages just gotten cheaper?
(If you are replacing the display - is there any significant performance difference between the stock display and the replacement display?)
Also, considering probably the vast majority of servicing of iPhones happens at an Apple genius bar
That may not be the case for display replacements. From what I've seen, the Geniuses won't attempt to replace a screen if the phone's chassis is even slightly deformed. But the local fixit shops will.
The question then becomes, "How random is the subset of people who get thrown out of the Genius Bar for screwing up their phone really badly?" The wealthiest of those will just buy a new phone, so that's one potential source of bias, I suppose.
This would be a non-issue if you could just buy the replacement screen (or any other part) from Apple or their manufacturers directly, no? Sure, it's nice if the phone can tell you that a part is non-genuine in case you got scammed, but the fact that this is even a problem is because Apple refuses to sell parts and makes repair even using genuine parts as difficult as possible. They created a problem, then "solved" it in a way that just so happens to force users to spend even more money at the fruit store. What a convenient coincidence...
Right to repair is a real issue that needs to be dealt with but if we consider some other points, when you do an unofficial screen or battery replacement, where does that screen actually come from? I'm not aware of any companies manufacturing brand new iphone displays. So my only thought is they must be mostly from stolen phones and for batteries, also stolen and second hand batteries.
When I have done my own battery replacements on android phones I have found that half the time the battery I got off ebay is already stuffed probably because it was in someones phone for 2 years already.
We need to consider how much use letting users replace their own screens is compared to how much use having users not get their phone stolen is. Perhaps there could be a system where the part ids are tied to an apple id and the original id has to authorize a transfer but then all the displays on ebay would still not work because they are stolen.
Usually cheap after market replacement parts in phones really act according to their price. I haven't seen a quality replacement part for these prices. Nothing close to the original anyway. As anecdata, every case I know where an iPhone screen was replaced with a cheap AM part it ended up being replaced again later with an official one. I'm not talking about Apple induced issues but problems with colors, banding, viewing angles, glare, touch response, thickness, etc. These are random articles I found while looking for pictures that highlight these issues [0] [1]. I'm sure this can very well extend to batteries or cameras.
This may be acceptable for a phone (even in the $1000 range) but in a car it poses a genuine safety risk. Also it undermines the premise of the original expenditure with the car. If you invest $50.000 in a car you may have an incentive to not use a low quality battery pack for example.
[0] https://discdepotstandrews.co.uk/copy-iphone-screens-vs-orig...
[1] https://www.hotshot.repair/mo/columbia/office-banter/lets-ta...
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