Apple can say many things, that doesn't make them true. Of course they loose potential money on repairs if they can get customers to buy a new phone instead, that's how consumer electronics make Money.
Is it losing money per unit broken or is Apple actually not making a profit with the latest iphones?
Because if it's the former, then that headline/statement is highly misleading. Of course you'll lose money if you make the phone nearly impossible to repair in the first place.
The alternative to a difficult component repair is paying fifty to ninety percent of the cost of a new phone altogether for Apple to swap it with a refurbished one. It’s easy to see why your argument holds no water in that case.
Not caring at time of purchase doesn’t mean they don’t grumble and curse the brand later on after an experience where the phone breaks and the options are limited to a costly manufacturer repair. I consider myself an iPhone person, my current phone is an iPhone 12 Pro Max so I paid a pretty penny to Apple for it, it’s also insured, but it still doesn’t mean I won’t condemn Apple for making dubious decisions that hurt repair options. Not all that different from getting your car repaired at a mechanic rather than the dealer.
It's not especially shocking that the people doing repairs are the people talking about repairability.
And you're taking it from the perspective of someone buying a new device from Apple who doesn't care about anybody else. Consider the perspective of a low income person who would otherwise buy a refurbished phone which will now be unavailable or more expensive, or the environmental perspective of having to manufacture new phones (future landfill) instead of reusing what already exists. If we care about other people then we should care about the consequences of what Apple is doing here.
I have a simpler explanation. Apple would prefer people buy new phones than repairing old phones because they make more money that way. One way to accomplish that is to make the phone harder/riskier to fix.
That said, I think Apples success is mostly inertia at this point: demand in the secondary market keeps resale prices high which quickens the new device cycle. As long as it costs less to sell the broken one and buy a new one, that will be the path people take when there is an issue.
The problem for Apple is if you sell badly repaired phone, the buyer has no way of knowing it was badly repaired and will blame Apple for any failures.
Sure, but mind you Apple's phones have gotten thicker over the past 5 years (as have their laptops), and that certainly hasn't impacted sales in any meaningful capacity. People don't really care, and I don't buy the arguement that it's impossible for Apple to design things to be more repair-friendly. Simple changes like socketing the battery or limiting OEM component DRM would make all the difference, but Apple actively fights against any changes that would threaten their authority over the iPhone and it's aftermarket profitability. Maybe there is a technical limitation here, but I'm not convinced the world's largest engineering team can't fix it with their 100 billion dollars in liquid R&D funding.
Why would Apple complain? You can repair a phone screen as long as you pay 50% off the price of the original phone. As long as they control the supply of components and are able to price them as they wise, it’s a win win for them. The difference between Apple and any other phone, is that Apple has maybe 15 different models to support that each one has been sold by millions of units, meanwhile there are thousands of different android phone models.
I feel for both sides of this. On one hand, as a consumer, I think it's unfair to force users to either buy a new iPhone or do repairs via Apple (do they even do them all?).
As a business, I understand how non-Apple repairs can damage a brand.
I hate this myth. Apple products are very repairable, I got repaired my iPhone numerous times and I know many people who did the same and there's a shop in every corner who can repair iPhones. In poorer countries, Apple products are passed down/up to generations. A 10 years old iPhone would still be repairable and often would be passed to a non-techie relative.
It's a well established fact that Apple products last long, thats why the second hand market is very strong. An iPhone is almost equivalent to cash.
It's hard and time consuming to build smartphones in the first place. Sometimes you have to do hard and time consuming things.
I don't see that a requirement to continue to honor the warranty after third-party repairs has been made represents any sort of undue burden on Apple, let alone one so terrible that it justifies overturning hard-fought consumer protections and returning to a system where companies are allowed to screw over customers pretty much at will.
Apple always has the choice to err on the side of caution and honor the warranty even when the third-party repair is at fault. That caps the cost to whatever it costs them to provide a replacement device. Which is probably something like $200 if your phone isn't brand new.
If they feel it may be worthwhile, they can try to determine whether a third-party repair is at fault for the problem at hand. But they don't have to.
Do you honestly think Apple does not want you to repair your own device? They would absolutely sh*t kittens to have you buy replacement parts from them!
The problem is that smartphones are super complex devices, able to withstand dust, rain, drops, and more. In order to do that, they have complex internals, which AMONG OTHER THINGS (like heat dissipation and RF I/O) are designed to support mentioned goals.
Current gen iPhones can be dropped onto concrete at arms-length and not suffer from a broken screen or back. Think about that for a moment. Could you build a smartphone that could do that, and have amazing battery life along with desktop performance?
Note that I'm absolutely not affiliated with Apple, or a shareholder.
I feel like some folks downplay the amount of engineering that goes into the iPhone, and to a somewhat lesser extent, ANY mobile device. For many of us, these things live in our pockets and our hands. They are expected to have many hours of screen time, play games, let us read books, etc. They aren't simple devices, especially the current gen iPhones Apple has been pushing out.
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