Key Points:
- Apple opposed a right-to-repair bill in Oregon, despite previously supporting a weaker one in California.
- The key difference is Oregon’s restriction on “parts pairing,” which locks repairs to Apple or authorized shops.
- Apple argues this protects security and privacy, but critics say it creates a repair monopoly and e-waste.
- Apple claims their system eases repair and maintain data security, while Google doesn’t have such a requirement
- Apple refused suggestions to revise the bill
- Cybersecurity experts argue parts pairing is unnecessary for security and hinders sustainable repair.
No, Apple never supported right to repair.
They “supported” a bill that they immediately circumvented, yeah. They had no interest in protecting right to repair they just wanted the PR. It should surprise no one that they’re opposed to actual bills that force them to alter their business practices.
they just wanted the PR
And it was a resounding success. Apple is an absolute master of gaslighting. Can’t tell you how many people I came across that told me “oh Apple actually supports R2R now!”
People still act like Apple is a privacy-oriented business even after they planned to scan everyone’s iCloud files on behalf of the government to “protect the children”.
no suprise here. it’s apple. they made a $3500 device that has been bricking itself and charging people $100 to fix it because it’s completely proprietary
Obviously people should be able to repair their own devices.
Pumps millions into actively preventing that exact thing
Pumps more millions into a cringe advertising campaign with some mother earth bullshit or so. Yeah sure we love her but let’s force more ewaste down her throat. 😂
Yeah they supported weak protections that they could game. They are lobbying against legislation they can not.
Bingo
It’s crazy that Apple is lauded as having amazing designers and engineers, but they can’t make easily repairable devices. It’s almost like that’s the point…
Ooooh. I have a story for this.
I was a student at Purdue and one of the freshmen “engineering hype” lectures had people from industry come say why they’re so cool, etc. Now, this was specifically an electrical and computer engineering course, not the whole engineering school. These are the people who tore apart their various electronics for fun and made cool stuff using parts from RadioShack (RIP).
Apple came to one. First red flag: she started with “don’t tell anyone we were here”. Weird, but whatever. She proceeded with her spiel and, after however long, got to the Q&A bit. Someone raised their hand and asked this: “why does Apple solder RAM into their devices”. This woman said, and I quote, “It is the position of Apple that the consumer has no right to change the product after it has been sold”. With a straight fucking face. Jaws dropped. There was a solid 10 seconds of silence while all these nerds (I include myself here) processed such a blatant anti-consumer (and anti-us if we’re being honest) statement. This was in 2010 (+/- 1 year).
She finished up and left a few minutes later. No doubt some of my classmates went on to work for them, but it set my passionate hatred for Apple in stone right there. Don’t care how nice their devices are, even if my husband uses his apple devices all the time (the walled garden works well for his needs), I will never purchase an Apple product for myself.
Apple didn’t solder RAM to their devices in 2010 +/- 1 year
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid+2012+RAM+Replacement/10374
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Late+2011+RAM+Replacement/7651
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+mini+Late+2012+RAM+Replacement/11726
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+RAM+Replacement/15623
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+Pro+2009+2010+2011+2012+RAM+Replacement/147697
The exception was the MacBook Air.
Thanks for the fact check!
Guy must have been talking about that then. This was one of my rare clear memories. I had no idea about it at the time till that guy asked.
Can’t vs won’t. I have no doubt that they could do it, but apple didn’t get to be one of the most powerful companies in the world by doing the thing that is cheaper for the user.
Oddly, these hard to repair things in apples case are actually cheaper because of it, and probably in many cases makes them more durable due to less failure points.
The problems only come up if/when something does fail.
Having to replace a whole board instead of just the ram isn’t cheaper, but that board per unit is cheaper.
They have, but they are not in charge. Apple’s goal is to make money; everything else comes as an afterthought.
Apple just wants to sell you more shit. If they’d just admit it, I’d at least respect their honesty. As it is they’re just flip flopping.
Apple just wants to sell you more shit.
Bingo. I just set up a dual monitor and dock setup for my laptop in our home office. It dawned on me that my wife could get some use out of it, so I plugged it in. Come to find out, her MacBook Pro only supports a single external monitor. To do two external monitors, she’d have to upgrade to an entirely different and obviously more expensive MacBook. Dafuq? My almost 15 year old Sony laptop can do that ffs. Fucking boners.
I know there are software hacks I can do to enable the functionality, but that’s asinine for a $1700 laptop. Guaranteed if I dual booted Linux on it the problem would magically disappear.
Apple’s design revolves around devices “always” working. Dual externals probably has the potential to run like shit with heavy cpu loads. So they limit it to one where it’s “promised” to operate well. It’s why peripherals have to meet certain standards and have a license to pair to apple products, they have to work as Apple expects. Apple is afraid people will overextend resources and buy shitty peripherals and then say their apple is a piece of shit. So, their factor of safety is excessive. It helps foster the whole “apple just works” mentality, promoting its clean UI and smooth operation. It’s for common folk, people of the land, you know… Morons.
And things still run like shit anyway, especially when navigating proprietarianism hell
No they aren’t, they want to sell you and me more stuff. It’s the way it’s always been. We’re just the pleebs giving them our money.
That’s the goal, yes, by way of making the gen pop think apple is doing them a favor by providing a worry-free environment
Apple’s design revolves around devices “always” working.
This is what they tell us, yes. It is not what reality reflects
Dual externals probably has the potential to run like shit with heavy cpu loads.
I have a 10 year old laptop that will run 4 monitors simultaneously without breaking a sweat. Absolutely no chance the fuckin’ Apple silicon can’t run 2.
My 2010 Lenovo X series can run dual monitors with no problem. On any OS.
No, apple intentionally handicapped this capability, which is available via USB on my 5 year old laptops.
Nah I fully get where you’re coming from, but locking out users is a cop out. Considering Apple’s M-series chips being “system-on-chips” integrating the CPU, GPU, RAM, and more, I can slightly understand limitations with someone trying to do dual monitor video rendering or 3d modeling overloading the chip and crashing the system on lower end chips. But even then, there could easily be a software mechanism that disallows such use when loads are too high as well as a warning to the user by way of a pop up prompt. Modern monitors using display port via thunderbolt and USB C while claiming the chip can’t handle it is such a silly restriction when 3rd party software can mitigate it. Like I understand to an extent that they’ve made computing easy for the technologically uneducated and illiterate, but given their track record with other business decisions, this seems like more of just another “we like money” scenario instead of protect grandma.
Awesome username btw
You don’t need additional monitors to overload the GPU you can do that with compute code alone, no actual graphics needed much less outputting graphics.
Also it’s not terribly hard to prioritise scheduling such that certain aspects of the system remain responsive no matter how high the load, do that until you kill the resource-hungry process for exceeding hard limits and then display a popup sending the user to the apple store to buy an even stronger machine that’s even more overpriced. There, done. That still wouldn’t be a Mac I’d buy, but it’d be an Apple I’d respect, none of this “things are better when they’re worse” kind of gaslighting. That includes thinness of devices, btw, modern Apple laptops are severely crippled by their atrocious thermals, the beefiest CPU doesn’t do you any good if you can’t dissipate even half of the heat it produces, when you can run all cores at full tilt for a full half a second before it has to throttle to a crawl to not melt itself.
Sidenote: Can OSX maximise windows nowadays? Did they get around to implementing it?
Sidenote: Can OSX maximise windows nowadays? Did they get around to implementing it?
Don’t worry, you can buy a program to accomplish everything they forgot to put in the OS…
Seriously though, the M series hardware is impressive, but it’s not like apple software is actually more reliable. I’m running Ableton Live on an M1 air, and while it performs much better than on windows, it crashes exactly the same if you happen to choose the wrong order of operations. At least on windows you can choose “wait for this program to respond” - on mac you’re going straight to desktop.
Guaranteed if I dual booted Linux on it the problem would magically disappear.
unfortunately not since its a hardware limitation
probably a cruft from the iPhone/iPad era since the first ARM desktop chips from Apple are basically beefed up phone chips which don’t need more than one external monitoranyway it is pretty stupid to ship a laptop with that limitation in this century
While I haven’t tried, there are software circumventions on osx that bypass that limitation, so I can all but guarantee it would likely be a non-issue on any given Linux distro
They haven’t yet supported right to repair for their own devices, so there’s very little flip flopping
Right to repair also has an environmental angle. Consider which one uses more resources and likely produces more pollution:
- The RAM in your laptop dies, you take it to a repair shop, they swap out the dead RAM. Dead RAM goes in the bin, laptop has years of life left in it
- The RAM in your Macbook dies, the RAM is soldered to the board, you throw the whole thing away and buy a new one, and when a single component in the new Macbook dies, lather, rinse, repeat
Considering how much extra e-waste is generated when people can’t repair things, there’s really no way to buy Apple and call yourself an environmentalist.
Oh, you’re a sustainable Apple user? Show me your reflow oven.
Mother earth advertising beg to differ /s
I really hope neither Apple nor any other repair shop simply casts electronic components in the bin. My expectation in both cases is that the components are recycled, at least for precious metals.
I don’t have this optimism 😅
apple’s “support” was basically malicious compliance.
The only way to get new parts involved sending in the damaged ones, which still screws over any third party business because they can’t have spare parts on hand for fast repairs. And the pricing basically meant you were saving like ten bucks in exchange for potentially fucking up and destroying your hardware. As opposed to using the repair program at the apple store.
They hoped you’d forget about all that .
If parts pairing is nessesary, then just publish the tool used for pairing?
-Apple’s official statement.
That’s a security risk that would allow dangerous 3rd party hardware to be paired with perfect Apple products.
/s…if it’s really necessary.
Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose?
“safety, security, safety, security”
No, you mean “money, money for us”.
Of course they want you to use their shops. That way they can charge whatever price they want.
It’s the same reason McDonald’s ice cream machines are always down.
It’s moreso so that they can ensure you can’t repair it at all. They’ll tell you you need to spend way more money than you need to, then conveniently point you to the upgraded model on the show floor.
I’m just absolutely floored that people still spend so much money on this garbage.
That doesn’t make sense when they backed the one in California but only didn’t back this one because it would allow consumers to go outside of their repair system.
Meh, the ice cream machine is a different thing. I haven’t figured out fully how it benefits McD’s, I suspect there’s little profit margin on ice cream, but having the machine at all still brings (hopeful) people in who buy something else. A bait-and-switch.
McD’s uses the same machine as many other places, but they have the temp variance much tighter, so much tighter that after the daily cleaning cycle, it takes hours to get back to temp.
Then (and this is probably what you’re referring to), if the machine has a code, the franchise is required by contract to use the repair service that comes with the machine lease.
There’s an indedependent dev who wrote a code reader/reset tool for the machines, and McD’s isn’t happy about it.
I’m not clear how doing the maintenence this way benefits McD’s, unless they own the servicing company, and it doesn’t appear that they do.
In the end, it means McD’s will often not actually have ice cream available. But these are franchises, so it would hurt the franchise most directly. Seems there’d be a potential legal issue here, if it could be proven.
Meh, the ice cream machine is a different thing.
It’s not.
I haven’t figured out fully how it benefits McD’s
They get kickbacks from Taylor.
McD’s uses the same machine as many other places, but they have the temp variance much tighter, so much tighter that after the daily cleaning cycle, it takes hours to get back to temp.
There’s an indedependent dev who wrote a code reader/reset tool for the machines, and McD’s isn’t happy about it.
Yeah McD’s just told them they’re not allowed to use it.
Fortunately, they are forced to do it in EU.
Will this fix the HP printer problem?
Apple is a hardware company. They get the biggest bang from people buying their hardware. They aren’t going to make this easy cause it quite literally means giving the shareholders less profit, which is illegal in the US.
They aren’t going to make this easy cause it quite literally means giving the shareholders less profit, which is illegal in the US.
Making less profit than previous periods of time or even operating at a loss is not illegal in the US. Many companies have periods where they lose money or sacrifice short term profits for long term growth.
Investors with enough control might boot the leadership out, but they can also do that for whatever reason including unrealistic expectations.
Hell, some of the highest valued tech companies right now have never turned a profit in their entire existence.
Suckling the teat of VC firms and investors works really well until the money dries up. After that, enshittification. Lots and lots of enshittification.
FFS sake, our CEO told the Board, for a couple of years, “We’re gonna lose money to invest in $X, $Y and $Z.” They applauded him. Out loud. Literal clapping.
(We accidently made profits for those years. Oops. But that’s beside the point.)
giving the shareholders less profit, which is illegal in the US
Cite me chapter and verse. Point to the illegality that hurt you.
This idea is a childish notion of how corporations work. And it’s a lie. I’m not saying there’s nuance here, I’m saying it’s a LIE. But bullshit scores internet points!
shareholders less profit, which is illegal in the US.
This is a bit of a misnomer. It is illegal for a company to deliberately lower share value, not to make a business move that ends up lowering share value.
Specifically, it’s the fiduciary duty of the directors to act in the best interests of the shareholders.
In other words, the consumer doesn’t matter, the employees don’t matter beyond what the law mandates, and the quality of the product or service doesn’t matter until it starts impacting profits or stock values. The only time these actually need to be given any consideration is when it would serve to benefit shareholders, such as with hiring skilled talent or before the company has a reputation for quality products.
