This is a terrific story, well told by Jason Koebler and the Motherboard team. From the video description:
Every year there’s a race to become the first to tear down the phone, with teams from around the world flying to Australia—where it’s first released—to compete to be the first to look inside the world’s most coveted new phone.
This video is riveting, well worth your time. If this sort of thing interests you, you might check out this Twitter thread, where Jason tells the story about dropping his MacBook, cracking the screen, and encountering iFixit for the first time.
Fantastic video. Wow, very well produced and a fantastic commentary on the fact that Apple’s products are design marvels.
I find the mentality that everything should be able to be fixed by the user to be a little foolhardy. There are certainly a lot of benefits to being able to repair instead of replace items, but there are also downsides.
There are design cases where something can be made x percent more reliable but also harder for users to repair. That’s a real tradeoff and it isn’t the case that favoring user repair (or even repair in general) over reliability is a good decision. There are also features like water proofing that are great for users, but significantly hinder repairability.
Additionally, companies who want to offer strong service and support have a hard time if users can get into the devices, possibly causing a lot more damage, and then come in expecting the company to fix everything for them. These are extremely complex devices and users will tend to be overly ambitious in their assessment of their own repair ability. Bricking your own devices while trying to repair it is a far worse outcome for everyone than simply taking it in for professional service.
In the end, none of these devices has a long useful life. Even if you can repair a phone or computer, technological advance is going to render it obsolete relatively quickly. Repair is far more useful in other items like furniture, appliances, and tools that can have a useful life stretching to decades.
How do you define “long useful life” and “obsolete”?
I’ve donated, gifted, or sold most of my Macs once I replaced them with newer models. Each had a useful life of between three and six years before they were handed off to someone else.
For all I know, a good handful of my old computers might still be functioning and providing service to someone. I like to think I prolonged the usability of most of these machines with a few simple aftermarket modifications, the likes of which are becoming less and less possible as Apple seals, glues, or welds everything shut and turns everything they sell into disposables.
I don’t think there is any need to apply special meanings to “useful life” or “obsolete.” If something can still be used for its desired purpose, then it would still be with in its useful life and would be obsolete if external forces (rather than device failure) rendered that untrue or the device is not capable of doing the task economically compared to more modern alternatives.
I’m sure you have added life to your device, but I’m equally sure Apple’s construction techniques have added life to their devices as well.
There’s also a tradeoff, in some cases, between things like weight or size and repairability. Elsewhere on the site today there’s a post about a guy whose MBP died so he worked on his iPad Pro. One of the advantages he cites is weight difference… the iPad Pro + KB being about 2.2lbs. He cites his MBP as being 5.6 lbs… but it’s 4 years old. The new 15″ is 4lbs and the 13″ is even lighter. If that savings makes them less repairable… is that good or bad? Trick question – it depends on how important weight is to someone.
iFixit has been a great resource to me of for nothing else but battery changing on iPhones in the past.
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theyre not disposable just because you personally cant easily make repairs.
how many times have you repaired a calculator? because thats the form factor today, with an even more incredibly complex density of components.
how many times have you repaired an ultra slim TV?
a pacemaker?
an iPad?
…these things can all be repaired, but the compromises to make it easier for normal end users to do it is unreasonable compared to the value add by not doing so. DIY tinkerers are not the prime use case. a niche within a niche.
nope, apple designs for the correct use case — normals, who aren’t doing DIY tinkering.
youre making the assumption that the proprietary fastener is used only to make things more difficult for normals, and not because its design adds its own value to apple’s repair or manufacturing process (ex: better torque with a super small screw head, or whatever, etc)
I realize this. But I still believe the tradeoffs are less desirable at the end of the product line where the Mac Pro tower used to be. I’m wondering what sort of tradeoffs this year’s replacement will make.