back to article Apple, forced to rate product repair potential in France, gives itself modest marks

Apple, on its French website, is now publishing repairability scores for its notoriously difficult to repair products, in accordance with a Gallic environmental law enacted a year ago. Cook & Co score themselves on repairability however, and Cupertino kit sometimes fares better under internal interpretation of the criteria [ …

  1. sgp

    Apple give theirselves a 10 out of 10 in willingness to speak to the press if they get to set the narrative.

    1. ThinkingMonkey

      I imagine printing word-for-word a prepared statement in the form of an email would also be acceptable. Joking aside, even though I've noticed in my later years that most inexplicable policies can be traced to money one way or the other, I haven't been able to figure out why, exactly, that Apple and Google refuse to answer questions.

      Is it simply because said questions are asking why they're being a dick about this or that? All they have to do is give a "politician" answer, aka no answer at all even after much talking, to at least try to give the illusion that they care. As it is, they don't appear to give F-all whether people like them or not.

  2. Shadow Systems

    3rd Party Verification should be law.

    A company should not be able to assign their own scores, those should only be accepted from unafiliated 3rd parties that make all such tests (process & results) openly available to anyone that asks, preferably as part of the page giving the product score in the first place.

    If a bunch of 3rd parties each grab a random sample off a retailer's shelves in multiple random locations, do 3 tests across 3 samples, & post the average score of the 3, then if any one of them consistently gives low/high scores that seem out of line, their methods & results can be examined in excrutiating detail to determine why. Meanwhile, if 7 out of 10 such reviews all fall within a point of each other, you can be pretty sure that they're all on the same page.

    Even better is that, the more such testers doing the reviews, the harder (not impossible, just more expensive) to bribe them all to fudge the results in the company's favor.

    Then the government can set a minimum threshold for scores such that any product failing to meet said minimums will be quickly removed from product shelves while the company is given a legal slap upside the head & told to fix their shit to be better for everyone & the environment.

    Apple would wind up getting the shit smacked out of themselves so often it would make their CEO look like a masochist.

    Proprietary screws, glued together, custom clips that break if opened, & the mobo one giant lump of solder? One moment while we fetch the Slap-O-Matic 9000 & some popcorn...

    1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

      those should only be accepted from unafiliated 3rd parties

      Sadly I fear that the only result of that would be to enrich the lawyers paid to challenge them.

      1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

        Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

        You could have a set of standards designed by production engineers. For example, one could be battery replacement using a standard toolkit. The standard includes a model (not a real phone) that scores 10/10 and the time to replace the battery is recorded. Then Apple (or whoever) just have to demonstrate battery replacement on their device. They can use only the standard toolkit, but they can bring trained techs if they want. Time it and then apply a formula to score it based on how much longer it took than the standard model.

        You could have these for a whole set of tasks - screen replacement, connector replacement, memory upgrade, keyboard repair, etc.

        Then, there should be repairability sales tax added to devices price, with low-scoring devices having eye-watering levels of tax added.

        Software and security updates mandatory for five years to prevent them hobbling their devices to boost sales once the repairability and supportability starts having an effect.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

          This.

          There's no point in self-assessment unless there's an objective standard for the assessment. The article doesn't mention if this is the case.

        2. chris street

          Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

          IF you just tax Apple stuff more it increases the price and the fanbois will lap it up - it costs even more so it must be more iShiny and more iSpecial right.... It will be a self defeating circle that...

          What would be better is to have an average repairability score over all the devices sold - and if that doesn't show steady improvement then other levers can be imposed on them right down to limiting how many of their awful closed source walled garden iThings can be sold in the country...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

      "A company should not be able to assign their own scores"

      As long as there are stiff penalties for lying, why not? That's how plenty of certification works, with decent results overall and the occasional major scandal.

      "those should only be accepted from unafiliated 3rd parties"

      A nice idea, but in practice, how do you make that work? First, who pays for the work of those 3rd parties? the companies themselves? That wouldn't make them "unaffiliated", right? The government then? So, a new underfunded, overwhelmed government agency is born that people can complain about?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

        As long as there are stiff penalties for lying, why not? That's how plenty of certification works, with decent results overall and the occasional major scandal.

        Like the Boeing 737 MAX?

        Yes...I went there.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

          I work in aviation. The industry is to a large extent self-regulating. As the other person says, it works rather decently well.

          Why do you decide to pick on the one example where thing went wrong and a degree of abuse may (or may not) have occurred?

          Boeing clearly has an organisational problem, but that's not evidence of systemic issues. Regardless of you might read in the generalist press.

          1. Adelio

            Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

            When all the people doing the checking work for the company being checked and there is very little oversight (as we saw from Boeing) and the people doing the checking were afraid of dobing their employers in it. Then THAT is a systemic problem.

            The FAA should have done a better job of checking and Boeing should have tried doing a proper job of design and NOT been driven by artifical deadlines.

            I am told that boing used to be a company run by engineers but is now a company run by accountants (Like so many other companies)

      2. Chris G

        Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

        "A nice idea, but in practice, how do you make that work? "

        There are already a bunch of national and international bodies that could cover the job.

        British Standards Institute, CE, TUV, ISO and so on, all the manufacturer would need to do is pay them for additional certification to cover repairability. Since most of these organisations are members of the ISO it wouldn't be that hard to achieve a set of international standards.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

          "it wouldn't be that hard to achieve a set of international standards."

          Well, for some indeterminate value of "hard". Each stakeholder will need to consulted, focus groups created to identify and discover what the makeup of committees should be, forming said committees to discuss the direction of the roadmap, further committees to discuss the timelines, an oversight sight committee to make sure the under-committees are properly diverse in their makeup. Eventually they will all agree on what the standards committee should consist of and said standard committee can then e formed and start the multi-year process of creating a standard that all parties can agree on, taking into account the market share and financial clout of the relevant parties and their influence of even the most minor of points.

          After all, rinse and repeat for the ratification process. Meanwhile, technology has moved on and the market leaders won't follow the standard "because new techniques not included in the standard".

          TLDR

          1. JetSetJim

            Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

            That managed to do it for crash test rating of cars(euro ncap?), why not repairability of phones? Just let the tester pick random phones from production/retail and do their testing.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

          British Standards Institute, CE, TUV, ISO

          Of that list, CE is the one that doesn't require testing. Most CE-marked products are self-certified, there is no central CE test lab. BSI, TUV & UL are the ones to go for.

      3. Old Used Programmer

        Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

        Require all published repairability scores be generated by a competing company.

    3. EvilGardenGnome

      Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

      Add in forcing the company to pay all disposal costs for their product would see suddenly increased repairability and longevity. Just a thought.

      1. Horst U Rodeinon
        WTF?

        Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

        @EvilGardenGnome: You do realize it is the customers who ultimately pay taxes and other fees for products? That begs the question, how much more are you and others willing to pay for your iThings?

        1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

          Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

          I bet that if Apple lost sales to its competitors because of eye-watering repairability and recycling taxes then their September new-products' USP would be longevity, standard screws and easily replaceable batteries and screens.

          Remember that some of the nasty manufacturing techniques they use aren't to save money, they are to make stuff thinner, because no one is ever going to buy a device that is not thinner than the device it's replacing. Oh, except when they bring a folding phone out, in which case it will be ok to pocket a folded phone that's over 1cm thick, but until then, every device has to be thinner. I assume the Apple canteen is down to Parma ham by now and they have a whole department dedicated to making a machine for slicing it even thinner before they all starve to death.

          1. Shadow Systems

            At Headley_Grange, re: deli slicing.

            If the deli had to slice meats like Apple sliced their devices, the meats would be down into single digit molecule ranges & nobody could tell by looking at the cuttings tray if there was anything there or not.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

          how much more are you and others willing to pay for your iThings?

          Me? Absolutely nothing. I will not pay them a penny. My employer has issued me an iPhone for work purposes and so that I can read work email while away from my desk but I did not pay for that.

          Happily, they will be changing to Office 365. This means that I will be able to run this on my own phone. Like a lot of phones nowadays, it can take 2 SIMs. My manager is happy with that. I can turn off the work SIM when I don't want work calls. This means that, at some point, I can return the iShinyShiny for reuse by someone else.

    4. hoola Silver badge

      Re: 3rd Party Verification should be law.

      Just like car fuel consumption and emissions.

      The only way these sort of things work is with a third-party doing the audit.

  3. Dave 15

    I admire the French for this but

    I would go a step or two further. I would have an automatic right to a full noao argument refund for any product where the user is not satisfied in the first 2 years and a no argument requirement for free at the customers home or office repair for 10 years. This would push up requirements on design testing repairability and manufacture. For example i have 2 Lenovo laptops that are scrap because the design bozo made it so when the battery charge circuit fails they won't run even when plugged in the mains, satisfaction zero. I have a Nokia Android phone, the screen freezes and touch screen stops working, getting worse in every forced update, should never have been sold. I have cars where changing a headlamp bulb requires a workshop (God knows why the Germans allow them to be sold when you have to have a bulb kit in your car so you can change bulbs at the side of the road but you don't need to have the mobile workshop that is required for the job)

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: I admire the French for this but

      A two year warranty if you're "not satisified" will equal a two year free rental of a phone, laptop, TV, etc. for a lot of people.

      Or is the government also supposed to somehow police things to prevent me from buying an HP laptop and claiming "not satisfied" after 23 months, then a Dell laptop for 23 months, then a Lenovo laptop for 23 months, and so on?

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: I admire the French for this but

        So you wouldn't be able to buy a computer anymore, but you can lease a one for only 100/month

    2. WhereAmI?

      Re: I admire the French for this but

      Renault Megane and Renault Scenic. We had one of the latter. To change the headlight bulbs you had to:

      - remove the front wheel mudflaps so you could

      - remove the inner mudguard so you could

      - remove the lower front grill so you could

      - remove the radiator cover so you could

      - change the headlight bulbs.

      Oh - and you needed some special Renault tools too.

      £50 a throw in the local garage and he was NOT ripping us off. Not a French designer's finest moment.

    3. conel

      Re: I admire the French for this but

      Can you see any potential drawbacks to this or is your genius brain certain that this will make everything better?

  4. Dave 15

    Extend to cars

    Why does it take 8 (yes eight) hours to disassemble the dash enough to change a dash bulb? Why do you need to take all of the air filter out to change s headlamp bulb (or worse on the other side the whole battery compartment) Why do you have wheel bolts which means you can't put the wheel on at night in the pouring rain when you have a puncture, why do you have to take 15 bolts out and 4 under bonnet panels off to see and top up the brake fluid? Why cambelts? There have been mechanisms since Bentley in the 30s for driving overhead cams without belts or chains. Modern cars are deliberately designed for lack of repairability in a way that makes apple look amateurs, all that trim clipped in by one way non removable clips.... Just so you can't repair it.

    1. chivo243 Silver badge

      Re: Extend to cars

      I thought I read 8 years... had a laugh and re-read!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Extend to cars

        Funny, that's two of us.

    2. John Riddoch

      Re: Extend to cars

      When I had to replace a headlight bulb in my car, the manual had a nice easy looking procedure. Plenty of space to get in behind the unit, take out the bulb holder and put in a new one. Reality? About an inch clearance for me to get my fat fingers into to release the bulb housing and be able to replace the bulb. I think replacing the fan belt (when it started squeaking) was actually less stressful than that process and that was a PITA for an amateur.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Extend to cars

        Years ago I called the lease company to book my company car in for a headlight bulb change. They refused, and reminded me that bulbs came under the general maintenance which was the driver's responsibility. I read them the relevant section of the manual which stated that the car had to be raised on a lift or axle stands and the front valance removed in order to replace a headlight bulb. They weren't happy, but they had to book it in to the workshop and give me a replacement car for the day.

        As others have pointed out, if I'd taken it to France I'd have had to carry a replacement bulb kit. It was a Renault Clio.

        1. Martin Gregorie

          Re: Extend to cars

          Did Renault include ramps and/or axle stands in their bulb replacement kit?

          If not, why not and was it legal to omit them since they were evidently an essential part of the kit?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Extend to cars

            @Martin. Yes, axle stands were included with the bulb kit. And a generator and telescopic lighting tower in case the bulb had to be changed in the dark. And also a very old transistor radio covered in "STP" and "Castrol" stickers. The radio was, of course, capable of receiving Radio 2 everywhere in Europe, albeit everso slightly off tune.

        2. Potemkine! Silver badge

          Re: Extend to cars

          It was a Renault Clio

          Renault is crap, and I know by experience.

          As the proverb says: "Tant qu'il y aura des Renault, il y aura du boulot pour les mécanos" (as long as there will be Renault cars, there will be jobs for mechanics)

        3. Adelio

          Re: Extend to cars

          I think with modern LED lights most of them are NOT replaceable. Headlight more so. My last MAZDA had Xenon headlight. I am guessing they would have been a P.I.T.A to change

    3. serendipity

      Re: Extend to cars

      I don't agree regarding cambelts most of them last 100k miles. I've looked into buying cars with cam chains (eg Vauxhall Astras, Mazda 6's etc ) and it turns out they often don't run like Swiss watches for 500K! I do agree that manufacturers could make it easier to get at things. But then we the great unwashed happily buy new cars stuffed with fripperies we don't really need - LEDs - how repairable are those, AUTO boxes (they can often be too expensive to repair so the car is scrapped) - AUTO CLOSING TAILGATES - is it so hard just to close them manually and ironically, APPLE infotainment systems!!. So we are all partly to blame.

      On a more positive note, my current car is a Volvo V70 mk3. To remove the entire headlamp, you just lift the bonnet, pull out two pins and voila the whole (huge) unit slides out. Mind you I was doing this not to change a bulb but because the headlamp had literally dropped to bits inside and I was told it wasn't repairable. Sod that, I opened it up with a cutting wheel, fixed the broken bracket and then gaffer taped it up - it's just made it through winter absolutely fine with no water ingress :)

      1. Snake Silver badge

        Re: Extend to cars

        "I don't agree regarding cambelts most of them last 100k miles"

        I take it that you've never had the pleasure of a timing belt snap significantly before its expected time, then??

        Say "Mitsubishi hidden defects" twice (the number of times it snapped), click your heels (a full month in each instance, the amount of time to order and fit the brand-new head) and you'll be in Kansas, Dorothy.

    4. dca1

      Re: Extend to cars

      I think we digress here. Is it so much about the time or about the incidental cost applied to minor repairs?

      The issue is that on a £1,000 laptop if you want more ram, or your ram fails, or one other tiny piece of your logic board fails then you are either paying about £800 to replace the entire logic board and discard the remaining working components, or you are paying £1,000 for a shiny new [insert current year] macbook.

      If my suspension fails and in order to replace only the suspension I have to have a mechanic spend 12 hours disassembling to get to it and replace it, in this case only the suspension is discarded. It might take longer, I definitely won't have to buy a new car and my old car will carry on just as it was before.

      I thought the goal was to get to the latter position with consumber electronics. Specifically those consumer electronics which could and have been made modular but are now being made as single units, glued or that do not have parts made available for the purposes of the upgrade cycle.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Extend to cars

        The answer as ever, is steam trains

        Steam trains, at least in their early "Rocket" form could be built and repaired by a blacksmith with a hammer.

        In the glorious future the only form of transport allowed will be "The Rocket", each family will build their own from weekly plans printed in The Radio Times and be assembled in their shed.

        If you want a self-driving version, there is always the option of owning a horse instead.

        1. el_oscuro
          Boffin

          Re: Extend to cars

          The first computer I programmed was a Heathkit H-9 in which my Dad (with a little help from me) assembled. The instruction manuals that came with these kits were legendary in there detail. While some components like the keyboard and floppy disk drive were mostly pre-assembled, you had had to solder every chip, diode, resister, etc to the motherboard yourself. I remember helping him with the flyback transformer that was installed on the neck of the CRT tube.

      2. DS999 Silver badge

        Re: Extend to cars

        Replaceable RAM is only seen as a requirement by some because it has always been that way. Do you want to ban putting a GPU on the same die as a CPU so that you can replace just one of them? Nobody seems to have a problem with the "southbridge" chip being soldered onto the board. Why not? Wouldn't upgrading to a newer version of USB by replacing that be as desirable as adding RAM for some rather than buying a whole new motherboard?

        Do you want to ban other advances, like an SoC that includes all the stuff that used to be done by the southbridge? Do you want to require SATA ports, which are increasingly being dropped as higher performance NVMe SSDs become the norm and optical drives are legacy? If the SSD can perform even faster when it is soldered on, or maybe made part of the SoC chip "stack" in the future, should that advance be banned even though you looked the other way when they dropped SATA ports? (and IDE ports before them)

        Back in the Apple II days computers had sockets for each individual RAM chip. I'm sure there were people who bitched about SIMMs because it forced them to replace all the RAM chips on the SIMM at once even if only one was bad. They probably decried "modern" busses like PCI when older standards like S100 exposed a bunch of CPU control lines and were FAR more flexible in their capability. Somewhere, there is someone still unhappy that CPUs aren't like the old days where new instructions could be added by rewiring a plugboard...

        Like it not, technology advances, and those advances often come at the cost of greater integration and reduced flexibility.

        1. DevOpsTimothyC

          Re: Extend to cars

          @DS999

          While your statements make sense, how do you justify the different daughter boards being ID locked, eg face recognition being turned off if you replace screen or camera ?

          I can appreciate things like RAM and CPU being soldered on for the thinner / lighter models, but why are no models sold where these CAN be swapped, just in a slightly larger form factor?

          https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/24/surface_pro_7_plus_ssd/ is an example of the lock in issues people really don't like

          1. DS999 Silver badge

            Re: Extend to cars

            That's pretty simple actually. Due to activation lock, stealing an iPhone and reselling it as a whole unit has become pretty much impossible. So what the crooks started doing instead was breaking it up for parts - similar to what auto thieves do. Now you can say "I don't buy that, Apple is just being greedy" but my explanation is quite plausible, whether or not you agree with it.

            Having expensive in-demand parts like displays and cameras ID locked prevents stolen iPhones from being worth anything to the thief, thus eliminating the incentive to steal them in the first place. So you say, "well why doesn't Apple allow independent repair shops to use legitimately acquired iPhones as a source for parts"? The problem is how do they tell it was "legitimately acquired"? If I offer to sell them a used iPhone, how they do know I didn't steal it, or acquire it from someone who stole it?

            If the iPhone I bring them is fully functional, that's easy, if I'm the owner I can remove activation lock. Then Apple's systems could (I don't know if they actually DO, but could) also allow installation of the parts within it into other iPhones. Once that franken-phone is activated the new parts would be "married" to that iPhone's serial number in Apple's systems.

            Here's the real snag though - what if the phone I offer them is broken (screen completely busted, won't power up, or whatever) making it impossible to disable the activation lock whether or not you are its legitimate owner? Sure, you can remove non-broken parts from it, but there's no way to establish the phone from which it came was not stolen since the activation lock is still present.

            You're free to disagree, but I'm willing to pay the price of more expensive potential repairs if it means the chance of someone snatching the phone out of my hand as they zoom by a bike or whatever can be pretty much eliminated.

            1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

              Re: Extend to cars

              What about Apple selling spares to repair shops at cost plus a reasonable mark up? I don't mind paying a reasonable price to get stuff fixed, what I object to is having to travel miles to the "nearest" Apple shop to drop it off then travel miles to pick it up. There's a non-Apple repair shop in my town. When I wanted my Mac's battery replacing they charged a lot more than Apple because when they buy the battery from Apple, Apple charges them the same for the battery as they would charge me for replacing the battery.

              I understand the security aspects, but I'd be more than willing to believe that it's merely a convenient side effect of Apple's designing their products and services to lock users' wallets into their walled garden.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Extend to cars

              You're free to disagree, but I'm willing to pay the price of more expensive potential repairs if it means the chance of someone snatching the phone out of my hand as they zoom by a bike or whatever can be pretty much eliminated.

              But what are the odds that the hypothetical thief will case you to determine the phone make and model before going for the kill?

    5. Nonymous Crowd Nerd

      Re: Extend to cars

      While at the other extreme... I believe the record to remove and replace the engine in a classic VW Beetle is 76 seconds. The time is measured from driving the car over a line to start the clock until it's driven back over the line with the engine back in the car again to stop the clock.

  5. glococo
    Thumb Up

    We deserve a wider and improved EU regulation.

    Thanks France for being brave enough to be the first one.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Not that that would help us in the UK except indirectly by pushing manufacturers in the right direction.

  6. vmistery

    What really irks is they solder the SSD down in the name of security, but this security comes at the cost of reparability. The ram I can get slightly less bothered about as it tends not to die like SSDs do as they don’t wear the same. That all said the skeptic in me thinks they do this to artificially push the price of the higher end upgrades up rather than as a space saving measure.

    1. Smirnov

      The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

      Are you kidding??? RAM is the second most failure prone (after mechanical hard drives) component in a computer. Much more than even earlier SSDs, and modern drives are, in general, very robust and last for a very long time.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

        "RAM is the second most failure prone (after mechanical hard drives) component in a computer"

        Citation needed.

        I've serviced plenty of laptops, desktops and servers in the last two decades and in my experience: fans, power supplies and motherboards are more failure prone than RAM.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

          "I've serviced plenty of laptops, desktops and servers in the last two decades and in my experience: fans, power supplies and motherboards are more failure prone than RAM."

          100% agreed. 25 years here doing break/fix and RAM is probably the least likely to fail component.

          Hunting around in the boot of the car a few years back I found some "standard" DIMMS that had stores labels on them showing they were nearly 10 years old! So old, I doubt there was any kit out there on contract they would have worked in so I sent them back to stores.

      2. Will Godfrey Silver badge
        WTF?

        Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

        To date I've never had a RAM failure. The closest I got, was overheating on BBC Model B when it had an expansion board plonked right on top of the RAM chips - and even that was cured by moving the board.

        1. heyrick Silver badge

          Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

          I've seen RAM failures - usually as a result of running the things too hard in too tiny a space with poor ventilation.

          A bad SIMM that frequently messed up and caused all sorts of havoc in a tower PC (where it was located just above the processor in a rats nest of wires and cables) worked flawlessly in my RiscPC. That SIMM must have thought it was on holiday!

        2. vtcodger Silver badge

          Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

          To date I've never had a RAM failure.

          You've never had a RAM failure that you know about. How would you tell?

          Few remember today, but early PCs had parity bits on memory. But back in the days of $100 a megabyte memory, PC makers -- with a lot of nudging from Microsoft -- quietly removed the parity bit from their personal computer designs. Fewer bits, cheaper chips, cheaper products, same profits. (and more memory hungry Windows sales for Microsoft).

          Since that time, the only way to confirm a RAM failure on a consumer PC is to swap in known good memory -- preferably with identical specs so as to avoid BIOS tweaking. It's possible -- not certain -- that many weird or intermittent computer failures are caused by defective RAM rather than faulty software. Not that there isn't plenty of the latter.

          1. Richard 12 Silver badge
            Boffin

            Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

            Soldered RAM basically never fails after the first few days. If it survives its first couple of weeks of life, it'll outlive the rest of the machine.

            Socketed RAM is rather less reliable, especially if the embedded PC is spending a lot of time bouncing around in the back of a cold lorry...

            Flash and other NVM is different because it physically wears out. Dynamic RAM just has the usual solder problems and doping drift as causes of failure - the CPU will probably die first!

          2. Sandtitz Silver badge
            Holmes

            Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

            "But back in the days of $100 a megabyte memory, PC makers -- with a lot of nudging from Microsoft -- quietly removed the parity bit from their personal computer designs."

            Uh, citation needed. Out of interest I tried to search for information about this but came up with nothing.

            Memory was $100 / 1 MB in about 1990, around when Win 3.0 was introduced. MS-DOS was probably present in nearly all PC clones (IBM had their own PC DOS) but Windows was rather useless until v3 and DOS was mostly just a rudimentary launcher for 3rd party software. Did Micros~1 really have that much clout over Compaq, IBM and other major PC manufacturers back then?

            Before Windows 3.0 there were not a lot of use for >640K in a PC. Some may have had more but utilising the >640k memory was restricted to few (business) applications or used for disk caching. My 286 clone (NEC V20) had 1MB RAM and the extra 384K in it was mostly useless.

            From what I've read memory parity was mostly dropped due to improvements in memory chip quality.

            "Since that time, the only way to confirm a RAM failure on a consumer PC is to swap in known good memory"

            It is not the ONLY way. If your Memtest86 or similar software shows errors, it is VERY likely that the memory module is faulty.

            "It's possible -- not certain -- that many weird or intermittent computer failures are caused by defective RAM rather than faulty software."

            True, but they could be due to poor signal levels / power delivery on motherboard or some other part of the computer. Cosmic rays may flip memory bits but has this ever been observed and confirmed? Then again the parity chips in memory modules may fail as well.

          3. nintendoeats Silver badge

            Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

            I know about parity and ECC and all that, but I would really like a citation on this.

      3. Lord Elpuss Silver badge

        Re: The ram I tends not to die like SSDs do

        "RAM is the second most failure prone (after mechanical hard drives) component in a computer."

        Rubbish. Batteries, IO boards, ribbon cables fans and LCD components are all far more likely to fail.

    2. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      My ranking of fatal failures from using work-provided MacBook Pros and having previously owned Mac desktops:

      1) Obsolete. Computer was marginally fast when new but now it's too slow and there are no upgrades.

      2: Firmware/OS bug. Slowness, lockups, or crashes triggered by certain uses. Maybe Apple fixes it, maybe not.

      3) Misc manufacturing flaw - bad solder joint, destructive battery swelling, short from defective insulator, etc.

      Never had an SSD fail. The hard drives used to fail, but they were replaceable.

  7. Howard Sway Silver badge

    Quite surprised Apple didn't give their products 0 out of 10

    I mean, if it breaks you go out and by a new one, right?

    Who do you think their aspirational products are aimed at : poor people? The very thought of one of their customers having to wield a screwdriver must make them reach for the smelling salts.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      Re: Quite surprised Apple didn't give their products 0 out of 10

      Even if they wanted to wield a screwdriver, they won't own the right one because Apple uses screws that are specific to Apple.

      Their 'walled garden' is a physical wall when it comes to hardware.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Quite surprised Apple didn't give their products 0 out of 10

        And even if you have the right screw drivers, some parts replacement are only feasible if you have the right jig to mount the parts in otherwise they don't properly line up and become almost impossible to remove or replace.

  8. chivo243 Silver badge
    Coat

    Once again

    Apple is inspecting their own meat.

    1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: Once again

      Or certifying their own 737-max...

  9. low_resolution_foxxes

    In my opinion, Apple do go out of their way to prevent 3rd party repair.

    However I do disagree with some of rhetoric and acknowledge some challenges. Ifixit seem to think it is their right to get Apple service manuals for free, I'm not sure that's how copyright works (the market seems to get these by stealing copies from Apple).

    Also, I saw they were complaining about not being able to buy spare fingerprint sensors. But given that fingerprint sensors are presumably protected/encrypted and authorise payments, I accept some level of control is required there. I do not expect this to extend to battery/cable/displays, especially when many YouTubers are showing 2-minute cable fixes for common faults that Apple stores want £1000-1500 to fix.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      It's not unusual to find laptop service manuals downloadable so they have a point.

    2. Smirnov

      "However I do disagree with some of rhetoric and acknowledge some challenges. Ifixit seem to think it is their right to get Apple service manuals for free, I'm not sure that's how copyright works (the market seems to get these by stealing copies from Apple)."

      Documentation is part of the product, and that includes maintenance and service manuals, which many manufacturers (like HP or Dell) offer for free as downloads for their products.

      And I guess there's a reason why Apple, a company known to sue first and ask later, has not sued anyone for breach of copyright in relation to service instructions (and I'm sure their lawyers know a great deal about copyright so they probably concluded that there isn't much copyright involved in disassembly instructions).

      "Also, I saw they were complaining about not being able to buy spare fingerprint sensors. But given that fingerprint sensors are presumably protected/encrypted and authorise payments, I accept some level of control is required there."

      Fingerprint sensors are just that, sensors, they aren't encrypted, and only a means that goes into a payment authorization system (which is much more than a single sensor, it's mostly software).

      They aren't protected parts, and free for sale on the open market. Same as with batteries, it's just Apple wanting to prevent non-approved parties to be able to fix a broken iPhone.

      1. Tessier-Ashpool

        Apple TouchID sensor: because security.

        Sure you can buy fingerprint sensors on the market. But an iPhone’s sensor is hooked up to its Secure Enclave. Sensor data is *never* accessible to the OS, and authorisation is delegated to the Secure Enclave / sensor combination.

        This is far more secure than hooking up (potentially hackable) OS code to a sensor. But the only way that delegation in turn can be trusted is if the physical sensor is trusted by the Secure Enclave. Otherwise you could attach any old fake sensor to the phone that will authenticate every time.

        Sometimes, things *should* be tamper-proof.

        1. Tessier-Ashpool

          Mr Thumbs Down, you know Jack Shit about security.

        2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

          Apple TouchID sensor : made in China.

          By the bucketload.

          There is no reason to not be able to replace it.

    3. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      I don't think a fingerprint sensor actually authorises payments. That's all done in software behind the scenes. The fingerprint sensor is just a data input device, like a keyboard on which you type your password. The keyboard doesn't authorise or encrypt anything either, just takes input.

    4. doublelayer Silver badge

      "Ifixit seem to think it is their right to get Apple service manuals for free, I'm not sure that's how copyright works (the market seems to get these by stealing copies from Apple)."

      If Apple has a program where it sells copies of the repair manual to anyone who wants to repair, then we can talk. If that happened, most of the talk would be me saying they should give them away with a purchase, but you'd actually have a counterargument. They don't do that. They rope them into a complex contract where they need to take lots of steps to be Apple-certified repair people who only buy parts directly from Apple and who can be cut off at any time if they displease them.

      "Also, I saw they were complaining about not being able to buy spare fingerprint sensors. But given that fingerprint sensors are presumably protected/encrypted"

      But they're not. The secure enclave behind them runs that. The sensor is a dumb input device. Now of course you could have a nefarious one, but you could have a nefarious version of most components. You could theoretically have a screen that logs every image displayed and tap, thus becoming a keylogger. You don't have that in reality because it's hard to build and not very useful to an attacker, but you could. That's not a good reason to hide the parts away. The main reason is exactly what you say next.

      "I do not expect this to extend to battery/cable/displays, especially when many YouTubers are showing 2-minute cable fixes for common faults that Apple stores want £1000-1500 to fix."

      And yet it does extend to those things. Because Apple doesn't mind the high prices and doesn't want you doing quick fixes. For things that look secure, they'll use a security argument even if, as I pointed out, it doesn't apply. For things that don't look secure, they'll use a safety argument, like "If you put these non-Apple batteries in, they might explode. Sure, they probably won't, but it's possible". For things that don't really have convincing security or safety arguments, they'll not justify their actions but just try to prevent it working by engineering them to fail.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "You could theoretically have a screen that logs every image displayed and tap, thus becoming a keylogger."

        But Apple don't do that, because that would be muscling in on Google's turf...? >:->

  10. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Meh

    In days of yore

    Manufacturers used to go to great lengths to make servicing as easy as possible, Not only was every component clearly identified, but PCBs had the outline of one side's trackwork printed on the other side - OK I know that wouldn't practical for multilayer boards, but you get the point.

    1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

      Re: In days of yore

      It used to be a science - maybe it still is, but I don't work in any areas that use it now; Reliability, Maintainability and Availability - RMA. Ages ago, for military contracts we had to supply mean time to repair figures from the system down to line replaceable modules. Given that the MTTR included fault finding the RMA engineer would have rejected designs at the first design review if they included gluing things down that might ever need ungluing. I worked with one who had a pathological hatred of any fasteners and I learned to give him nut, bolt and washer counts before reviews so he didn't spend the first 20 minutes trying to count them and argue about them one-by-one. Conformal coating was a real pain. US customers assumed CC was an absolute necessity even in situations where it definitely wasn't and they often specified it, but it really messed up the MTTR.

      1. el_oscuro

        Re: In days of yore

        In the US Army, it still is. It is called Preventive maintenance checks and services (PMCS), and used for all equipment. Maintenance charts are required for everything, and the goal is that soldiers understand their equipment and and fix it in the field if needed.

    2. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      Re: In days of yore

      I wonder if in those days, the only people expected to be doing the repair would be the manufacturers. So there was a benefit to the them by making it easy to repair. Today, with the democratisation of knowledge and skills, people expect to be able to repair things themselves, within reason. So manufactures can no longer expect to be the repairers, hence there is no vested interest in making repairs easy. Apple seem to be trying to restore that balance back by making it harder for everyone else to do the repairs, rather than easier for them (apple) to do it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: In days of yore

        It wasn't manufacturers usually doing the repairs, but service centres that would range from a one person shop to a large company. Take the original IBM PC for example - it came with very in depth documentation, and the service manuals were readily available on request.

        From personal experience, the same was true of electronic music equipment. I have the service manuals for numerous bits of kit from the 1970s to early 1990s, and it's very comprehensive. This applied to kit from manufacturers in many countries, so this was common practice worldwide. Then sometime in the mid-1990s it changed. Surface mount and multi-layer boards didn't help, but even disassembly guides disappeared.

        1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: In days of yore

          And the PC came with socketed ICs. I demand that my iPhone comes with the CPU in a 512pin DIP package (although I might need slightly longer pockets)

  11. chololennon
    Unhappy

    Greedy capitalism

    Well, nowadays even farmers have the same problem, they also want a bill for the "right to repair"

    https://www.thedrive.com/news/39158/farmers-are-having-to-hack-their-own-tractors-just-to-make-repairs

  12. Blackjack Silver badge

    Is not an Imac but...

    Anyone else wants to get their grubby hands on a framework laptop when (if) comes out?

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Is not an Imac but...

      Louis Rossmann is optimistic about it, and the company answered some of his questions in the comments.

  13. serendipity

    How about including an 'openness score' - lack of software updates from the manufacturer often kill perfectly usable phones and tablets. If manufacturers were forced to open up their boot loaders say after five years, I'm sure that the Linux community would develop suitable alternative OSes to repurpose the devices. Apple, as the most closed software and hardware producer on the planet, would currently have to rate themselves (if they were honest) as 0 out o 10 for openness! ;) But to be fair, the whole smartphone / tablet production model seems to designed to sell new stuff (no surprise there!) and confine perfectly useable kit to the e-waste bin!

  14. A.P. Veening Silver badge

    Right from the start Steve Jobs didn't want people mucking around on the inside of his kit.

    Not quite from the start, there were multiple third party expansion cards for the Apple ][ and Apple ][+. I really enjoyed the Klokhuis Vierlingkaart (Applecore Quadruplet Card, created by Dutch hobbyists), which had four different functions including a clock on one expansion card.

  15. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Joke

    Does my tower look small in this photo?

    Hope the French government does not annoy Cupertino too much - else they may find the Eiffel Tower appearing to be smaller than it should in photos taken with iPhones.

    https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/02/26/shutterstock_paris_photo.jpg

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Apple motto

    “I like money”

    For a company valued at over a trillion dollars, or was at some point, they don’t half behave like thieving gypsies

    They stole £5 from me, still not returned it, they gave me some worthless song credits because of their policy “NO REFUNDS” even though the game I brought from their CrAPPStore, Flashback (another world sequel), they removed due to copyright issues, but didnt refund me, didnt even contact me to say the thing I paid them money for, is gone

    Then there is this new app I see appear on my phone called Translate affer an IOS update

    I already have Google translate and it works fine, “late to the game” CrApple, dont even allow us to review and rate their Translate app, but I can with Google Translate

    Seriously, these tech conpanies can go fuck themselves with their stupid walled gardens, fucken cunts the lot of em. With any luck this Covid will sweep the crud off the face of this sad rock

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Apple motto

      For computers, I can't think of any reason to chose the App Store over Steam for games, unless you updated to Catastrophe or Big Sur by mistake.

      For iDevices Epic got defeated in North Dakota so maybe that's the end of alternative App Stores for iDevices. As Apple testified, a toggle switch to allow 3rd party installs would have been the end of the world as we know it.

  17. steviebuk Silver badge

    Serialising

    Whats even worse is they are starting to serialise everything. Take a Apple battery out of an Apple phone and put it in another and the 2nd phone will tell you its an unauthorised battery. They claim stuff like this is for security and safety. Bullshit, its clear its parts of their business model. Make it difficult to repair your products so people just buy new or charge 10x the price of an independent shop so you can make money on repairs.

  18. TinTinTeroo

    One easy option

    The easiest and most effective replacement procedure with a Mac is to replace it with a new PC running Windows 10.

    Apple Mac's - PC's for beginners.

    1. Headley_Grange Silver badge

      Re: One easy option

      Thanks - I'll think about that when I need to change my Macbook Air. It's 8 years old now, so it's probably due a change sometime soon.

      1. ICL1900-G3 Silver badge

        Re: One easy option

        Not as old as my Thinkpad!

  19. I Am Spartacus
    Childcatcher

    Of course its easily repairable

    As the Apple Support bod told me after my third call and copious email exchanges) my very hard to repair iPad Pro was easily repairable by the simple expedient of buy a brand new one. There, job done and so simple and quick.

    1. Naselus

      Re: Of course its easily repairable

      It's surprising how quickly 'geniuses' turn to 'why not just buy a new one' when asked to actually, y'know, fix something. Almost like they're over-titled sales drones rather than trained support staff or something.

      1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

        Re: Of course its easily repairable

        But they are, fallen up by lack of weight.

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