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We lose money on repairs, sobs penniless Apple, even though we charge y'all a fortune

jeffty

The difference between Jones/Rossman and Apple is the same as the difference between a motor engineer and most car dealers.

Jones/Rossman have expert skills in low-level hardware diagnostics/repairs. They understand the connectivity between the electrical components and have the tools needed to interrogate them for faults. They're able to quickly determine and resolve the cause of a hardware fault, usually right down to the faulty chip, IC or transistor. They'll then obtain replacement components, remove the faulty ones and solder the replacements onto the board.

Your average Apple store will probably just diagnose the fault down to the nearest board and replace that entire assembly, regardless of which chip on it failed.

The expert costs more in labour but less in materials used, Apple have probably worked out that it's cheaper to hire support staff of a lower expertise level and just to take the hit on the increased cost of replacement parts and lost data.

Still, there's no reason why they can't just use conventional connectors/form factors (PCIe storage for example) to allow for easy data recovery or repair, and still produce a thin, sleek device. RAM, storage and batteries are usually the three most common hardware failures you see in a laptop (hell, they're the most common failures in a standard PC too if you swap batteries for PSUs). It's price gouging/planned obscelescence and nothing more.

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