Comment by Night_Thastus
6 days ago
I've never seen any evidence that either of those are true.
However, it's not planned obsolescence either. It's just math. Building things to be repairable costs more money and time. There is very little incentive to do so, because most customers simply do not care. Thus, Apple does not bother. Nothing conspiratorial about it.
Most people do care even though they won't do any repairs themselves. This very article explains how it makes a few broken keys a 700$ repair. Customers do care about that.
No, enthusiasts care about that. People who have a soldering iron and will try to fix things themselves.
Most people do the following:
* Take it to Apple * Apple says it will cost $X * Customer says 'yes' and gets it repaired OR customer says 'no' (and proceeds to buy a new one)
That's what the vast, vast, vast majority of customers do.
Yes but they will still remember 'damn they wanted 700 bucks because I broke 2 keys??" And think twice before buying the next one. Or just keep it broken.
Also, this might be the case in rich places like silicon valley or the US in general. But most of my friends would come to either me or the less official repair shops when Apple gives them such an outrageous quote. Because most of my friends don't just have $700 for an unexpected incident just lying around. That's a lot of money.
I agree most people don't care about self repair but the majority would care about cost of repair, and the ability to go to unofficial places for cheaper options.
I mean I still get friends coming to me with early 2010s hardware and asking if I can speed it up. Sometimes I install some old memory I had lying around or an old SSD to replace its spinning drive. These things help a lot.