by Alan C wrote:It does seem a bit unwarranted to me. As I understand it displays are reasonable to replace on an iPhone with the proper tools and considerations, compare that to what I was told about Samsung display replacement up to at least two years ago; even with a skilled technician the chances of cracking the display when trying to remove it was decidedly non-zero. They're a bastard to remove. It is unfortunate to see RAM and now SSDs being soldered to the mainboards now but it's not just Apple doing it, it's the way things are moving. I've personally serviced Dell and Lenovo laptops and plenty of them were bastards to fix as well, particularly certain Thinkpad models requiring almost complete disassembly to get to the mainboard or trying to replace a Yoga LCD without the fucking thing cracking.
I'm reminded of the stink caused with Foxxconn employee deaths a couple of years ago and the hate thrown at Apple, Foxxconn is a big company making things for other companies besides Apple but I don't recall seeing any criticism of these others. Criticise for sure but I'd suggest being wary of being one-eyed about it.
For the record I own a few Apple products, also I have a Ryzen/Nvidia PC [mainly for gaming] I've put together and I've assembled a modest intel workstation for the missus. I've dabbled in ubuntu and a Raspberry Pi 4. I was a die-hard Amiga user back in the day that wouldn't have anything to do with Wintel but the writing was on the wall near the end of the nineties so I held my nose and got a PC.
I think there's a difference though between something being awkward or difficult to repair because of the design of the device, and something being technically easy to repair but then having something in place that prevents it from working after someone has repaired it themselves. Imagine if a car manufacturer said "yeah you can bring it to a mechanic, but your brakes might be a bit dodgy unless you get it repaired with us." It's monopolistic behaviour and it should be illegal.
My computer doesn't technically even have seperate RAM, so if something goes wrong, the entire processor needs replacing. That's fine. It's a design choice that makes the computer faster/more efficient. They shouldn't be obliged to make things easily repairable, but they should be obliged to not include artificial barriers to repair so that you have to go to them.
