Why Apple Forsaked Repairability for Better Reliability

Intro

If you have ever wondered why repairing your Apple device is much more expensive when the screen or back glass is broken without Apple Care Warranty and it makes sense to trade-in for newer devices which you can get for the price of repairing old devices. It's due to Apple pairing parts through serial number locks also known as part-pairing in their firmware which disables the features when you use a third party refurbished or new product that is not an Apple certified part

Why Apple dis this?

Recently, MKBHD was invited by Apple to check their automated durability tests for their unreleased devices. Marques met with Apple's Head of Hardware Engineering John Ternus who talked about reliability and durability of their devices and how it sets apart from competitors.

Some excerpts from John Termus statements:

We have found when we will pull units back from the field and we'll find things and figure out how do we build a test that represents maybe this new use case that somebody is doing in the field and then that becomes a part of our test suite.

It's objectively better for the customer to have that reliability and better for the planet because the failure rate since we got to that point have just dropped, it's plummeted. So you can actually do the math and figure out there's a threshold at which if I can make it this durable then it's better to have it a little bit harder to repair because it's going to net out ahead.

While Apple’s biased statements for favoring better durability and reliability which help push their growth but third party repairers and data recovery providers are supporting Right To Repair for sustainable product and e-Waste so that everyone can keep using device longer rather than the controversial Planned Obsolescence 1, 2

Source(s)

• WCCFTech Article
• HTG’s Article