Apple: don't fix your phone, peasant!

Seen at Slashdot and at Instapundit, this datum should inform your choice for your next phone. You'll have to decide if you want to pay a thousand bucks for a phone that can't be repaired.

The lengthy [Apple shareholder] letter cites, specifically, that people are buying fewer iPhones because they are repairing their old ones. Apple has long fought efforts that would make iPhones easier to repair: It has lobbied against right to repair efforts in several states, doesn't sell iPhone replacement parts, sued an independent repair professional in Norway, worked with Amazon to get iPhone and MacBook refurbishers kicked off Amazon Marketplace, and has deals with electronics recyclers that require them to shred iPhones and MacBooks (as opposed to allowing them to be refurbished.) The Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, has seized iPhone replacement parts from prominent right to repair activists in the United States.

[...] Apple has never clearly articulated why it doesn't want people to fix their own iPhones or to have independent experts repair them. It has previously said that iPhones are "too complex" for users to repair them, even though replacing a battery is pretty easy and is done by average users all the time. But the fact that repair hurts Apple's bottom line came out in Cook's official communication with shareholders, who he is legally obligated to tell the truth to.

Now, we all knew this at some visceral sort of level. Down deep in your heart, you could feel that Apple did not want you to fix that iPhone. They don't sell repair parts, right? I can get repair parts for almost anything from a shovel to a big-screen TV. I can certainly get parts for my Samsung phone. But not an iPhone. And why couldn't you even open an iPhone without all kinds of specialized knowledge and tools? Because they wanted you to give up and buy a new one.

We have also seen that Apple really and truly was slowing down older phones and iPads. You didn't imagine it, it was slower. Which would have been okay-ish, I suppose, if they hadn't done it in secret. Which they certainly did.

I've seen a few generations of these phones taken apart. They are -shoddy- inside. Things like wifi antennas break because they are made of super thin plastic and stuck on with hot-melt glue like a kid's craft project. The phone gets hot, the glue softens, and the antenna wanders out of its socket. Or the plastic perishes and the teensy-tiny little ribbon wires break. Engineers don't do things like that by accident. They know it will break. But more than that, they know -when- it will break.

Back in the 1970s with the Ford Pinto we all learned a new term: planned obsolescence. This is a business maneuver where a company designs a traditionally durable-good product, like a car, dishwasher, phone, electric motor or what have you, with a deliberately limited lifespan. The Ford Pinto was famous because it rusted out in four-to-five years, and would go on fire in low-speed collisions.  Ford made it that way to maximize profit by minimizing production and material costs. They calculated that it would be cheaper to pay off potential lawsuits than build the car properly. And, they knew it would be easier to buy a new car than fix the rusty one.

Tim Cook and company in the Apple leadership seem to have remembered the planned obsolescence part, but they forgot the part where Ford nearly went bankrupt from the class-action lawsuits over corrosion and exploding cars killing people. The company was served with murder charges, which nearly sent the Ford corner-office guys to jail in 1980.

Lately we've seen a big advertising push from Apple that their next-gen 10-s phones will last longer, to be more environmentally friendly.

Sure. I believe those boys care about the environment. Because their failed attempt to make the phones legally unrepairable would have nothing to do with that, right?

Note to read-until-offended Lefties: When I say that Silicon Valley Liberals are a bunch of lying assholes who do not mean a single word they say, this type of thing above is why. Tim Cook, for sure, does not care a single damn about the environment, or Diversity!!!, or anything other than the almighty dollar. Just turn the sound off and watch what he does.

UPDATE: It seems Apple has finally discovered that humans don't like being spied on.

My thoughts on this parallel my thoughts on Tim Cook's ecology crusade. Their whole business model is built on iPhones tracking their owner's movements and interests. They make more out of selling that data to advertisers than they make out of selling the phones.

Seeing that sign makes me giggle. What happens on your iPhone gets transmitted to Cupertino every ten seconds.

To be fair, Android is no better. The only difference between them is the location of the server farms. But please, lets not pretend Apple gives a good Goddamn about your privacy. They're the reason you don't have any.