ElliotShane

“What? They can’t do that, can they? Really?”

“They can. I mean, they shouldn’t- but they can. I came out to a co-worker and then the next day I was booted.”

“If they’d done that to me, I would have just stolen something out of spite. Like… a stapler or something,” says the janitor. 

“Well… I was working for the zoo.”

That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.

My mom has an iPhone 6 Plus and hasn’t even had it for a year when one day it suddenly died and would not charge. So she took it to an authorized Apple repair place and they charged her $50 for a diagnostic only to tell her that she would have to buy a brand new phone.

So she decided to go to the AT&T store to talk to our usual guy that upgrades our phones and handles any problems for us. She tells him what’s wrong and he takes her phone to the back only to come out two minutes later, puts her phone on charge and it comes back to life. 

She asks him what was wrong with it that he managed to somehow fix when the people at the “authorized apple repair place” couldn’t. And you know what he told her?

All companies want you to buy their new products. None have gone to the lengths that Apple Inc. has gone to make end user repairs as impossible as is legally viable. I have been repairing electronics and computer systems privately, commercially and active duty in the US military for about 30 years. 

Apple puts extra effort into special hardware requiring proprietary tools that are only legally produced by their licensed manufacturer and can only be purchased through licensed repair shops if at all. 

Companies like iFixit can only exist as profit making companies because they are able to make workaround tools and kits that are still profitable but less of a blatant ripoff than Apple.