• luciole (he/him)@beehaw.org
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    8 months ago

    Apple sells an high end experience, not repairability. They don’t care about generating e-waste. AirPods for example are notoriously unrepairable. It’s just a matter of profitability. They’ve put in place a parts pairing technology to maintain a stranglehold on parts availability so as to circumvent legislation on repair. The obsolescence is planned. From the article:

    JJ: So what does that malicious compliance look like? It’s a rhetorical support for the right to repair, but when it actually pans out, it doesn’t look like what you’re actually calling for.

    GG: Yeah, the best example right now is what we call “parts pairing.” That’s been a problem all along, and we thought we had it nailed down in our template legislation, which we wrote back in 2015, that you can’t require specifically that you buy a part only from the manufacturer, and only new. And Apple got around it. They just said, “Well, we’re going to make sure that if you order a part from us, it’ll only work if you give us the serial number of your phone, and we preload that serial number into the part that we ship you, and that’ll work, but nothing else will.”