#iFixIt

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)

Today (September 22), I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. Tonight, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.

Why does Apple hate repair so much? It's not that they want to poison our water and bodies with microplastics; it's not that they want to hasten the day our coastal cities drown; it's not that they relish the human misery that accompanies every gram of conflict mineral. They aren't sadists. They're merely sociopathically greedy.

Tim Cook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple:

https://www.inverse.com/article/52189-tim-cook-says-apple-faces-2-key-problems-in-surprising-shareholder-letter

So Apple does everything it can to monopolize repair. Not just because this lets the company gouge you on routine service, but because it lets them decide when your phone is beyond repair, so they can offer you a trade-in, ensuring both that you buy a new device and that the device you buy is another Apple.

There are so many tactics Apple gets to use to sabotage repair. For example, Apple engraves microscopic Apple logos on the subassemblies in its devices. This allows the company to enlist US Customs to seize and destroy refurbished parts that are harvested from dead phones by workers in the Pacific Rim:

https://repair.eu/news/apple-uses-trademark-law-to-strengthen-its-monopoly-on-repair/

Of course, the easiest way to prevent harvested components from entering the parts stream is to destroy as many old devices as possible. That's why Apple's so-called "recycling" program shreds any devices you turn over to them. When you trade in your old iPhone at an Apple Store, it is converted into immortal e-waste (no other major recycling program does this). The logic is straightforward: no parts, no repairs:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

Shredding parts and cooking up bogus trademark claims is just for starters, though. For Apple, the true anti-repair innovation comes from the most pernicious US tech law: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

DMCA 1201 is an "anti-circumvention" law. It bans the distribution of any tool that bypasses "an effective means of access control." That's all very abstract, but here's what it means: if a manufacturer sticks some Digital Rights Management (DRM) in its device, then anything you want to do that involves removing that DRM is now illegal – even if the thing itself is perfectly legal.

When Congress passed this stupid law in 1998, it had a very limited blast radius. Computers were still pretty expensive and DRM use was limited to a few narrow categories. In 1998, DMCA 1201 was mostly used to prevent you from de-regionalizing your DVD player to watch discs that had been released overseas but not in your own country.

But as we warned back then, computers were only going to get smaller and cheaper, and eventually, it would only cost manufacturers pennies to wrap their products – or even subassemblies in their products – in DRM. Congress was putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, and it was bound to go off in Act III.

Welcome to Act III.

Today, it costs about a quarter to add a system-on-a-chip to even the tiniest parts. These SOCs can run DRM. Here's how that DRM works: when you put a new part in a device, the SOC and the device's main controller communicate with one another. They perform a cryptographic protocol: the part says, "Here's my serial number," and then the main controller prompts the user to enter a manufacturer-supplied secret code, and the master controller sends a signed version of this to the part, and the part and the system then recognize each other.

This process has many names, but because it was first used in the automotive sector, it's widely known as VIN-Locking (VIN stands for "vehicle identification number," the unique number given to every car by its manufacturer). VIN-locking is used by automakers to block independent mechanics from repairing your car; even if they use the manufacturer's own parts, the parts and the engine will refuse to work together until the manufacturer's rep keys in the unlock code:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

VIN locking is everywhere. It's how John Deere stops farmers from fixing their own tractors – something farmers have done literally since tractors were invented:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

It's in ventilators. Like mobile phones, ventilators are a grotesquely monopolized sector, controlled by a single company Medtronic, whose biggest claim to fame is effecting the world's largest tax inversion in order to manufacture the appearance that it is an Irish company and therefore largely untaxable. Medtronic used the resulting windfall to gobble up most of its competitors.

During lockdown, as hospitals scrambled to keep their desperately needed supply of ventilators running, Medtronic's VIN-locking became a lethal impediment. Med-techs who used donor parts from one ventilator to keep another running – say, transplanting a screen – couldn't get the device to recognize the part because all the world's civilian aircraft were grounded, meaning Medtronic's technicians couldn't swan into their hospitals to type in the unlock code and charge them hundreds of dollars.

The saving grace was an anonymous, former Medtronic repair tech, who built pirate boxes to generate unlock codes, using any housing they could lay hands on to use as a case: guitar pedals, clock radios, etc. This tech shipped these gadgets around the world, observing strict anonymity, because Article 6 of the EUCD also bans circumvention:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Of course, Apple is a huge fan of VIN-locking. In phones, VIN-locking is usually called "serializing" or "parts-pairing," but it's the same thing: a tiny subassembly gets its own microcontroller whose sole purpose is to prevent independent repair technicians from fixing your gadget. Parts-pairing lets Apple block repairs even when the technician uses new, Apple parts – but it also lets Apple block refurb parts and third party parts.

For many years, Apple was the senior partner and leading voice in blocking state Right to Repair bills, which it killed by the dozen, leading a coalition of monopolists, from Wahl (who boobytrap their hair-clippers with springs that cause their heads irreversibly decompose if you try to sharpen them at home) to John Deere (who reinvented tenant farming by making farmers tenants of their tractors, rather than their land).

But Apple's opposition to repair eventually became a problem for the company. It's bad optics, and both Apple customers and Apple employees are volubly displeased with the company's ecocidal conduct. But of course, Apple's management and shareholders hate repair and want to block it as much as possible.

But Apple knows how to Think Differently. It came up with a way to eat its cake and have it, too. The company embarked on a program of visibly support right to repair, while working behind the scenes to sabotage it.

Last year, Apple announced a repair program. It was hilarious. If you wanted to swap your phone's battery, all you had to do was let Apple put a $1200 hold on your credit card, and then wait while the company shipped you 80 pounds' worth of specialized tools, packed in two special Pelican cases:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/22/apples-cement-overshoes/

Then, you swapped your battery, but you weren't done! After your battery was installed, you had to conference in an authorized Apple tech who would tell you what code to type into a laptop you tethered to the phone in order to pair it with your phone. Then all you had to do was lug those two 40-pound Pelican cases to a shipping depot and wait for Apple to take the hold off your card (less the $120 in parts and fees).

By contrast, independent repair outfits like iFixit will sell you all the tools you need to do your own battery swap – including the battery! for $32. The whole kit fits in a padded envelope:

https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-x-replacement-battery

But while Apple was able to make a showy announcement of its repair program and then hide the malicious compliance inside those giant Pelican cases, sabotaging right to repair legislation is a lot harder.

Not that they didn't try. When New York State passed the first general electronics right-to-repair bill in the country, someone convinced New York Governor Kathy Hochul to neuter it with last-minute modifications:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/weakened-right-to-repair-bill-is-signed-into-law-by-new-yorks-governor/

But that kind of trick only works once. When California's right to repair bill was introduced, it was clear that it was gonna pass. Rather than get run over by that train, Apple got on board, supporting the legislation, which passed unanimously:

https://www.ifixit.com/News/79902/apples-u-turn-tech-giant-finally-backs-repair-in-california

But Apple got the last laugh. Because while California's bill contains many useful clauses for the independent repair shops that keep your gadgets out of a landfill, it's a state law, and DMCA 1201 is federal. A state law can't simply legalize the conduct federal law prohibits. California's right to repair bill is a banger, but it has a weak spot: parts-pairing, the scourge of repair techs:

https://www.ifixit.com/News/69320/how-parts-pairing-kills-independent-repair

Every generation of Apple devices does more parts-pairing than the previous one, and the current models are so infested with paired parts as to be effectively unrepairable, except by Apple. It's so bad that iFixit has dropped its repairability score for the iPhone 14 from a 7 ("recommend") to a 4 (do not recommend):

https://www.ifixit.com/News/82493/we-are-retroactively-dropping-the-iphones-repairability-score-en

Parts-pairing is bullshit, and Apple are scum for using it, but they're hardly unique. Parts-pairing is at the core of the fuckery of inkjet printer companies, who use it to fence out third-party ink, so they can charge $9,600/gallon for ink that pennies to make:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Parts-pairing is also rampant in powered wheelchairs, a heavily monopolized sector whose predatory conduct is jaw-droppingly depraved:

https://uspirgedfund.org/reports/usp/stranded

But if turning phones into e-waste to eke out another billion-dollar stock buyback is indefensible, stranding people with disabilities for months at a time while they await repairs is so obviously wicked that the conscience recoils. That's why it was so great when Colorado passed the nation's first wheelchair right to repair bill last year:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

California actually just passed two right to repair bills; the other one was SB-271, which mirrors Colorado's HB22-1031:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB271

This is big! It's momentum! It's a start!

But it can't be the end. When Bill Clinton signed DMCA 1201 into law 25 years ago, he loaded a gun and put it on the nation's mantlepiece and now it's Act III and we're all getting sprayed with bullets. Everything from ovens to insulin pumps, thermostats to lightbulbs, has used DMCA 1201 to limit repair, modification and improvement.

Congress needs to rid us of this scourge, to let us bring back all the benefits of interoperability. I explain how this all came to be – and what we should do about it – in my new Verso Books title, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

Image: Mitch Barrie (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daytona_Skeleton_AR-15_completed_rifle_%2817551907724%29.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

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kambanji (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/kambanji/4135216486/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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Rawpixel (modified) https://www.rawpixel.com/image/12438797/png-white-background

[adafruit]

iFixit + Adafruit - Hack, mod, and explore the Nintendo Alarmo ⏰🔧

Thanks, iFixit, for an awesome teardown — what a way to celebrate Mario Day! Now that we’ve seen what makes the Alarmo tick, let’s take it to the next level. It's a me! Ladyada from Adafruit, and we’re about to hack this clock and see what we can make it do. Power up, because here comes the fun!

[ralfmaximus]

iFixit.com is an amazing resource for DIY repairs on pretty much every electronic thing you own. I spent $18 with them last year on an earphone repair kit that saved my $250 Bose headphones from becoming e-waste.

And now they've ended their business relationship with Samsung because Samsung keeps lying and ghosting them on stuff like repair manuals and acquiring parts.

Oh, don't worry: iFixit is still gonna help you repair your busted Galaxy Tab or whatever, they're just doing it without Samsung's help any more. Same deal they have with Apple.

Meanwhile, in other news, it has been revealed Samsung has some pretty alarming language in its franchised repair contracts.

Basically, Samsung authorized repair places are required to report your personal data to Samsung, including name, email, street address, phone number, and embedded phone ID. Secondly they are REQUIRED to destroy any devices containing non-genuine Samsung repair parts, and notify Samsung of the perceived infraction.

What the actual fuck, Samsung.

[inkprovised]

Sorry, this might not be very interesting.😅

Cleaning and 'repairing' some old Nintendo stuff.

Next in line: new batteries for the GameBoy-Games and fixing our GameBoy and GameBoy color 🤣

[thesaltyace]

I've been using ifixit.com to repair my electronics for... over 15 years now? The first time I remember using them was to repair my MacBook circa 2008.

I just used their replacement batteries and spudger+pick set to breathe new life into both our PS5 controllers. About $80 to replace both batteries instead of spending about $160 on two new controllers. Less waste, less cost, took 15 minutes to do both replacements.

We need Right To Repair laws to make it easier to replace and upgrade worn out components instead of having to buy a whole new thing.

I fucking love iFixIt. 🫶🏻

[jonreytrevino]

My current hat setup

[gruvbox-official]

Since I'm kinda bored, I figured I'd show off the stickers on my thinkpad

[artsybi]

every time you open up an apple device you can just FEEL how angry apple are about right to repair. like i can tell you just want your phone to be smooth titanium and completely impenetrable but FUCK YOU I HAVE IFIXIT ON MY SIDE. GET ABSOLUTELY FUCKED

in related news my phone finally has a new battery and im very excited about it

[redheadedgirl]

I love my magnifying light 🧡

[dumbgirlgamedev]

So I've been busy...

It took about 2 and a half hours and was nerve wracking for every step but I modded my iPod classic and turned it into a very personal and special super nugget. It has 128gb of flash storage on it and it is so much lighter and faster than it was. I absolutely adore it and I am so happy with it! Take a look!

I do want to give special thanks to the following amazing people, without them this project wouldn't have happened:

IFixIt for the tools and the guide; their resources for replacing the iPod's click wheel was invaluable:

Elite Obsolete Electronics for the parts, this project would have been 100 times harder without them, check them out if you need replacement iPod parts:

DankPods for starting this whole project, his content got me into proper music listening and physically owning music again and his passion made me want to get into this hobby in the first place. Plus his guide on repairing old iPods were a major help! Please check out his channel if you're interested in music, headphones, and weird audio players:

[buckandduke]

turned out pretty good.

That was a storm dropped limb off a cedar tree, sawed on my sawmill and cut to size to replace the one the truck hit hauling sheep to the spring pasture. It’s a true dimension 2x6.

[adafruit]

iFixit + Adafruit - Hack, mod, and explore the Nintendo Alarmo ⏰🔧

Thanks, iFixit, for an awesome teardown — what a way to celebrate Mario Day! Now that we’ve seen what makes the Alarmo tick, let’s take it to the next level. It's a me! Ladyada from Adafruit, and we’re about to hack this clock and see what we can make it do. Power up, because here comes the fun!

[lizzielovessummer]

Digitizer fixed! This is a Kindle Fire 8, gen. 10.

Infodump 👇

I found out that with these touch screens, the lcd gives the image and the digitizer is the glass that goes on top that controls the touchscreen capabilities. In this case, the cracks were on the top digitizer part, but the lcd screen was still working. After covering the cracked glass with tape, I used the heat gun to soften the adhesive around the edge of the device holding those two layers together. Most of the work in this type of repair is in separating the two parts without damaging the lcd underneath and creating a huge mess of glass, but I found that ifixit has tutorials for almost everything, and it gave me some good tips, like checking to make sure the magnets on the casing did not accidentally migrate to the digitizer frame, and really highlighting where the ribbon connector to the digitizer was, as well as including pictures of how to disconnect stuff from the motherboard. I already had some tools, and the replacement screen ($20) came with tools as well, but I needed add some 3m double sided foam tape ($7) to attach the new digitizer to the lcd screen.

I destroyed a cricut mat with the heat gun, so I will likely add a silicone work mat and some new picks next time I order a repair part from ifixit, but as far as entertaining me for a couple hours this was great enrichment! For reference, a new screen (digitizer and LCD) is about $50 for this model. A new kindle replacement? This kodel runs at $100. I would much rather repair than throw away. Electronic waste is a terrible thing.

[definitivelydrivel]

Got home and broke down my friend's switch lite to replace the digitizer/screen

Turns out, the ifixit digitizer page warns that it doesn't include the LCD (which I knew) but completely neglected to mention that you have to buy the adhesive separately. Not even a link to the adhesive on their website.

I have a fully disassembled switch lite but no way to affix the old working LCD to the digitizer.

Fuck.

[awesomededersse]

Buy Now ou le pouvoir des médias sociaux et du marketing sur la surconsommation

Sorti en octobre dernier sur Netflix, le documentaire Buy Now sur Netflix illustre le lien entre le marketing sur les médias sociaux et la surconsommation en regardant la FOMO, le CTA et la dissimulation.

Sorti en octobre dernier sur Netflix, le documentaire Buy Now sur Netflix illustre le lien entre le marketing sur les médias sociaux et la surconsommation en regardant la FOMO, le CTA et la dissimulation. Le dernier vendredi de novembre annonce le Black Friday. Les gens se lanceront à l’assaut des magasins et des commerces en ligne, espérant faire de bonnes affaires. Pendant ce temps, des…

[dr-iphone]

iFixit 拆解 Apple Watch Series 10，內部細節全公開！

蘋果最新的 Apple Watch Series 10 外型設計更纖薄，螢幕也更大，但到底是怎麼設計把那麼多零件裝進去，才能讓手錶那麼纖薄呢？知名維修網站 iFixit 拆解了 46mm Apple Watch Series 10，讓大家一窺機身內部結構。 Continue reading iFixit 拆解 Apple Watch Series 10，內部細節全公開！