The Right to Repair Movement Is Forcing Apple to Change
Found on Motherboard on Sunday, 18 June 2017
For the better part of the last decade, every design decision Apple has made has seemingly been in the pursuit of making its products thinner and more beautiful at the expense of upgradability and repairability.
Apple's authorized repair program leaves a lot to be desired—companies must pay a fee to join the program, and those who join aren't allowed to do many types of repair (such as a charge port replacement, which is trivially easy for any repair professional).
If consumers buy a product, they own it completely. If they want to take it apart to repair it, it's their right. If Apple wants to change that, it should rent hardware to the fanbois; but that would cause another load of problems for the company because customers would return defective hardware and demand a free replacement. On the other hand, that could result in better and more reliable hardware and reduce interest in planned obsolescence.