Dark Month for Apple Repairs

The Garage
#1

I would like to speak personally for a moment on an issue that is quite important to me. The subject matter is difficult and polarising, considering the specialty of this website and discussion forum, but I’ll aim to be as reasonable as I can be. I’m not seeking conflict. I’m just concerned.

http://9to5mac.com/2016/07/01/tekserve-closure-louis-rossman-videos/

I started repairing computers and electronics when I was seven years old. I bought my first computer with pocket change, around five dollars in total, and a bunch of scrap parts. It’s been my passion and even my identity for as long as I can remember. When I turned 18, I landed my first job at an Apple service centre repairing Macs, and the rest is history.

Never before have I actually feared for the future of consumer electronics and repair as much as I do now.

Computer and electronics repairers lost a battle last month when the Fair Repair Bill, which aimed to allow independent repairers to provide repair services to customers without fear of legal action, was dismissed by the New York State senate and not even tabled for a vote following input from a consortium of manufacturers including Apple, IBM, Cisco and Xerox, who actively opposed the bill.

So it was a dark time for independent repairers.

The second blow came in the form of the announcement that Tekserve, precursor to the Apple Store and one of the worlds most notable and loved Apple Resellers and Authorised Service Providers, would cease operations as of August 15th after 29 years in the Apple business. The company cited a “cultural shift” as being a key contributor to the demise of their business.

“This is a cultural shift,” the company’s chief executive, Jerry Gepner, said in an interview in his office above the store. “It’s not a failure of the business. It’s like this giant wave finally crashed down upon us.”

The company was a popular destination for Apple enthusiasts to purchase, repair and talk products with other enthusiasts. It was less of a retail front and more of a gathering place. Lined with products from throughout Apple’s history and set in an old-world charm that made them perhaps the most well known name in the Apple reseller and service provider business not just in America but around the world, Tekserve was as much of a free exchange of knowledge, history and wisdom as it was a place for customers to come and have their needs taken care of.

“We love our customers, and we love what we do,” Mr. Gepner said. “But there comes a point where that doesn’t make sense anymore, as much as we love it.”

It stands to reason that if the most loved among us can fall, anyone can. As Apple continues to move more toward mail-in depot repairs rather than carry-in to a local authorised service provider, and withholds necessary equipment, diagnostic tools and service parts to Apple’s own repair depots and retail stores, that it will only become more difficult for service centres to continue supporting the products that Apple sells.

Which is a shame. Because Apple Stores won’t service products like the service centres do. You can’t have a hard drive replaced in a vintage product, or a machine that has been removed from sale for 5 years or more, at an Apple Store because Apple doesn’t service vintage products. Apple won’t preserve your data, or rebuild your filesystem, or rescue those precious photos, because at the Genius Bar a software issue is a complete wipe and reinstall. All services that at one point the local service providers were able to offer, but that too will soon come to an end.

The third blow hits home the hardest. Louis Rossmann, owner and primary technician of the Rossmann Repair Group in New York City, has long been an outspoken advocate of the repair industry. He provides services to customers that most other repairers can’t offer, including Logic Board rework and repair, data recovery from failed boards and SSDs, screen replacements on MacBook Air and Pro Retina, and then some, often at a cost significantly less than what the Apple Store would charge. In addition he services machines that Apple have deemed too old to service.

But he is most well known for his repair videos on YouTube, where he teaches others with no electrical background or prior experience the basics of how electronic components work, how to troubleshoot faults in electronic circuits and how to repair their own Logic Boards at home. I learned a lot from Louis, including how to repair my own MacBook Pro 17" when its Logic Board failed and how to troubleshoot and repair a water damaged Retina MacBook Pro when it wouldn’t start up and return it to service. Prior to attempting these repairs I had no experience in repairing circuit boards, but in his videos and through direct correspondence with him on occasion, I now absolutely love it. So I have great respect and admiration for Louis. I couldn’t thank him enough.

But Louis’ repair business may face a difficult road ahead, after a video he uploaded contained a rather ominous message of impending legal action or dispute between himself and a company that is yet to be identified.

Louis has since updated his video to state he is not being sued, but he has “no idea what I’m getting actually… and the suspense sucks”.

The community has since rallied around Louis and Rossmann Repair Group, mirroring his videos and making the entire catalog available via torrent should YouTube receive a takedown request and close the channel. Without knowing exactly what he is facing due to the vague nature of the video and scarce information being made available, it has been a tense 24 hours for not only Louis, but also the wider community of repair technicians that looked to him and his resources for information and guidance.

But it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of challenges ahead for the repair industry of consumer products, both authorised and independent. Unfortunately as is common, a lot of it is under non-disclosure and not able to be made available as public knowledge. As a matter of fact, everything I mentioned above I am able to state because it’s information that has already been made available to the public, complete with public-facing sources such as 9to5mac, iFixit, YouTube and Reddit, and nothing I have said is subject to confidentiality.

With all of these factors combined, whenever I think about it, I’m left with the same conclusion every time - I’m afraid of what comes next. I think the fear of being out of work is a contributing factor but the fear of where we are headed in consumer electronics, and the power that companies are free to exert over someone doing independent repairs and sharing that knowledge with others, scares me a lot more.

It leaves me with a dilemma, whether to stand my ground and continue working to my strengths, perhaps becoming a circuit repairer or a specialist in a different area, or whether to leave the service and repair industry altogether for something with more stability, less restrictive and not as open to litigation, although thankfully that last one is not so much of an issue here.

I wouldn’t be the only one in the computer industry reconsidering their future given recent events. I sure would appreciate knowing how they intend to deal with it though. Ah well. All in due course.

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#2

It always saddens/annoys me when yet another nail is hammered into the repair coffin. There will always be a place for specialist repair and maintenance service, but not for the level or number of those providing the service.

I’ve always repaired/serviced/upgraded my own machines, but now laptops are next to unserviceable to me, my hands and fingers are too big to work on machines such as current Mac Minis. My main gripe is the fragility of parts used even if I can get access to the boards.

It really “annoys” me when the confidentiality clause is wielded unnecessarily, service material denied, (and I won’t be surprised if intentionally vague),and parts not generally available.

All power to the independent repair specialists, but I believe you guys are pretty much the last generation before the chuck-and-replace model over whelms the general populace.

Best of Luck.

#3

I’m wondering, what does all of this mean for sites like ifixit? Ifixit and others like it are obviously an invaluable resource for self repairers/upgraders. It would be a travesty if they were made to shutdown.

#4

iFixit should be safe. Louis Rossmann needs access to proprietary schematics and board views to perform component level repairs, and because he teaches board repair that means making some of that information available, such as component ratings and manufacturer part numbers, to others so they can repair boards as well. That’s where the legal grey area is.

iFixit doesn’t need access to proprietary information to show you how to replace a drive or display, so manufacturers don’t have a valid reason to pursue them.

#5

It’s pretty much curtains for the independent repairers. I’d be stunned if there’s any significant ones left in the next decade.

I’d bet good money the new MacBook Pros will have soldered SSDs to complement the RAM, and once that happens, add 5 years to vintage status and there won’t be enough serviceable machines left in circulation to even do repairs on.

It’s just a changing business. Customers aren’t willing to wait for repairs, want more compact / light products, and the convergence of this is to have the system we do now, for better or worse.

Personally, I don’t mind it, but it has very little impact on me.

#6

Being an independent repairer is reaching the point of requiring board level repair again, swapping components and modules isn’t cutting it. This becomes more important when SSDs start getting soldered onto boards, when component level repair is required for data recovery.

But it’s become such a negative industry. Closed products, corporate policies, litigation, dissatisfied customers who purchase closed machines then complain when it can’t be repaired, an increasingly negative perception of independents and even authorised providers, and the sense of impending doom that makes me wish I had trained in a different field altogether. Or at least not chosen to specialise in Apple products.

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#7

Warranty repair costs are a huge burden for companies, something made more troublesome by dishonest customers. It suited Apple perfectly to not have the iPhone openable and customers sticking dodgy 3rd party batteries and memory cards inside and breaking their phones, as they tended to do with Macs.

I recall at one point that Apple were going to refuse warranty service on machines that were using other than Apple RAM, though they backtracked after an outcry.

Heck, I had a customer buy a lampshade iMac, take it home, break the motherboard installing the RAM, then insisting on a replacement on the spot for his own, very expensive mistake. Then let’s not talk about all the gross fraud perpetrated by various authorised repair agents.

Indeed though, the unlucky ones are going to be the people who don’t need new machines and are happily using 10-year old Macs which they’d rather keep going. I rather wish there were a Raspberry Pi-cheap Mac which could work for them.

1 Like
#8

This comment reminds me of a tweet I saw the other day…

Remember when building a #Hackintosh was about getting a cheap "Mac"?

Today it's about getting #macOS-running hardware that's not outdated.

— Felix Schwarz (@felix_schwarz) June 30, 2016
1 Like
#9

In 1997 a lightning strike took out my just recently acquired Macintosh Quadra 840av… (Sorry, just love saying that name… sad I know.)

AppleCentre Darwin quoted me something like $1,200 to repair - nearly twice the price I’d paid for the machine 1 month earlier - which simply consisted of changing the logic board.

For my parents insurance, I had to get a second quote… But there was no other Apple repairer in the Northern Territory… so I had to take it to a company that did electrical repairs. They looked at the logic board, and said they could clearly see the components/path that the lightning took… and quoted a lower price to repair - just replacing the bad bits…

Ok, now ultimately I convinced the assessors to go with AppleCentre, because they were authorised to perform the repair… But - without insurance, the Q840av would have become a doorstop (a lot sooner than it did.) But without the insurance, I’d never have been able to pay for the repair…

Later… I heard several people say they’d managed to replace the bad caps on faulty eMacs (before Apple implemented their Repair Program). If it weren’t for my email to Steve achieving a positive result - again component repair would have been my only option, because again Apple’s repair price was something like $900 on a machine that retailed for $1,599 and was only 18 months old…

So - whilst I’ve not used component level repair, the thought of Apple making repairs impossible… (even such as how they use so much glue these days instead of screws) certainly gets my goat, and IMO can only be seen as a push to force obsoletism…

I absolutely applaud your efforts, iMic, and hope that people will continue to find ways around Apple’s penny pinching.

cheers

cosmic

#11

Lawsuit against Apple over the design of their butterfly key caps due to a spec of dust requiring a $700 repair bill…

It’s just obscene.

I think back to the Pismo era, with the keyboard that simply popped out… No idea what a replacement cost compared to the price of the machine, but I’m sure it was less than 1/3 the RRP…

Do modern construction methods really reduce the cost of production by such a degree as to be worthwhile to anyone other than Apple?

#12

For what it’s worth, I’d replace the Top Case with Keyboard assembly at a cost of $819.00 AUD, assuming around $140 for a single hour of labour and $679 for the part, factoring in overheads and of course GST. It’s an expensive repair.

That’s being conservative as well, considering the amount of work required. Two hours of labour would be considered the norm.

I’d imagine it reduces manufacturing costs in some sense, since riveting the keyboard into the machine and adhering the battery cells in requires less effort than screwing in hundreds of individual screws. But the drawbacks are pretty significant, like the cost of replacement or the waste generated when replacing one component like the battery. Those top cases aren’t being refurbished either as it simply doesn’t make sense. How can one “refurbish” a worn battery, shiny key caps or scuffed housing?

And it has drawbacks within Apple’s own supply chain. Apple had difficulty supplying replacement Top Case with Battery assemblies for over 12 months, starting early last year and ending only a couple of weeks ago. They couldn’t manufacture them fast enough, and customers needing batteries, housings, keyboard or trackpads all had to wait - often months - for a replacement.

If those components were separately replaceable, we could replace the affected component and leave the rest, drawing only from the parts pool of the components we needed, and taking pressure off the supply chain for this one integrated Top Case assembly.

It’s unbelievably stupid. Any cost or process advantages they bought themselves in assembly were offset by the hassle, supply shortages and cases they had to give away for free to placate inconvenienced and disappointed customers. They caused the problem, and both they and the customers had to deal with the consequences.

And if they have to issue a repair extension program for this current batch of keyboard issues, it’ll most certainly happen again, only this time the larger scale of the issue means it’ll be significantly worse than before.

#13

For the up front cost alone, buying a new Mac is not on the cards for me. Add to that what I see as a lot of form over function, my desire to own new decreases further. But knowing that something as simple as a broken key on the keyboard could cost me more than 1/3 the cost of the device… ?

Having something MAJOR like a dead logicboard is one thing. That I can understand costing a huge proportion of the buying price. But a key?

sits shaking his head

I could see some bean-counter explaining it to management - “Only x will fail in this way, which is a very small % of the customer base - Not enough to worry about the fact that the repair bill will be ginormous.”

And - Apple are still selling hardware using this philosophy of lack of repairability. People are still buying them. So - enough people don’t care about it, such as to allow Apple (and others) to continue doing it.

I remember learning that if you damaged the rear door on a Rav4, from an insurance perspective - the car was written off. It was too time consuming to replace, so it was cheaper to buy the customer a new car rather than fix 1 door. That was nearly 20 years ago. So much waste taking over our lives.

If the AIs don’t kill us, we’ll just use up all our resources and be back to using horse and carts. (Til we’ve cleared all the forests to build the bloody carts, because every time a wheel falls off we’ll need to go buy a new one!)

1 Like
#14

Yes. Apple can bang on about recyclability and robots taking apart iPhones till the cows come home, but producing the sort of non repairable and upgradable hardware it does does the bulk of the damage.

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#15

From my experience, a lot of customers don’t know. A common phrase I hear whenever someone brings a Mac in for service with a major component failure is “I thought Apple stuff wasn’t supposed to have these problems?” It’s a throwback to when Microsoft was pushing Vista, and customers came across to the Mac in droves for a more trouble-free experience.

Repairability and reliability isn’t an issue for most customers until they discover how much the repair, if one is even possible, will cost. Then suddenly it becomes a major factor in their future purchasing decisions.

And there are many examples where Apple has eroded the public’s trust in recent times that are starting to come back to get them.

There are certainly more examples too. These tactics aren’t exclusive to Apple, but in a time when consumers are questioning the practices of large tech firms, Apple is doing themselves no favours by behaving this way. Some could argue that most consumers will never notice, or simply don’t care, but these instances are now becoming more common knowledge, and tarnishing a reputation is often a death by a thousand cuts. If you lose one customer here or there, word starts to travel, and over time the company runs a serious risk of losing the hearts and minds.

#16

Wow, I never knew it was quite this bad. It will certainly make me seriously consider other options before spending my hard earned money on Apple products - especially given that I can buy an equivalently spec’d (actually better since it has a gen 8 CPU) PC for over $1000 less than the equivalent Mac from Apple.

#17

My son’s iPad wants to be updated right now, and one of the notes in the “about this update” states that 3rd party screen replacements may cease working. I couldn’t believe that when I saw it! Yes, I have no idea about the workings of these things, but to me that just sounded like Apple punishing people for taking a cheaper option than using their expensive parts to repair their expensive devices… (Thankfully it’s not an issue - his iPad is still 100% stock standard.)

#18

Are you suggesting that Apple should guarantee that 3rd-party replacement screens must work with an iOS device? That would be ridiculous. It would be like trying to fit a Holden gearbox inside a Ford. It may work, but unlikely to.

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#19

No that’s not the implication at all, it’s more like only being able to use Holden spark-plugs in a Holden and not allowing you to purchase and install any other type, and even worse totally disabling the vehicle if you don’t use their parts.
That said the position on parts is acceptable while the device is under warranty but outside of this it is completely unacceptable and quite possibly illegal in a number of countries.

#20

The screen of an iOS device is more important to the operation of the device than mere spark-plugs for a car. Apple is NOT punishing people for using cheaper parts, they’re simply not taking responsibility for cheaper, non-approved parts being used in their devices.

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#21

As noted - I am not aware of the technicalities of the hardware. I was working on the evidently false theory that a touch-screen built to xyz specs was a touch-screen built to xyz specs.