iPhone 14 iFixit teardown shows Apple’s learning on repairs
The iPhone 14 harbors a secret that’s a pretty big deal: The internals have been redesigned to make it more repairable, says iFixit. Gone is an excessive use of glue and solder, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in his iPhone 14 teardown report. Instead, Wiens said, the iPhone 14 features a butterfly-style design with a pop-off screen and back plate that can be removed with nothing but a single pair of screws, as you can see below.
Wiens said the iPhone 14’s design is a “dramatic rethinking” of Apple’s flagship device that signals right-to-repair advocates have won yet another victory against Apple, a long-standing opponent of the self-repair movement. But the legislative tide is turning and Apple sees which way the wind is blowing.
“This design improvement is a big win. These changes to the iPhone will help it last longer and reduce its overall impact on the planet. With any luck, it will inspire other manufacturers to follow suit. All of our—and your—work has paid off. Our advocating, lobbying, yelling in the streets. We’ve convinced Apple’s design team that repairability matters,” Wiens said in his teardown post. (The Register)
iOS 16.0.1 is shown to recant certain repair locks in the iPhone 14, but not the 14 Pro
Apple is well-known for baking replacement part-detection measures into iOS, resulting in error messages and broken functions should a user dare to do something like replace their own iPhone’s display. The new 14 Pro flagship has shown itself to be just as repair-unfriendly as the 13 Pro in the latest video from a prominent device-repair YouTuber – however, a comparable video may prove that these issues have gone away in the vanilla 14.
The YouTuber Phone Repair Guru claims to have established that the base-model Apple flagship has also dropped at least some of the software locks that normally impair or even break potentially important features should its system detect a non-factory display, battery or logic board.
Unfortunately, the 14 Pros proceeded to exhibit symptoms about as severe as the pair of 13 Pros before them. The 14 did not drop its own errors until it was updated to iOS 16.0.1; however, this was not the case in the Pro, with 1 unit even “rejecting its original camera” under the newer version after swapping it back. (notebookcheck)
India’s Demand For Refurbished Gadgets Rising: E-Repair Market All Set To Boom
Earlier this month, Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT) presented the benefits and future scope of these services to the union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. Nitin Kunkolienker, president emeritus of MAIT, opines that incentivizing local manufacturing of components is critical for such services to flourish in an economy.
Kunkolienker stated: “One of the key aspects of promoting a homegrown repair services economy is to ensure that the components are being sourced locally, which has not happened extensively so far. India has a robust supply chain that caters to various industries, which can diversify to procure and manufacture components that are critical for a local repair economy to grow.”
Nitin Gupta, the CEO of electronic waste recycling firm Attero India, said the company has seen a clear growth in the volume of e-waste that it collects and recycles every year though the benefits of these actions have not trickled down to companies in India so far.
As India needs to formalize the domestic market for third-party repair and refurbishment of electronic items, Chowdhry opines that initiatives such as Flipkart’s acquisition of refurbishing and repair services startup, Yantra, earlier this year are crucial baby steps. Other example includes the Onsite-Go and Urban Company’s partnership, which provides at-home repair services for smartphones, laptops and other common gadgets. (ElectronicsB2B)
Welsh government focuses on circular economy and extended producer responsibility
Dr Andy Rees OBE, head of waste strategy at the Welsh government, has outlined the steps Wales is taking towards achieving a circular economy, including greater support for reuse and repair hubs. The Welsh government’s goal is to support 80 reuse and repair hubs in town centres.
The head of waste strategy also touched upon other aspects of legislation, mentioning Wales’s moratorium on energy from waste facilities with a capacity over 10MW, which was introduced in March 2021 due to “incineration not being part of circular economy”. In terms of the future, Dr Rees talked about the forthcoming extended producer responsibility for packaging regime, highlighting Wales and Scotland’s plans to include local authorities’ costs for cleaning litter and emptying street bins.
Next year’s legislation will also see non-domestic premises obliged to segregate recycling as commingled streams will no longer be accepted, he said. Ahead of the consistency regime to be rolled out in 2027, the Welsh government has plans to undertake a trial to figure out the best way to phase plastic film into kerbside collections. Dr Rees added that “this is something we need to explore and work towards with the plastic recycling industry”. (LetsRecycle)
MA Auto Repair Case: Revised Guidance Dashes Hopes For Pre-Emptive Rules
Two procedural orders issued on September 14, 2022 by the Massachusetts federal court in Alliance for Automotive Innovation v. Healy suggest that a public decision in that case is unlikely to be forthcoming until October 2022 at the earliest. The case involves a challenge by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade association representing manufacturers in the automotive industry, to recent changes to the Massachusetts Right to Repair Law. Those changes, adopted by Massachusetts voters via a ballot initiative in November 2020, require that commencing with Model Year 2022 (MY22), vehicles sold in Massachusetts using telematics systems be equipped with “an inter-operable, standardized and open access platform” to enable customers and independent repair shops to access mechanical data from those systems.
Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (“NHTSA”) recently published an update to its 2016 guidance on vehicle cybersecurity best practices. In the update, NHTSA recommended that OEMs strike a balance between the need for cybersecurity and third party access to the type of data that is at the heart of the Right to Repair litigation. But NHTSA also recognized that “the balance between third party serviceability and cybersecurity is not necessarily easy to achieve.” NHTSA’s guidance continues to be non-binding and voluntary, a point the Attorney General has made in the litigation to argue that the Right to Repair Law does not conflict with and therefore is not preempted by any binding federal law. (Seyfarth.com)
📅 Event: Intellectual Property and the Right to Repair on October 12th (This event will be in French)