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When I switched over to an apple mac book for work, I did a lot of research including what some of appleâs hardcore critics like Louis Rossman has said about apple. While I agree with Rossman on right to repair and many of the issues he brings up with apple, it doesnât affect me much, because I waited to purchase a macbook until an applecare+ extension rolled out. I used to play a ton of steam games, but now only WoW which my mac book can run. I have had a dedicated gaming laptop for years and now it collects dust due to a dead battery.
While I consider myself âpro appleâ I donât think I am a mindless fan. (yet). Charging $300 for an ipad keyboard and $600 headphones in the middle of a pandemic is tone deaf. Making it harder for independent repair shops to fix the stuff you own, is also shady. But apple is a business and they want to control the entire user experience. Lying to lawmakers saying âitâs dangerous to fix your own stuff, because of fires,â when you can fix your car is sadly laughable.
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Iâm not sure what the pandemic has to do with anything here. Neither of these products are mandatory to survive the pandemic, and are luxury items.
You can use regular earbuds, and you can still type an email by using the keyboard on the touch screen.
Often times this criticism of Apple is framed from the perspective that these products are the ONLY option available to people, and it is simply not the case.
One also needs to look at the context. $550 headphones arenât even a remotely new thing in the audio world. While the Maxâs arenât quite audiophile grade, theyâre at the tip-toppest end of consumer audio dipping its toes into audiophile in terms of things like build quality, and that doesnât come cheap. These are essentially Sony WH-1000XM4âs if they were built like high-end corded headphones (which will cost at least $550, if not more, for similar build quality), better built-in DSP, and H1 chip.
If you donât want the build quality, DSP, or H1 bluetooth enhancement chip, the $320 XM4âs are there for you, and if you donât care for the XM4âs multi-device capabilities the XM3âs are just as good for ~$100 less. Nobodyâs twisting your arm and making you buy AirPods.
The most funny thing is that the crowd who consistently gets most twisted out of shape about apple products donât blink an eye at dropping $750-$1500 on a GPUs when $300-$500 models will get you within spitting distance of those at vastly better price-to-performance. Unless youâre in the handful of people who earn a living with them, those RTX 3080s and 3090s are just as much luxury items as Apple stuff is.
Itâs somewhat shaky, but not groundless. Back when MacBooks still had externally swappable batteries, a consistent problem was people balking at the price of a brand name battery (which Apple publicly sold back then) and buying a $30 noname off of Amazon or eBay, after which the batteries would bloat, catch on fire, or even brick the laptop. The same thing happens with internal batteries now, albeit at a much reduced rate since most people donât open their devices.
This is a problem with third party repair shops, too. Even with readily available official parts, many shops use questionable knockoffs instead to either boost their margins or offer service at unsustainable prices, which can then make the devices dangerous (in the case of batteries) or otherwise negatively impact the performance of the devices, for which the user then blames apple for instead of the repair shop.
Which wouldnât be a problem if manufactures made all their parts available for purchase by the customer and the repair shop.
Itâs really really hard for repair shops to get parts from apple products unless they have donor devices or contacts in China. However, apple not only tells their suppliers not to sell any of these parts, they also serialize the parts to the device, making repairs impossible. This was because people were buying apple products, taking all the parts out, swapping bad parts in, then returning the device. Why? Because apple wonât let you get parts, a problem apple created.
As I stated in my previous postâŚ
In other words, this is a problem thatâs not exclusive to Apple devices and also exists for devices where part supply is no issue, whether thatâs via an accessible part purchase program run by the manufacturer or just a side effect of the device in question being comprised of off-the-shelf OEM parts (common with PC laptops).
I wonât contest that Apple should improve their behavior here, but thereâs also no shortage of unethical repair shops. The bar to entry is low⌠anybody with enough capital to rent a mall booth and knowhow to use eBay or AliExpress can open one, which means in that space thereâs as many questionable profiteers as there are genuinely good repair shops. I think itâd be in the best interests of the industry to band together and reel the rogues in.
Personally Iâd prefer that these companies all had direct access to parts open to even general consumers, so those of who are more capable can just cut the middleman out entirely and know what weâre getting instead of potentially getting dished mystery meat from repair shops.
They look nice, but for $549? Those things better cancel my crippling depression for that price, too.
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