Writing this on a refurbished Thinkpad. Best laptop I’ve owned.
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This morning I heard NPRs national broadcast announce Apple and Amazon’s new agreement to sell Apple stuff, adding that Amazon was being active in “cracking down on counterfeit goods”.
I’ve bought two used iPhones through Amazon, for my wife and daughter. They have worked fine, you get what you pay for - in this case a perfectly serviceable phone that has worked for 2years at 1/4 the cost of a new or refurbished model. However Apple refused to do even the simplest thing - battery replacement - to them as part of their blocking.
I’m as big an apple fan as they come, but on this - screw them. Used product is a legitimate market, and not up to them. I’ll buy it on eBay next time and they can suck it.
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thats right! well, sort of:
yep, the rubberpad-“fix” comes from the “original manufacturer”. thats some serious craftsmanship, I tell ya!
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was amazon as bad as ebay?
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I don’t know if every 3rd party repair person knows their shit as well as this guy, but this guy appears to know his shit.
His videos on known Apple hardware issues has me just waiting for my MacBook Pro to burst into flames (its a work machine, though.)
OH hey, he has a video about this specific topic.
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I will buy a manufacture refurb over new anytime. Currently using a mid-2012 Apple manufacturer refurb MacBook Pro running Mojave 10.14.1 that has been rock solid since I bought it three years ago. Came with same warranty as new, and at less than half the price. Apple has always been very protective of their stuff, so I see their point even if I don’t necessarily agree with them. If third-party people are selling cheap knock-off shit on Amazon and folks who got sucked in are honestly reflecting their experience in their reviews, that should warn others away. My rule of thumb is, if a seller doesn’t have a 95% positive rating or higher on Amazon or eBay, we aren’t doing business.
Great. Then the free market will kill shitty refurbs all on its own. No laws necessary. Right?
From what I saw, Apple isn’t requiring standards. They are requiring high sales volume.
The point of the article is that Apple is trying to do what Henry Ford his-own-self could not: claim ownership over every aspect of their products, from manufacture to initial sales to resales to product end-of-life. Granted, Apple doesn’t need to buy a controlling share of a rubber plantation, but Jobs’ fundamental design philosophy rested on the idea that Apple’s executives and.engineers knew better than the customers about what said customers needed or wanted.
Their business practices seem to flow out of the idea that mere mortals who aren’t fully licensed (by Apple) only deserve to lease Apple products, not truly own them. Because if Apple surrendered control over their precious, precious products at the point of sale… The stockholders could potentially lose money! And they’ll have none of that .
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I think the general tenor here is that you shouldn’t be buying refurbs over the internet. If you do buy a refurbished device, then either from the original manufacturer (Apple, in this case) or from a local shop. And especially not from Amazon or eBay.
For the record, I have bought refurbished computers. The first was from Small Dog Computers (now Small Dog Electronics) and that 12" G4 MacBook lasted about 8 years before I replaced it. My first iPhone was also a refurbished one, from Apple in Germany.
So yeah, I object to the “war on repair” tenor here. It looks more like an attempt to cut off shady resellers and protect their reputation for good hardware that has longer lifespans than the competition.
You can get refurbished computers directly from Apple or from any number of other retailers.
This story may not be a good example of Apples “war on repair”, but that is absolutely the case. Luckily, you had no issues with your devices. If you had, you would probably been forced to buy new ones. Because when you take it back to Apple, 9 times out of 10 they are like, “OH this thing is FUUUUCCCKKKKED. Let me show you the new models.” Anything worse than “turning it off and turning it back on again” would result in needing a new mother board or some other costly solution. (This is only partly an exaggeration.)
Now if you took it to a private repair shop, someone who knows what they are doing, they have to do any repairs with one hand tied behind their back. The actual official diagnostic tools Apple does have it dosen’t make available. It doesn’t make spare parts available. And worse yet, they have had known hard ware issues on various models, and don’t stand behind their product unless sued.
So yeah, just poke around some tech sites and you will see so many stories like above. I linked a video above, if you view that guys channel, you can see so many examples of this issue.
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The manufacturer can demand source tracking. See Sandisk. The number of counterfeit Sandisk memory cards is near zero now.
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I did let a third party swap the hard drive on my 2010 iMac for an SSD, and I did have the battery in my 4S replaced by an “Apple Premier Parter”, but you are right in that I rarely needed repairs.
Oh, and I still use the iMac on a daily basis, though mostly for writing code and browsing the web.
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