Who is Apple to say who can open something they've paid their hard earned money.
I've seen people throw their phones in anger, and Apple nor any other manufacturer doesn't care, and they won't repair the device for free since it wasn't designed to be operated in such a manner., since throwing a phone is not a normal operation of the device.
Where I live there is a radio consumer advocate that does a segment once or twice a year called "Crap I bought" and they have hundreds of people take things to have them crushed that are still in properly working order and Apple products have been among some of the things people have taken to have crushed or destroyed along with PCs, and Macs.
These people could donate the items to charity but choose to destroy them because they belong to them, and they can do whatever they want to them. If someone tinkers with something and it stops working that's their problem not Apple's. Apple isn't going to fix anything that has been tampered with by someone unauthorized to take it a part or fix it.
I don't know of any other company that repairs things people take a part that they bought. It belongs to the person who bought it, and they can do whatever they want with it. they don't have to have a degree. it's their property.
If I throw my phone at someone's window and break the window, who is responsible for breaking the window? Me!, they're going to say I threw "MY" phone through their window, and I'll have to pay to replace the window, the manufacturer of the phone will never be mentioned.
FYI, I've repaired everything I've owned if it needed repair and it worked out just fine for me. I learned how to do it from tinkering with variuos devices.
How do you think Steve Jobs and Bill Gates learned the things they knew? neither one of them had college degrees but they did tinker with devices they bought.
Apple certainly isn't preventing you from tampering with your iDevice. Pentalobe drivers are readily available on-line. Apple is merely hindering unsophisticated users from damaging the product. I have degrees in both electronics and physics. I wouldn't ever consider opening up my iPhone. Not only would it void the warrenty, but chances are slim I would ever be able to reassemble it properly since I don't know what special methods were used to assemble it in the first place. I would consider myself to be an idiot to even consider trying it.
Let me know how fixing your iDevise yourself works for you, and how smart it was to do it.
ChasChas - I agree 100% - add a warranty seal but make it easy to open.
Recently, my kids dropped our Nintendo Wii, and the disk was stuck in the drive. The unit is out of warranty....so I had nothing to lose. However, I found that it uses special screws that have a triangular driver. A little googling and I found and ordered a screwdriver made specifically for Wii for a few bucks. The only "pain" was waiting a week for the special screwdriver...but then I was able to fix the Wii easily.
Apple is pretty good at what they do - but they are also an arrogant, closed, overly expensive brand....an extension of Steve Job's personality. How soon people forget the fiascos with iPods with non-removable batteries, iPhones with disfunctional antennas, etc. Another example of Apple's arrogance was when they led an industry consortium to create the 1394 (Firewire) interface as a universal industry-standard open spec. Then, a few years later Steve Jobs tried to sue everyone that used the interface, saying that it was an Apple "proprietary" standard. This was total BS, of course, and Apple lost their case.
Give me a break, a lot of people make modifications to their homes without getting a permit, and they only get in trouble if as in my state a building inspector happens to drive by their property. Really how would a building inspector know I divided a large room into two or made my bathroom larger?
My mother owns a house and when she went to have a new addition put onto the house, the existing addition was not on file with the building department the person who owned the house built two additions onto the house and never registered them with the building department if the previous owners had applied for a permit the additions plans would have been on file.
The house had not been modified since the 60s and to the best of my knowledge the previous home owners were not fined anything for making the improvements, because if they had there would have been a record.
As I stated, the irony is that Steve Jobs, Steve Wosniak and Bill Gates were all tinkerers, and owe a great deal of success to their respective companies for being able to do things like take a part electronic devices or look at code to see how these devices worked.
The very thing they hypocritically don't want others to do now, the world hates hypocrites, then again if you're a hypocrite I guess you don't. I find it interesting how these companies talk about these guys as being innovative when they start out, and then these guys get a closed world mentality.
Google is another company that used open source software to build it's company and it's only been recently that they've opened up or given back to the open source community the very community they were able to obtain free open source code to build their empire.
Without those people who tinker and take things a part, you stifle innovation.
A lot of bugs that pop up in Apple products as well as many products by other manufacturers are pointed out by hacks tinkering around with products they purchased from those companies.
Not to mention that too many people have too high an opinion of themselves and their skills and would end up doing substandard work. Even the "pros" aren't necessarily good as Mike Holmes shows prove.
I'm not defending Apple, just saying that one of their reasons for using non-standard hardware is to help ensure that an untrained person not be able to readily take the device apart. As was posted elsewhere, the required driver can be bought, so it isn't like a person can't do it regardless of what Apple wants.
Besides, opening these things allows the owner to do what? Now I have not opened an Apple iWTF but I bet that there's little to nothing to fix. They aren't like a stereo or CD player of years ago. They are comprised of proproetary chips and even if not proprietary are difficult to work with, and special spec'ed components. I bet you can think of no one in your circle of friends who would be able to "work" on one of these. Take a look at the iPod Nano and tell me what you'd fix.
Like my initial post implied, I'd be able to open one regardless of what the manufacturer intended, and I have, only to find that I'm f'd and couldn't fix a GD thing. Even when I could fix something, like an LED monitor, I had no schematic and they wouldn't give me one as the manufacturer was driven by liability concerns from an owner getting hurt while working on their product with a schematic that they supplied. So, I shot off a letter to the CEO stating precisely what you posted, and voila, they repaired it for free!
So, go ahead and defeat the will of the manufacturer and learn that the problem isn't that they used non-standard HW, but that there's nothing you can fix anyway.
Regarding owning your own home, and being able to make changes,
1. Certain modifications require building approvals and construction licenses from the city, county, or state.
2. Certain modifications (electrical, HVAC, plumbing, gas lines) require the work be done by licensed professionals and inspected after the work to certify compliance.
3. Zoning restrictions can prohibit certain types of animals, control easements, and limit construction within property boundaries.
Sure, an individual can ignore any of these, but then they are subject to penalties, and attempting resale of the property may be difficult if the potential owner requests property inspection and the home is found out of code or in violation of easements and restrictions.
This is not saving people from themselves. An iPod is not a breaker panel/load center that untrained people should not attempt to work inside. It is a piece of consumer electronics with GRAS voltages inside. If the consumer breaks it further by his exploration inside the case, that's squarely on them.
To even THINK about trying to defend the use of those relatively non-standard screws (which are obviously intended to keep the owners out) is ridiculous, and I can almost picture those defenders genuflecting as they praise the manufacturers and their use of those screws.
Those oddball screws are NOT on display cases of rare pieces of art that should be protected from the public by similar tamper-proof screws. They are on equipment that is purchased and OWNED by individuals, and non-standard, harder-to-find drivers should not be necessary.
If the manufacturers were forced to give a logical reason for using those screws, their only honest reply could be, 'Because we can', and that is a pathetic state of affairs: that the manufacturers can have that attitude, and that the consumers would tolerate it.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
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