The countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK:
As of Tuesday, Apple's Self Service Repair program is now available in eight European countries. It launched in the United States in April, with promises from the company to expand to other countries by the end of the year.
[...] The program allows individual customers to purchase the same repair manuals, parts, and tools that Apple uses to perform repairs. Two hundred individual parts and tools are available through Apple's Self Service Repair Store. In addition to buying the parts, customers can rent repair kits for 54.90 euros with free shipping.
Apple claims that each part "is designed and engineered for each product and goes through extensive testing to ensure the highest quality, safety, and reliability" and that they are offered to users at the same price that Apple's authorized repair providers pay.
All that said, the parts are not available for every product. To take advantage, you must be seeking to repair a phone from the iPhone 12 or 13 lineups or a MacBook with an M1- or M2-based chip. iPhone 14 models and Intel Macs are not yet supported.
[...] The Self Service Repair program puts repairs in the hands of savvy customers, but it also maintains Apple's cut. Some commentators see that as a win-win; to others, it's still not enough.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday December 12, @03:57AM (1 child)
I'm really enjoying the gains being seen for Digital Citizenstm across Western Europe. First we have the GDPR, now this. While it's not perfect, it's certainly a big step forward from where we have been recently.
Given that these kits can now be purchased from 8 countries in Europe, how many seconds until an enterprising person starts buying them there and offering them (with a 'shipping and handling' fee added on) to US-based customers?
Hopefully the need to have completely different policies between certain markets will prove too bothersome and the big companies will just standardise a single approach worldwide that also meets their European requirements. I guess it depends on how much money they think they'll make otherwise.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ingar on Monday December 12, @11:47AM
From TFS: "It launched in the United States in April".
I took a quick peek: 75 EUR for an iPhone 12 battery,
but you get a 26.25 EUR refund if you send in the original part. I assume this is to prevent scalping,
and to prevent third-party repair shops keeping them in stock.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday December 12, @12:33PM (1 child)
You can rent an apple approved repair kit for €54.90+shipping. Gee how generous .... Whatever that entails. Is it their special screwdriver or something. After all this must be the tools and not the consumables, as renting them would be kind of weird since they'll be used up so it's nothing to return.
Also "purchase" manuals etc. They should all come with the products like they used to. Telling us that you can now buy them just shows how cheap and greedy they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12, @01:59PM
It is a special jig to make sure you are holding it correctly during repair.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 12, @01:44PM (2 children)
In the days of the Apple II, tons of info about the machine was available. In addition to such expected things as a manual for programming in BASIC, there was the classic Beneath Apple DOS, 6502 assembly manuals, and even a schematic. And that was just the relatively official information.
Then Apple went into complete lockdown mode with the release of the MacIntosh. Been that way ever since.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Monday December 12, @02:48PM
That sort of thing is true for PCs in general. The two old machines I still use for my MythTV system are early 2000s Dell P4 Dimension machines and I still have the PDF service manuals they offered at the time. They're actually very detailed in fact.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday December 12, @04:56PM
That is generally true for almost all 8-bit and 16-bit machines. You got a lot of manuals when you bought them. Programming guides, usually in BASIC and sometimes even assembly. There was memory maps and what all the ports did and how it was connected. It was not really a big problem even in pre-internet times to get service/repair manuals for the machines either. Just as buying any piece of software came with multiple books, I still have some Borland boxes around someplace and they came with 2-3 books each on how to program in whatever language the compiler was for. I'm not even really sure when this sort of went away. Perhaps when computers stopped being in keyboards and instead moved to the clone thing and you just inserted whatever cards you wanted in a box. But then by that notion you should get the good manuals again when buying laptops.