Apple’s approach of making products that are easy to break and hard to repair is unethical
So it happened. My daughter spilt a glass of water into her Mac Air and the keyboard and trackpad went funny. I visited the Mac store to get it fixed but they said Apple no longer did repairs on 5 year old Macs. Hmm, nice way of getting me to upgrade. Undaunted, I decided to fix the thing myself. I found a keyboard and tiny screwdrivers on eBay and set to work dismantling the Mac.
After removing an insane number of screws and tiny ribbon cables I could access the keyboard. Only to discover it was riveted to the casing with over 100 rivets! Still undaunted, I watched a couple of YouTube videos and proceeded to tear the keyboard from the rivets. Which worked. Except the rivets stayed stuck in the casing. I couldn’t get them out with the tools I had but after ordering a couple more super tiny pliers from Amazon I had them breaking free.
Then I discovered that I had bought the wrong keyboard: it was a European one which has a different shaped return key. Doh! So I order another keyboard from eBay and include the backlit sheet this time since the old one got torn in the disassembly. OK, so how to fit the keyboard? I realised that without rivets is wasn’t going to stay in place. Another YouTube video showed how to use 100 tiny screws the size of poppy seeds to use where the rivets had been. Cool, so that just meant ordering the things from China. No problem, just a four week wait.
During all this carnage, a little I/O daughter board got squished so I ordered a reconditioned used one while I waited for my Chinese shipment. I tried hard at this stage to remain undaunted, but to tell the truth this repair job was really heading South pretty fast. Now I have all the parts that I need and I’m watching YouTube videos on how to dismantle a Mac. Well, more accurately I’m watching the videos backwards so I can reassemble the Mac. The whole thing is sitting on my desk waiting for me to summon the energy to do the final push.
Apple has almost forced me to concede defeat. They design a Mac that is almost impossible to repair. When a computer store tells you it is cheaper to buy a new product it probably almost always is. But it is for the wrong reasons. A product that is knowingly designed to be almost unrepairable is different to a product that simply can’ be repaired because of its nature. A Mac laptop is the former, a very carefully designed collection of unfixable pieces. A nice glass vase is the latter, and we can forgive it for being like Humpty Dumpty when it falls and smashed.
But I can’t forgive Apple for their Mac Air. With insane resources at their disposal, the design effort to make a product repairable is minimal. And, hey Apple, I think you may have made this product more breakable than it needed to ever be: water-resistant keyboard have been around for decades. Maybe I should send Apple’s Johnny Ives some web links to other products help out?
Apple’s approach of making products that are easy to break and hard to repair is unethical. Of course we all know Apple isn’t alone in this. It’s hard to prove but don’t you also have the feeling that this is going on with your car, washing machine, TV, and mobile phone? Strange how I need to buy a new refrigerator every few years and yet older folk have ones that have been running for decades..
