Apple hasn’t always been the easiest company when it comes to making repairs to its products — you can’t simply pop a new battery in an iPhone, for instance. And the company itself hasn’t, at least on the surface, warmly embraced recent Right to Repair laws, which have broadened the availability of service tools and parts for consumers and other repair businesses.
And now a consumer group is calling out the tech giant for its fixability issues. A new report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) gives Apple a D- and an F on its repair scorecard for laptops and smartphones, respectively. The highest scores in those two categories went to Dell and Motorola, both of which scored a B+.
To grade manufacturers on their support for repair and Right to Repair, U.S. PIRG Education Fund, with assistance from iFixit.com, accumulated repair scores across 187 devices from ten prominent manufacturers — and those scores come from France, where manufacturers have been required to list those numbers online since 2021. As PIRG notes: “Because repairing products is dependent on your ability to get access to necessary repair materials, our grade also reflects companies’ record of lobbying against Right to Repair, or membership in associations which are prominent Right to Repair opponents.”
Besides making products that are difficult to even open up for repairs, the low scores by Apple also reflect the company’s lobbying against Right to Repair and “support for other trade groups who are most visible in opposition.”
As AppleInsider notes, Apple has improved some of its fixability issues recently, announcing a “Self Service Repair” program last November that would begin to sell parts and tools directly to consumers in early 2022.
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