Linked List: August 24, 2023

Thursday, 24 August 2023

Apple Lends Support to California ‘Right to Repair’ Bill 

Brian Heater, reporting for TechCrunch:

In a surprise move, Apple this week penned a letter to California state senator Susan Talamantes Eggman, voicing support for SB 244, a “right to repair” bill currently making its way through Sacramento’s State Capitol building. [...] Apple has, of course, softened its stance on right to repair legislation in recent years, including last year’s addition of a Self Service Repair program. The offering, which was viewed by many as a preemptive measure against looming state and federal legislation, provides users with rental tools to repair iPhones and Macs at home.

In the letter, Apple expresses its support on the grounds of offering consumers the ability to repair their devices safely, without risking privacy or data issues. “Apple supports California’s Right to Repair Act so all Californians have even greater access to repairs while also protecting their safety, security, and privacy,” the company says in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “We create our products to last and, if they ever need to be repaired, Apple customers have a growing range of safe, high-quality repair options.”

This sort of backing from a specific manufacturer is unusual — particularly from Apple. It is thus far the only major manufacturer to express its support for the bill in this manner. These kinds of statements are generally made through industry consortiums, such as TechNet.

I don’t find Apple’s support for this legislation surprising, but most people commenting on it do.

Dare Obasanjo:

This is less of a pivot and more of just accepting reality.

Apple pushing aesthetics such as no seams in their phones over consumer benefits like being able to replace your phone’s batteries has been deemed unacceptable by a number of governments including the EU.

Regulation is coming whether they like it or not, so they might as well get some positive PR for “supporting” the regulations.

Jason Koebler, writing at 404 Media:

Apple told a California legislator that it is formally supporting a right to repair bill in California, a landmark move that suggests big tech manufacturers understand they have lost the battle to monopolize repair, and need to allow consumers and independent repair shops to fix their own electronics.

Koebler’s use of “monopoly” hints at the assumption that authorized repairs are a profit center. That is true for some manufacturers in some industries. Koebler himself has copiously documented the saga with John Deere tractors. All the nonsense inkjet printer makers go through to try to keep people from using third-party replacement ink cartridges is another. That’s never been Apple’s reason for opposing these laws. Apple’s stance is more about control.

And I’d argue that Obasanjo is missing the possibility that Apple actually thinks California’s SB 244 is a well-written law. Would Apple prefer no such law at all? I think the answer is obviously yes. Providing all the necessary documentation, tools, and parts for every new device the company makes is a pain in Apple’s corporate ass, and I think that’s why Apple resisted such legislation. From their perspective any such law is an unnecessary annoyance. But it’s undeniably reasonable for there to be consumer protection laws, and if there are going to be Right to Repair laws that cover computing devices, those laws ought to be good ones. And the plain language of Apple’s letter is that the company thinks this is a good one.

I highly doubt we’re going to see any such letter from Apple to the EU endorsing their Digital Markets Act, the law that, among numerous other sweeping provisions, is poised to mandate sideloading on all phones. Apple continues to oppose the EU law requiring USB-C ports in all rechargeable devices, and that law is already passed. Apple has complied, begrudgingly, with the Netherlands’s rather specific regulations regarding dating apps and in-app payments — but they’ve issued no praise for the law.

If Apple says they support California’s SB 244, it probably just means they actually support it.

‘Apple Buying Disney Isn’t the Fairy Tale It Once Was’ 

A Jason Snell daily double — this time his Macworld column, speculating on rumors of an Apple acquisition of Disney:

If this sounds outlandish, well, if I traveled back in time to 2011 and told you that Apple would be producing some of the best TV shows in the world, wouldn’t that seem bizarre? And yet the company has grown and changed–and will continue to.

But leaving the growth aside for a moment, there’s also this: Apple and Disney do have ties. They do feel similar in so many ways. From the Imagineers working on new Disneyland features to the VFX artists at Industrial Light & Magic to the animators at Pixar, so much of Disney is located at the same intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts that Apple calls home. (And when I look at the bill for my last family trip to Disneyland, I recognize that both companies are very good at charging me a lot of money.)

Last week when I was working — slowly, as ever — on my own take on the Apple-Disney speculation, I saw in my feed reader that Snell had published his own take. So, I averted my eyes until I finished my own. Glad I did, because I’m not sure I would have been able to resist lifting that keen observation about both companies residing at the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts. That’s exactly why this whole notion, though unlikely, feels like a “but, well ... maybe” idea.

‘How the iMac Saved Apple’ 

Jason Snell, writing at The Verge last week, marking the iMac’s 25th anniversary:

Upon its release, the iMac became so well known that it may have even eclipsed the Apple brand for a little while. It was at least a strong enough signifier that Apple began using it on other products. The iBook laptop was an obvious choice, but in 2001, the company chose to reuse the branding for its new music player, the iPod.

The iPod didn’t connect to the internet, but it didn’t matter. Apple was declaring that the “i” stood for another cool Apple product you’d want to buy, and people bought an awful lot of iPods. Apple began slapping the lowercase “i” in front of a lot of its hardware, software, and services, culminating in the release of the iPhone and iPad.

An astute remembrance of a seminal product. Snell rightly emphasizes how controversial some of the iMac’s features were: the lack of a floppy disk drive and dropping all legacy I/O ports in favor of USB. The branding power of that “i” prefix remains so strong that I still hear people calling Apple Watches “iWatches”.

In hindsight it seems obvious that Jobs and Ive would go on to create not just numerous great new products, but to do so in new (or at least new to Apple) product categories. But they had to start somewhere. The easiest way for Apple to have failed upon Jobs’s return would have been to shoot for the moon out of the gate. The next big things would come. First, they rightly decided to focus on righting the ship that was Apple’s previous big thing: a desktop personal computer. Everything the company has designed, built, and shipped since can be traced back to that Bondi Blue surprise.