Manufacturers have attempted to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to claim that they own the software that makes an electronic an electronic, and tampering with that software is a copyright violation. There's the fact that Apple quietly stopped accepting applications for "Authorized Service Provider" designations in 2010. There are the seizures of "counterfeit" parts being imported from China that may be legally legitimate. There are the lease programs carriers and Apple have started that ensure you won't ever actually "own" a phone ever again."Normally if I purchase a hammer, if the head of the hammer falls off, I'm allowed to repair it"
Though I'll mention Apple over and over again throughout this story, the company isn't alone in trying to make it difficult or potentially illegal for you or anyone else to fix your broken stuff. Most manufacturers are terrible at providing service manuals; Apple is notable simply because the repair market for the iPhone is larger than that of any specific Android phone.John Deere told the copyright office that allowing farmers and mechanics to repair their own tractors would "make it possible for pirates, third-party developers, and less innovative competitors to free-ride off the creativity, unique expression and ingenuity of vehicle software." Lexmark has been long-embroiled in a copyright case against a company that reverse-engineered its printers to create and sell aftermarket ink cartridges. The HTC One is basically impossible for a consumer to open, and so on and so forth."We're competing with the garbage dump"
When the iFixit crew pulled out the microscopes and soldering irons for a session about repairing and replacing transistors and capacitors, which are a hundred times smaller than a dime, on an iPad logic board, it became obvious that these professionals take the art of repair much more seriously than any electronics manufacturer."There are people here doing repairs Apple would never dream of," Chris Collins, a Texas-based repairman, told me. Collins repairs Apple devices, game consoles, old stereos and turntables, and even has a contract with local cities to repair cameras that survey sewer systems. "The best repair professionals in the world don't work for Apple."Jessa Jones, a former microbiologist-turned iPad repairwoman, is widely considered in the profession to be among the best repair professionals in the world. In between taking care of her four kids as a stay-at-home mother, she spends her days casually recovering priceless data from water-damaged iPads that would no one else would ever bother touching, or fixing short circuits that cause the iPad LCD backlight to burn out. She's so good that, if she can't fix a device, she doesn't charge her customers."Even in our community of repair people, people think that [logic] board repair died out when things started getting microscopic," Jones, who has started a logic board repair school, said. "It's just not true. The more we have people doing higher-level repairs, the more devices we can save, the more data we can recover, the more we can be ambassadors of repair to the public.""The first time you open an electronic, it stops being a magical black box and you see it's just a bunch of things plugged together"
Leaving your broken phone or computer in a drawer or throwing it in the garbage are the two worst things you can do with electronics, Wiens said. Recycling isn't much better."When it comes to electronics, recycling should be the last option," Wiens once wrote in a blog post called "Happy Earth Day, Don't Recycle."In a perfect world, you would get your stuff fixed and keep using it. Repairing it and selling it or making sure it gets repaired and reused is just as good."Mining and manufacturing are, in that order, the worst things we do in the world," he told me."iFixit is a hack. The manufacturers should be doing this."
Abella did not want to be extensively interviewed for this article, but told me the raid was devastating."Ever since then I haven't fixed iPhones," he told me in a text message. "I went out of business because of it."Last year, Customs and Border Patrol seized $162 million worth of consumer electronics in 6,612 separate raids as part of a program called "Operation Chain Reaction" that 16 separate government agencies are involved in. Spend some time searching the internet, and you'll find forum posts written by people who say their businesses or livelihoods were destroyed because of a CBP seizure."We got really scared, legitimately. We pulled all our parts out of our stores and we kept them at my house," Ivan Mladenovic, who runs two TechBar repair shops in South Florida, told me about the months following the federal raids in Miami. "We would shuttle parts to the store 2-3 at a time. I'm under the impression that the business of repairing iPhones could just go away one day. Apple could vanish an industry if it really wants to go after us.""Abel Abella claims there were 20 ICE agents and two people from Apple in his small Bird Road store.
'We got the parts from a company in California. To this day that vendor is still selling parts,' Abella said. 'Why did the come after me?'"
At home in central California, he fixes broken lawn sprinklers, chairs, toilets, and whatever else may break. He's replaced the transmission on his truck, attempted to put a chainsaw back together, and has been chastised by a buck knife manufacturer for trying to replace its spring-loaded mechanism. His nightmare repair is replacing the zipper on a jacket ("An all-day affair with a high likelihood of failure").The repair industry's bible is Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew Crawford's 2010 book about quitting his high-paying think tank job to become a motorcycle repairman—a job he says is both more rewarding and more intellectually stimulating."The disappearance of tools from our common education is the first step toward a wider ignorance of the world of artifacts we inhabit," Crawford wrote in the book. "And, in fact, an engineering culture has developed in recent years in which the object is to 'hide the works,' rendering many of the devices we depend on every day unintelligible to direct inspection.""If Kyle could have his way, everyone would live together in one compound and we would be this one harmonious group"