Bloomberg:

Late in the evening of Sept. 21, X-rays of the innards of the iPhone 8 appeared on Twitter. The images didn’t come from Apple. They were posted by a team from iFixit Inc., a repair-parts, tool and software company in San Luis Obispo, California, that had flown to Australia to take advantage of the 18-hour time difference to buy the new model before it became available in the U.S. When U.S.-based Apple fans woke on iPhone 8 release day, iFixit had a step-by-step guide posted for taking apart the new phone.

Wow! That is commitment.

Over the last decade, the repair culture that spawned generations of driveway mechanics, vacuum-cleaner shops and itinerant TV-fixers has been eroded by manufacturers keen to claim service contracts and revenues. They’ve used intellectual-property laws to restrict access to repair manuals and repair software for products ranging from iPhones to John Deere tractors.

This makes me crazy. I want to be able to fix something that breaks, rather than be forced to buy a new one. To me, the ability to repair my own gear should be a right.

From the interview with iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens:

If you take an iPhone, it’s around $5 in labor that Apple pays Foxconn to assemble an iPhone. It’s far more labor when you take your phone into a repair shop – it might be $50 in labor. And if your phone needs two or three battery swaps over its lifetime, that’s $150 in labor in the U.S. over its lifetime compared to $5 on the manufacturing side.

Making products repairable is better for the environment (less waste, more reusability) and better for consumers (cost and time savings on repairs). This might sound like “get off my lawn” griping, but read the interview, judge for yourself.