Really? You ever stop to consider, then, why you feel the need to defend corporations so blindly? Or why you're more inclined to take their word over someone else's?
Phone repair companies, third pary parts manufacturers, and Kytch are
also corporations.
This is something clearly written by someone who has no idea what they are talking about.
Like, for example, none of what you've said matters, because McDonalds still tries to force all franchisers to sign exclusive and insanely overpriced repair deals with Taylors, which McDonalds corporate gets kickbacks from.
Yeah, that's how franchising works. If you want totally control over who you hire and what you buy and how you run it and how you fix it, then open your own fast food restaurant instead of a franchise.
Also, the article doesn't establish anything about McDonalds getting a kickback from Taylor, it just quotes a guy that is directly competing with Taylor's repair service (IE, a completely biased and untrustworthy source) alleging that they do so, and further alleging the service is overcosted, despite him having absolutely no relevant expertise.
Its very obvious why this is happening, and its nothing to do with worrying about employees breaking something - hell, there's no reason they couldn't just allow the managers to put a passcode on the machine if that was the problem, but anyway, there shouldn't even be anything teenagers could break just by looking at diagnostic information.
The article itself undermines the idea that just letting the owner have all that data would help, as it shows that they clearly do not have the skillset to use it.
One franchisee, who asked that WIRED not identify him for fear of retribution from McDonald’s, told me that the ice cream machine at one of his restaurants had been down practically every week due to a mysterious failure during its pasteurization cycle. He’d scrutinized the assembly of the machine again and again, to no avail.
Installing Kytch revealed almost instantly that an overeager employee was putting too much mix in one of the machine’s hoppers. Today the franchisee wakes up every morning at 5:30, picks up his phone, and confirms that all his machines have passed their treacherous heat treatment. Another franchisee’s technician told me that, despite Kytch nearly doubling its prices over the past two years and adding a $250 activation fee, it still saves the franchisee “easily thousands of dollars a month.”
McD Truth confides that Kytch still rarely manages to prevent ice cream machines from breaking. But without Kytch, restaurants’ harried staff don't even notify owners nine out of 10 times when the ice cream machine is down. Now, at the very least, they get an email alert with a diagnosis of the problem. “That is the luxury,” McD Truth writes. “Kytch is a very good device.”
The owner had a problem with the ice cream, and immediately and monomanically focused on trying to take it apart and look for the problem, which is not how you problem solve like this, and as it happens I do know what I'm talking about here because this is my job in real life. What he should have done is audit the process to ensure that everything else, such as loading the machine's hoppers, was being done properly, and once he had that and had confirmed it was not a process error but rather a technical error, then you around poking at the machine.
That's is not in agreement with the things I've been reading about them coming out of actual court cases.
Court cases such as?
That's the argument they made (indeed, the anti-self repair types always claim consumer protection), but the fact is that there's no reason to assume a third party repairer isn't going to know what the hell they're doing, and the court found exactly that, thankfully. And that's with medical tech - this argument has even less legitimacy when applied to much more common consumer products.
Again, what court case? The only one I can find is Philips V Summit, which is still ongoing, and on a quick skim Philips didn't allege that Summit was acting unsafely, merely that they were violating Philips IP by hacking the machines and activating features the customer didn't pay for.
Why would I do that when it's a very common argument against self-repair? Or even in general when it applies to other things that create and enforce monopolies? Like how one of the arguments against services like Lyft and Uber was that it represented a danger to consumers that just anyone could be a driver.
Because it's not very interesting to have a discussion with someone that's railing against strawmen.
I have a better idea - why don't you explain to the class why exactly one should not be able to use the parts from one phone to replace damaged parts from another identical phone. You, for real, said it was about making them more compact, but that has nothing at all to do with something like that, which is one of the issues being discussed here. You literally cannot use parts from one phone of identical model to repair another one, or it will brick the device. So please, explain a reason for this that is other than maximizing profit by requiring in-house repair that the company can charge whatever price it feels like (such is the case with monopolies, after all), or just requiring the customer to purchase another device.
Maybe you should actually check what the point is about, because the orginal claim was about bonded battery packs and screens, not the
software changes that Apple made to block people from swapping out parts, which is a completely different issue then the cited points, which do indeed exist in order to make the overall phone thinner. You can still physically swap them out, but it's much harder, because of how they're designed, but that design doesn't brick the phone, that's a completely unrelated issue that no one has defended.
