The Insides of Things Are Beautiful

You paid for it. They kept the keys.

The cassette player has a battery compartment. Not a battery journey, battery experience or battery-service eligibility assessment. A compartment. When the cells died, you opened a door with your thumbnail and put new ones in. No account. No appointment. No diagnostic cloud. The machine assumed its owner possessed thumbs and had not merely licensed the right to listen to it.

Apple perfected a magnificent cultural con: opening your own property became vandalism. The battery - a chemical consumable guaranteed to die - was entombed like a pharaoh and its replacement promoted to a service event. Thinness went on the specifications page. Dependency did not. The rest of the industry saw the margins, copied the trick and called the resulting slab progress.

To be painfully fair, because facts make better weapons, Apple’s own battery guidance now offers Self Service Repair for supported models. Experienced repairers can obtain parts, manuals and tools. Then Repair Assistant may be required to finish the battery repair, and Apple warns that without the necessary Apple Account information you may be unable to finish the job or unlock the part. The owner performs the physical repair. The manufacturer’s software decides whether the repair counts. That is not ownership. It is supervised tenancy with nicer aluminium.

Right to Repair is not nostalgia for beige plastic. It is the basic proposition that a sale transfers control. You should be able to inspect the machine, maintain it, replace a dying battery, choose who repairs it and keep it running after the manufacturer would prefer another sale. Hence the exploded cassette player: MAIN BOARD. MOTOR. STANDARD FASTENER. STILL GOOD. NO ACCOUNT REQUIRED. The insides are the thing you bought. You were meant to see them - and nobody should need corporate permission to put the bloody thing back together.

Read it for yourself: About genuine iPhone batteries, Apple Support, Use Repair Assistant to finish an iPhone or iPad repair, Apple Support, Right to Repair Europe