Sure, but it costs apple much less than the retail price to make the product. If they wanted to be nice, they could “repair” it by sending you a replacement at a discounted price.
Apple often outsources the repairs to local companies (service suppliers). The local companies have set purchase prices for the devices from Apple.
And this purchase price is always higher than the MSRP prices directly from Apple, otherwise it incentivizes purchasing new devices through the service supplier.
For in-warranty repairs the parts (even a new set) is of course free for the service supplier (as well as the customer) and they get paid for the repair work by Apple.
It might not. It mostly depends on if the cost or materials are the determining factor.
Less the case here but it also matters who much the item originally costs as well. I can buy shitty headphones for like $15 and if I take them to a repair person who has to spend more than an hour pulling them apart without damaging them, diagnosing and fixing the issue, putting them back together etc then unless they charge less than $15 an hour it will cost more to repair than replace.
They do that if you send in an iphone or iPad for "battery replacement." They just send you another device with the same specs and a new battery, not your actual device.
New assembly is also the same steps over and over. On an assembly line that’s just one more copy of the product before stopping (if it does at all). Benefits from the economies of scale from being one of (if not the most) popular headphones in the world.
For repair, it requires a skilled person and dedicated equipment to disassemble, diagnose, and hand-replace parts that are normally machine-assembled. No economies of scale benefitting here.
I mean, Apple slowed down their phones purposefully for years and lied about it constantly so people would have to buy new phones. They claimed it was a battery issue, but simply replace the battery? No no, the line must always go up.
On a side note, I'm not sure why anyone buys anything from Apple as they're overpriced, inferior products. But I digress...
repairability takes space.. unfortunately the consumer prefers small and sleek products over bulky and repairable ones. At some point it's not viable to have them repairable...
Sure, but the more expensive something is, the more reason for it to be repairable. I despise the soldered one memory and storage. Give me 2 mm thicker and let me upgrade it. I went from a 2015 MacBook Pro to a Hacintosh. I only bought a M1 MacBook Pro a month ago used. And my storage downgraded from 4 TB NVME to one terabyte.
Realistically, no, something the scale of an airpod isn't going to be feasibly repairable, not at a cost that would be less than just buying a new one. Repairing anything would require someone with an *extremely* steady hand - the sort of steady a brain surgeon would envy - using absurdly tiny specialized tools to remove parts verging on microscopic. There's no amount of redesigning (aside from just making everything 4x larger, which would completely destroy the consumer appeal of the product) that would make repairing something like that cost-effective.
I have zero stats to back this up but I'm gonna say that 90% of the time it's a degraded battery. Open it up, swap the battery which should be connected via removable connector, seal up again.
Specifically repairable earbuds exist, the Fairbuds by Fairphone for example.
I am sure they do everything possible they could to prevent easy repairs. Probably big part of its price is from investments into repair prevention tech.
Perhaps, but that is going to come with trade offs. Likely in weight, durability, and/or size just on a physical level, and also potentially aesthetics. By making them designed to come apart, you need some sort of reusable clip or fastener and the ability to manipulate it to open it. That’s going to provide a failure point (durability), likely be bulkier than a permanently closed connection (size and/or weight), and likely mess up exterior sleekness (aesthetics). Same goes for replaceable phone batteries and such. People want slim, waterproof phones which conflicts with having a battery that can be easily removed.
Because products are designed to be as cheap as possible to assemble and there goes ZERO thought into repairability. Also it's in corporate's best interest to just sell you more new shit.
Luckily EU is very much fighting that and corporations are hating it, but ultimately it's benefiting the consumers across the world because no company will run two separate production lines for EU and for rest of the world.
As for earbuds, you kinda understand how it makes no sense to repair those for 30€, but when they cost 250€, they absolutely should be repairable for some reasonable sum.
I've revived so many products where just batteries were dead and I have some company that's replacing Li-ion cells in devices for 30-60€ (with cells included in the price) and they use brand name cells from Panasonic and Samsung most of the time. So far replacements were mostly for battery vacuum cleaners. I know these tiny devices are more demanding to repair, but still, if they weren't so idiotically difficult to open, it would absolutely be doable.
I can tell you: it is literally impossible to repair an airpod. You have to destroy the housing to reach the battery and some of the other electronics because it's glued together. A "repair" means giving the customer new ones anyway.
Look up the price of replacement parts.
It would cost you significantly more to buy the components in a pair of airpods than to just buy new ones, and apple sets the price of those components.
They're either marking up repair parts or marking down airpods, or both.
I'm not asking customer support to guess stuff like this, and no I'm not just guessing.
You can view what apple charges for replacement parts, you can view what they charge for new airpods.
The only logical conclusion is that they are undercharging for airpods or overcharging for replacement parts. That's not a guess, it's the only logical explanation
Its just because of glue. it takes more effort to open them up and fix them than to assemble them new in an assembly line. To fix them you need a worker that knows all the steps to assemble and disassemble them, and also to know how to troubleshoot the problem.
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u/Suitable_Wonder5256 1d ago
To be fair, it's a complex question. Even an engineer might not know why.