“We’ve seen manufacturers restrict our ability to buy parts. When we go to [suppliers] and say can we buy that part as a repair part, they’ll say ‘No, our contract with Samsung will not allow us to sell that’. We’re seeing that increasingly,” he said at the hearings.
“Apple is notorious for doing this with the chips in their computers. There is a standard version of the part and then there’s the Apple version of the part that’s very slightly tweaked ... and that company again is under contractual requirement with Apple to be sole dealing contracts.”
When Wiens wanted to buy spare parts from Apple for phones the tech giant no longer serviced, he found it was scrapping them.
“Rather than selling that out in the marketplace — to someone like me who eagerly would’ve bought them — they were paying a recycler to destroy them,” he said.
Apple and others have long been accused of obstructing unofficial repairs because it eats into their profits. The need to service devices every few years leads to more frequent upgrades, or at least makes consumers pay for official repairs.
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In Australia, Apple recently began offering contracts to supply parts to independent repairers, but only under strict guidelines.
At the Productivity Commission’s hearings, the Australian Industry Group’s Rachael Wilkinson said non-official repairs could hurt the reputation of device makers, and that rules recognising a right to repair should be designed to limit manufacturer liability in the case of dodgy fixes.
“One member advised us of seeing an unauthorised third-party repair where they’d actually used blue cellophane beneath the screen to mimic the look of LCD, and it had been attached using a hot glue gun,” Wilkinson said.
“That is the reality of providing carte blanche to people who are not authorised or not accredited in some way to be doing repairs.”
The Productivity Commission’s final report is due in October.
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