Thu. Oct 10th, 2024

Sam Kohl over at iupdate didn’t waste time in picking up the Apple self repair kit – 79lb of Apple’s own tools that you can now buy or rent by the week. They arrived in two pretty intimidating cases, and it may just be a marketing stunt for Apple’s own Genius Bar.

Apple announced their Self Repair program in 2021, stating that it would launch early in 2022. Now whether late April counts as “early” or not is down to you, its the first half I guess so it could have been worse.

Apple Self Repair Store
This is how Apple’s Self Service Repair Store looks… pretty generic!

The Apple Self Repair website is pretty bare bones, it looks like a default shopping website template and looks as though it’s run by a third party. At least Apple would have you think that. Even in the Privacy Policy it’s described as SPOT (Service Repair Or Tools), not as Apple. It doesn’t fill you with confidence at the beginning that this is an Apple service.

When the rented tools arrive as seen in iupdate’s video, you get two huge cases filled with what seems to be the same tools that Apple’s Genius Bar would use behind the scenes. These tools are covered with warning labels about crush hazards and hot surfaces.

Perhaps this is the point. Apple hasn’t introduced this program out of a passion to do so. It’s not here to save you money. After rental of tools and the parts, the total cost is between $10 and $40 of what you’d pay someone else to do it at the Apple store.

Apple Self Repair Benefits

I guess if you don’t live anywhere near an Apple store though, this is still helpful. My theory however is that Apple is just doing this to show how much goes into doing a repair on an iPhone properly.

Can you get your iPhone repaired at a corner phone store? Sure. But will it still be waterproof, will it work as expected? Maybe not. Maybe Apple wants to show that they protected the process before because it’s not easy to do well. Building a piece of tech as powerful and advanced as an iPhone AND making it waterproof isn’t easy. Expecting to repair it with cheap tools is probably not realistic.

Everyone likes to rag on Apple for not supporting easy repair of their phones, but now, you can do it properly. That can only be a good thing.