How to fix everything

It happened suddenly, like most of these stories. I had an alarm clock. I pulled my foot, suddenly waking up, and she came into close contact with the new laptop, innocently lying at the foot on the hotel bed. He landed on a chair leg - the sound of the blow was loud. A clear dent appeared on the aluminum next to the Apple logo. I opened it and saw a huge blob of broken pixels.

I had a few options. $ 600 for replacing the screen in the Apple store. $ 500 from an independent repairman. I fumbled with eBay and found out that the new screen can be bought for $ 50, if only I didn’t mind knowing what the MacBook Pro looks like from the inside. I clicked "buy." And then I saw the cogs.

***

If you ever tried to open iDevice - iPad, iPhone, iMac, anything - done in the last four years, you have met with the Eagle tiny five-pointed signs " Do not enter ". This is a clear statement that your phone, computer, tablet, is not really yours, and you can’t pick it up. This is a public statement that you are not qualified to repair your own things.

If you are reading this from an iPhone, or it is near you, look at the charging port, and next you will see these two tiny heads of five-petal screws [pentalobe] that are not found in the wild.





There is a solution for a five-petal screw - a screwdriver from Californian startup iFixit , which is at the same time opposed to Apple and does everything so that, despite the constant complication of electronics, amateurs can still learn how to repair it (and other companies began to produce screwdrivers). [ not to mention aliexpress - approx. ]

I recently spent several days with iFixit director Kyle Wines and repair technicians at the electronics reuse conference in New Orleans. I wanted to know exactly how manufacturing companies infringe our rights to open, mess around and repair their devices that we own.

Manufacturers tried to attract the “Copyright Act in the digital age” ( DMCA ) to prove that the software that makes electronics electronics belongs to them, which means picking this software will be a copyright violation. Apple quietly finished accepting applications from new applicants to become an "authorized service center" in 2010. There is a withdrawal of lots of "fake" parts coming from China, which in fact can be quite legal. There are development programs for leasing devices from Apple, so that you can never truly own a phone.

“Usually, if a nogka falls off a hammer I bought, I have the right to repair it. And after that, I can use it again, ”said Charles Duane, project directorpatent reforms of the Public Knowledge resource. “And in the case of new electronics, its manufacturers want only them to repair it, since they have more profits from this. They have already found many ways to achieve this. Intellectual property laws, contracts, user agreements are a lot of ways to make it so that you can't do what you want with your things. ”

Therefore, Apple has many ways to not let you into their devices. But why not start with a screw. On January 20, 2011, Reuters reported that Apple employees were told not to inform the phone owners about the substitution. The replacement was to ensure that no one except Apple would get into the device.

The iPhone 4 had normal Philips head screws. But somewhere in 2010 the companygave the installation for their "geniuses" in the Apple Store to replace these screws with five-petal ones in incoming smartphones. In theory, it was supposed to restrict access to devices for everyone except Apple.

Weins expected such a development, it was he who told Reuters about what was happening, and then, the day after the article appeared, iFixit released an “ iPhone release set ” consisting of a screwdriver for a five-petal screw and two screws with ordinary heads. During his trip to Japan, Wines discovered that the Japanese iPhone 4 came with five-petal screws. One of the local repairmen using a microscope and a file stoch a flat screwdriver to the state of five-petal, and managed to open the iPhone.

“It was the first screwdriver in the world that did not belong to Apple and could unscrew the five-petal screw,” says Weins. "Apple literally tightened the screws in its relations with its users, and since we knew everything in advance, we were able to sell a screwdriver as soon as it entered the United States." I found out


Kyle

Wines Pro iFixit shortly after this screwdriver. After searching Google, I got to the site of the California company San Luis Obispo. Having bought a five-petal screwdriver, I spent a few minutes exploring the site, and it opened my eyes to the existence of a large and thriving DIY repairmen community.

Want to know how to fix the red ring of death"appearing on the Xbox 360? On iFixit there are step-by-step instructions for hacking the device, and there you can buy spare parts and tools. Do you want to disassemble the lenses of the DSLR camera ? Replace the screen on the iPhone (or any other phone)? Install more memory in the computer? Repair the alarm clock "IFixit has it all. Do you want to know how the iron works? What about a washing machine or a Speak & Spell toy? No question. Do you want to learn how to sew a button on a shirt? You will be taught this too.

Although I constantly mention Apple, this company does not alone in trying to ban or complicate mending a scrapping GOVERNMENTAL things. Most manufacturers clamped repair manual, Apple also mentioned only because the repair market iPhones more than any of androidofonov.

John Deere argued with the copyright department that if we allow farmers and mechanics to repair their tractors, this will lead to the fact that “pirates, third-party developers and less innovative competitors will have the opportunity to profit by creative achievements, unique embodiments and the genius of software machines”. Lexmark has been suing a company for a long time with a company that re-engineered their printers to develop and sell cartridges. It’s almost impossible for consumers to open the HTC One - and so on and so forth.



The electronics reuse conference was filled with people rejecting manufacturers ’desire to control the devices in their hands. There are, of course, industry secrets and repair strategies that companies do not share - basically, these people are trying to figure out how to convince consumers that repairing electronics is often better than replacing it.

“We are not competing with each other,” says Vains to a hundred repairmen (there are different people at the presentation, but mostly white-skinned middle-aged men). "We compete with the trash."

"When you first open an electronic device, it turns from a magic black box into a bunch of things connected together."

When iFixit uncovered microscopes and soldering irons to demonstrate the repair and replacement of transistors and capacitors a hundred times smaller than a dime on the iPad, it became obvious that these professionals are much more serious about the art of repair than any manufacturer.

“People here are doing repairs that Apple doesn’t dream of,” Chris Collins, a Texas repairman, told me. Collins repairs Apple devices, gaming consoles, old stereos and turntables, and even contracted to repair surveillance cameras in city sewers. "The world's top repair professionals do not work for Apple."

Jessa Jones, in the past - a microbiologist, is now engaged in repairing the iPad. In a professional environment, she is considered one of the best specialists in the world.. In addition to raising four children and working as a housewife, she spends her days retrieving valuable data from flooded iPads, which no one would take, or repairing short circuits that caused the backlight of tablet screens to burn out. She does her job so well that she doesn’t take money for a failed repair.

“Even in our community of repairmen, it is believed that the art of repairing boards died when things moved to the microscopic level,” says Jones, who founded a board repair school . "This is not true. The more people engaged in high-level repair, the more devices we save, the more data we will recover, the more we will be able to promote our idea to the masses. ”



Later, for a beer, Vines falls into a nostalgic mood and recalls the times when washing machines worked for fifty years, not five. He notes that the increase in the screen of smartphones leads to an increase in the number of broken smartphones - “Have you ever seen a Galaxy Note with a whole screen?”, He asks - and says angry tirades, regretting that his company should exist at all.

He says that the fact that Apple and other manufacturers do not sell parts to consumers and do not make repair instructions for them leads to disastrous consequences for the environment. The transition to unique screws, the threat of falling under the rink of copywriting lawyers, enmity with independent repair shops — all this shows that the culture that opposes repair has not grown out of naivety or negligence — it is cultivated with malicious intent.

As Vines says, leaving a broken phone in a drawer or throwing it in the trash is the two most terrible things you can do with electronics. And recycling will not be much better.

"For electronics, recycling should be the last refuge," writes Weins in his article " Happy Earth, and do not need to recycle"

In an ideal world, your thing would be repaired, and you would continue to use it. And you could also fix it and sell it, or just make sure it was repaired and used - it would be just as good." Mining and minerals production - in this order - the worst that we do with the world, "he told me.


Agbogloshi district of the capital of Ghana, Accra

When creating a smartphone, about 50 elements of the periodic table are used, many of which are present in very small numbers. And most of them are not available for recycling.

“The plastic of your iPhone will be turned into low-quality plastic, and then into a park bench. “It’s a pity, because it’s high-quality plastic, it can cost up to $ 30 per pound,” he says. After processing, it will already cost ten cents per pound, since it cannot be processed separately from the cheap. ”

If we do not want to use electronics during its entire possible life cycle, we need to figure out how to keep it in working condition and pass it on to those who can use it. “Every person should have a cell phone, but we have to figure out how to achieve this through sound methods,” he says.

Much of Vain's environmentalism was born on several trips to developing countries. He’s inflamed most of all when he talks about people — about the man repairing the water pumps he met in Kenya, Cairo’s best mechanics, or people from Delhi, revealing old CRT TVs and monitors to make new ones (this is very dangerous because each CRT monitor has up to 5 kilograms of lead).

“We all heard about e-waste, and I decided to see everything with my own eyes,” he says. He therefore visited the Agbogloshi district in Accra, the capital of Ghana, which is commonly referred to as “the world's largest e-dump", and many other cities in developing countries. (He even removed a documentary that had not yet been released on this topic.) Agbogloshi is really a disaster for the environment, but everything is not so simple.

" Everyone says that we throw garbage into Africa. But in fact, this is not the case, ”says Vines.“ In fact, they buy electronics from us because of necessity, and when it breaks down, they throw it away because they do not have recycling and recycling facilities. ”



According to Vines , in Agbogbloshi and many other places there is no access to spare parts Repair instructions, with the result that they do not have opportunities and not to throw these things.

“The problem is that there are complex products, and their manufacturers do not share with us information on their repair. You make a million printers, they are used in millions of different ways, and at the end of their life they are thrown away or discarded from them in a million different ways. This is a lever that we can use to teach people how to fix things. We stumbled upon a solution to a huge problem. That's why I'm doing my job. ”

***



Having ordered the LCD screen for the MacBook, I did not think about its origin. Yes, I had no idea about it. But it was not made by Apple. Go to eBay or search for a component of a computer or smartphone. You will find spare parts for cameras, headphone jacks, LCD screens and iPhone front panels (it's easier to replace the entire panel, including the camera, than a separate glass). You will see a huge variation in prices for parts and their different names. There will be "original" parts, OEM, "certified", "used" and "extracted from used devices."

Even people who earn their living by repairing it is not clear what these words mean.

Everything is so conceived. Americans spent more than $ 23.5 billionto repair and replace broken smartphones from 2007 to 2014. In 2013, the analyst said that Apple is going to save a billion dollars by repairing the iPhone instead of replacing them - this gives an idea of ​​the size of the repair market for the most popular phone in the world. Apple wants to bite off a bigger piece of the market. Because she controls iron, she wants to control the aftermarket as well.

There is nothing illegal in the sale and production of LCD screens for the iPhone, but it is illegal to produce the back panel with the Apple logo. Apple has registered trademarks for different things - for example, the rectangle on the Home button, and it also places logos even on some internal cables.

So what is a "fake" part? Who knows!

“Apple and Samsung do not like the gray market, and this is the gray market,” Scott Head from iFixit explained at the conference. “There is a difference between the way customs officials and manufacturers perceive authenticity.”

Most repairmen told me that they are trying to order legal parts from China. But did these 500 Sony Xperia panels come from the original production? Fell from the truck on the way? Were made without the permission of Sony? All this matters - and many problems would be solved if only the manufacturers themselves would sell parts to consumers and repairmen.



Such questions lead us to situations where customs officers after a raid on 25 Miami repair shopsconfiscated "fake" parts for iPhones for $ 300 thousand. Local news in 2013 reported:

“Abel Abella claims that 20 customs agents and two people from Apple came to their Bird Road shop. “We bought parts from a Californian company. And to this day they sell them, “- says Abella. “Why did they come for me?”

Abella did not want to give me an interview, but said that the raid had devastating consequences. "Since then, I have not been repairing iPhones, I generally left the business."

Last year, customs officers confiscated parts and electronics for $ 162 million as a result of 6,612 raids under the Operation Chain Reaction program, in which 16 government agencies participated. You can easily find posts on the forums.for authorship of people whose business or lives were destroyed by this program.

“We were terribly frightened, we removed all the parts from all the stores and brought them to my house,” said Ivan Mladenovich, manager of two TechBar repair shops in South Florida. - We transported 2-3 parts to the workshop at a time. I have the impression that the repair business of iPhones may one day simply disappear. Apple can simply eliminate the entire industry if it wants to go against us. "

***



The ability to repair your items disappears as the electronics become more difficult in the device, the ability to open it and it becomes easier to get rid of it. Most people who advocate self-repair had some insight that inspired them to do this. It happened to me because of the laptop.

Vines listens carefully to how I cracked my MacBook Pro using his website, and since I saved on tools, I used a knife to remove the glass from the LCD. I understood little of what I was doing, and at 4 am, after six hours of fussing, solving problems and trying not to lose the cogs barely visible to the eye, I was left with a set of pieces on the kitchen table and a headache from frustration.

Wines is familiar with this feeling. iFixit appeared due to the difficult repair of a laptop that it started in college. As a student at California Polytechnic, he saved up enough money to buy a new iBook for $ 1,800. Like me, Vines showed his clumsiness by breaking the laptop soon after the purchase. But, unlike me, he had no one to turn to for help.

He looked for repair instructions, but found nothing. And still dismantled it. “It was two o'clock in the morning, and I thought“ I will leave the details, and in the morning I will assemble ” It was a bad idea. The next day I could not figure out what was where. I then still collected it all back, and the computer worked, but not in the same way as before. ”



Weins continued his research and found that Apple filed lawsuits based on the DMCA against sites that dared to lay out official instructions for repairing the company's equipment.

“And I thought,“ Wow, they use copyright to forbid people to repair things. ” I thought it was some kind of heresy. ”

Vains with a partner, Luke Souls, decided to find all the iBook and PowerBook computers, write repair instructions for them and sell for $ 15. The matter did not go; they never sold their 50 instructions. Then they posted them on the site for free, they wrote about them in a couple of blogs dedicated to Apple, and they suddenly turned into a source of information of this kind.

“All this is an attempt to circumvent copyright laws. According to the results of our study of developing countries, we decided that the world needed instructions for repairing anything and everything. There are two ways to do this - either get manufacturers to open their documents, or write new ones. We have not yet abandoned the first point, but are concentrating on the second. ”

On the first question, iFixit became one of the most famous companies campaigning for DMCA reform, and even snatched a small victory, when the head of the Library of Congress allowed for a couple of exceptions to the law protecting the “right to repair”. iFixit purposefully and successfully attacked the John Deere Corporation - now farmers can poke around in tractors without fear of being condemned. Now the company is fighting for the adoption of state law, whichwill oblige manufacturers to sell parts for repair and issue instructions.

Few small companies that tried to oppose their activities to the largest corporations in the world survived. Even less live well. But iFixit seems to have found its niche in the throwing of stones in the Eagle's Goliath. First, a five-petal screwdriver appeared, and by the time iPhone 4S came out, iFixit sent one of the engineers to Australia so that it could become one of the world's first buyers of new devices - and one of the first to disassemble them. The company operates at a profit, although Wines doesn’t cover exact numbers. The separated company Dozuki sells wiki technology to corporate clients around the world.

With each release of the new iPhone, MacBook or iPad, iFixit has to develop new tools using artisanal techniques to open and repair them. A week after the release of Apple Watch, the company has already made special adhesive strips to assemble the watch after the repair.



“Pizza Cutter” ( opener for iMac ) and iSlack device opening tool

“We have such a thing like a pizza cutter, which is convenient to open the new iMac, so we entered the pizza cutting business,” says Weins. We also make suckers, which I really didn’t expect - they are needed for opening iPhones. Apple and I have been butting for a long time. This company solves problems by ignoring people. ”

After publishing the article, Apple responded to one of my three inquiries: “We are not discussing the company's future plans and disclosing information about the profits received from repairs. All relevant information about authorized repair shops is available on locate.apple.com. ”The

cold war between Apple and iFixit has been warming up recently, Apple has removed the iFixit application from the App Store for breach of contract, because Apple sent iFixit new Apple TV, and iFixit by his habit of taking it apart.

It is also worth noting the interesting changes between the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 6. 5S is especially dangerous to repair - the wire from the Home button to the motherboard is very easy to tear off when you open the phone (it happened to me). And for security reasons, breaking this wire causes TouchID to fail on the device. Forever and ever. On the 6th iPhone, this wire was shifted differently so that it does not interfere, and it was not so easy to tear it.



“Apple makes more than a billion a year on repairing iPhones, so they can afford to instruct Jonathan Yves to make an iPhone more maintainable,” says Weins. “Such changes require time and careful thought, and they are expensive - all in order to make the device more repairable.”

After a flurry of criticism from Wines and the media, due to the fact that the MacBook Pro Retina uses too much glue to mount the battery, Apple switched to more convenient stripping strips that secure the battery to the iPad Pro. The change seems to be small, but it is not. Apple has lost its “ecological” status in EPEAT, an organization under the wing of the environmental protection agency, because the MacBook Pro Retina with glued batteries could not be recycled. Leaving batteries in devices often leads to fire.

“The guys from Apple armed themselves with a sledgehammer and a crowbar, and pulled out their battery,” says Weins. Apple got its certificate back and switched to adhesive strips. Thus, we have already won a great deal - using environmental concern as arguments. ”

“I sat at meetings with their lobbyists,” he adds. “They get paid for opposing anything that can limit their designers.”

iFixit recently announced that, instead of Apple, it will supply bulk parts of spare parts to repair shops, and has launched a certification program for workshops through passing the test online. But more importantly, iFixit makes it clear to those brave ones that they dare to open their devices - they are not alone. Most repair instructions are written by site users. DIY on the forums are constantly discussing hacks, modifications and other tricks to facilitate the repair of devices.

“We want to teach everyone how to fix everything,” says Vines. “Without the help of the community, we cannot do this.”

***


My MacBook is in the process of repairing

I was busy with my MacBook before dawn. The screen clicked strangely when I opened and closed it, but all the small cables were stuck in place. I pressed the power button - and he earned.

For me, as a person who has avoided manual labor all his life, be he rude or exact, this feeling was unexpected and unusual. I repaired something myself. To some extent, I had the feeling that I was going against the system. But mostly I was just proud of myself.

“When you open an electronic device for the first time, it stops being a magic box, and you see that it’s just a bunch of parts put together,” says Weins. - Plumber is not necessarily better than me versed in plumbing, he just works faster and he is more familiar. So with many other things. ”

At home in California he repairs garden sprinklers, chairs, toilets, and everything that breaks. Replaced the clutch on his pickup, tried to assemble a disassembled chainsaw, and got a scolding from the manufacturer of a folding knife when he tried to replace the spring in it. But most of all he is afraid of replacing the lightning on his jacket (“A story for the whole day, and most likely with an unlucky end”).

The Bible Repairmen - Shop Class as Soulcraft [“Repair courses as a discipline for the soul”] authored by Matthew Crawford [2010]. The author writes about how he quit his well-paid job as an office analyst and started repairing motorcycles - and got more pleasure and intellectual incentives from this work.

“The disappearance of tools from the curriculum is the first step towards total ignorance in the world of artifacts we inhabit,” writes Crawford. “The engineering culture that has emerged in recent years, in which an object must hide its internal structure, leads to the fact that we do not know how to study the many things we use.”



Such thoughts arise from all who work in the company. When they moved to their current location in an office that previously belonged to car dealers, employees spent several weeks reworking it.

“We specifically left the repair unfinished. On Saturdays we attached wooden boards we bought. The tool development team sits over there, in freight containers. “They took plasma cutters, cut out the doors there and put them on the sliding mechanisms,” said Scott Dingle, who has been with the company for four years. “If we could build this building ourselves, we would do it - this is our mentality.”

“This is a self-made group, everyone likes to build something and modify it on their own,” says Jake Devincenzi, a former iFixit employee who now works at an electronics processing company. “If Kyle’s wishes were fulfilled, we would live in complete harmony.”

And this is not a question of opposition from Apple or any other company. And it's not just about the struggle to preserve the environment. Repair things nice. It is not surprising that I once found the company's staff and other repairmen drinking beer and whiskey surrounded by microscopes late at night after the conference.

The iPhone and iPad spares the table and the floor. Someone was showing the phone’s own back panel. Jessa Jones repaired the iPad's backlighting and told everyone what each component was for. Weins and colleagues discussed fiction, decided which pizza to order, and showed off their latest renovations. Beer was run several times.

At some point, Wines poured himself a warm whiskey. Then he grabbed the freezing cylinder (it is used to search for superheated chips on the boards), put it in his temples and sprayed it. Spray spread everywhere, but the drink cooled.

Then I realized that Vines, in fact, devotes a lot of time to the struggle for his company not to become needed. I asked what would happen if Apple and other manufacturers decide to start teaching people how to fix devices and offer official parts. “IFixit is a hack. Manufacturers must do this. I would love to do something else. ”

But I still did not believe him.