The biggest problems at Apple at the moment

Planned obsolescence

Those are the two screws holding iPhone 6 and beyond’s screens down.

They’re not simple screws. Not the type that you can easily find the screwdriver to in your dad’s toolbox. It’s a Pentalobe screw. In order to get it out, and if you do, which often means you are trying to fix it anyway, you pay an extra $15 for all the equipment.

So if you have a cracked screen, be prepared to pay $25 and do it yourself, with plenty of risks in the process.

Not everyone would want to do it. And not everyone has the guts to. So they do exactly what Apple expect them to do: buy a brand new iPhone or pay $99 for an overpriced repair service.

And that is planned obsolescence.

Apple is purposely making their products harder and harder to repair or upgrade, while upping the service price at an exponential rate for the dirty practice of making money. This almost never happened during the era of Steve Jobs.

You need more examples?

That’s a cracked iPhone X glass back. It’s extremely difficult for an inexperienced individual to fix it themselves, and guess how much do they charge you for repairs?

Since the glass back counts as part of the unlisted issues, that accounts for $549. They are charging you more than half the money you paid for the phone.

Another example is the Mac:

This is what the inside of the 12” MacBook, the thinnest MacBook in the lineup, looks like. All of that black is battery. The entire motherboard can be seen here:

It’s that tiny. It’s so tiny you’ll need lots of luck to actually change anything about it yourself.

Want more RAM? Nope.

More storage? Nope.

Meanwhile, during the Steve Jobs era, Macs looked like this:

This is a 2011 MacBook Pro.

Everything inside was easily removable back then.

• That gray thingy on the left downward side of this picture is a hard disk drive. With simply a few screws, you can take that thing out and put something faster and better inside.
• The object right above it is an optical drive. For the golden age of DVDs. However, if you take that out, you can install another storage drive, too.
• With a few screw turns, you can take the battery out if it has lived past its usefulness. It’s the long section to the right of the hard disk drive.
• The blue section right above the battery is a RAM slot. That’s right. You can get 8 GB of RAM in there if you are up for it, all with a simple push into place.

All of the above would have cost you, with not too much effort and risk, about $200 for the parts.

MacBooks today undergoing the same upgrades would cost you more than the machine itself.