Apple Still Sucks On Right To Repair
Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company's ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company's efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can't be refurbished and re-used).
That's before you get to Apple's often comical attacks on right to repair" legislation, a push that only sprung up after companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, John Deere, and others created a global grass-roots coalition of activists and reformers via their clumsy attempts to monopolize repair.
While Apple has made some concessions to try and pre-empt right to repair legislation, there's clearly still a long way to go. John Bumstead, a MacBook refurbisher and owner of the RDKL INC repair store, recently revealed that used MacBooks retailing for as much as $3,000 are being scrapped for parts because recyclers are prevented from logging into the devices.
Bumstead told Motherboard the culprit is Apple's T2 security chip, which prevents anyone but the original owner from logging into the laptops. He also stated that despite Apple's promises on right to repair reform, the problem has gotten notably worse over the last few years. As a result, a countless number of costly 2018/2019 era Macbooks can't be completely repurposed:
The progression has been, first you had certifications with unrealistic data destruction requirements, and that caused recyclers to pull drives from machines and sell without drives, but then as of 2016 the drives were embedded in the boards, so they started pulling boards instead," he said. And now the boards are locked, so they are essentially worthless. You can't even boot locked 2018+ MacBooks to an external device because by default the MacBook security app disables external booting."
Experts state that Apple could make this all go away by building more convenient unlocking systems for independent repair shops, but then Apple might sell fewer new laptops - and threaten its own lucrative repair monopoly - and you wouldn't want that.