The Vergecast - Tearing down the iPhone 12 with iFixit

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

The Verge's Dieter Bohn talks with iFixit's Kyle Weins and Kay-Kay Clapp about their teardown reviews, the right to repair, and how to fix the Phone 12. We're a finalist for a Discover Podcast Award! Vote here: https://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/5978795/2020-Discover-Pods-Awards-Finalists Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Greetings, mobile accompliceers, and welcome to the last of our run of director's cuts of reviews on the Vergecast. I am Dieter Bone, and I have had so much fun talking to other reviewers this hardware season. And for this episode, I wanted to talk about a different kind of review, hardware teardowns. And so, of course, we brought in Kyle Weans, the CEO of I Fix It, and KKK Clap, who is the director of content for IFixit, to discuss their iPhone 12 tear down, right to repair, and how to build an oops machine. One thing I do want to call out at the top here is that while we were recording, we were waiting to find out if we could get

clarity on a specific repair issue with the iPhone 12. It's this thing where you swap the camera module from one iPhone 12 to an identical iPhone 12, and then it doesn't work unless you're part of Apple's approved repair program. We got a statement from Apple after we recorded this podcast, so I will insert that statement when the time comes at the right point in the podcast. Anyway, it was a really fun conversation, and I learned a lot about how consumer electronics is starting to feel the pressure to make things more repairable and how that could change how products are designed in the future. Kyle Wien's at KKK clap, thank you for coming on the Vergecast. So you may have heard we've been doing these sort of directors cuts podcasts of all the reviews that everybody in the tech media industry has

been doing. And I wanted to bring you two on because, from my perspective, your tear down, of electronics count as reviews to me, but they're just sort of reviewing a different thing. So, I don't know, just to get started with an overview of I-Fix-It, can you talk a little bit about why you do teardowns and what sort of things you're looking for when you start a tear-down? Well, we certainly think of them as a review. The goal is to let people know before they buy the product, whether they're going to be able to fix it or not. The process is going in and saying, okay, if I'm diving into this, of course, every

device is new. With something like an iPhone, we've taken part previous iPhone, so we have a feeling as to what it's going to be like. But we get out our tools, and it is an exploration of how do you open this thing? Like with the Microsoft Duo, how do you open a Duo? Nobody knows. So we had that, you know, you start from fundamentals, and we start and we're guessing. And then we kind of work through kind of a regular set of techniques. But the objective is at the end of it, to have a simple repairability score where people will have an idea, how much is this going to cost me over the life of the product?

Am I going to be able to replace consumables like the battery? How long is it going to last? When you're approaching an iPhone, you know what has worked in the past and maybe you go to that first. But something like the Microsoft Duo, like, what is the first thing that you do? Do you x-ray it? Do you just like, well, let's just like take a plastic pride bar to it and see what happens? Do you just like heat it up and see? Like, what's your first take?

It honestly changes between every device. So the essential phone, we did the teardown simultaneously with our video team and our, we had two teams doing the same teardown and they actually had to have two different ways to get into the phone. So we froze one and then we used heat on the other. So every teardown is kind of a surprise and that's part of the fun of it. It's just a lot of nerds with screwdrivers and alcohol, both kinds, some to dissolve adhesive and a lot more of it to drink. And we just keep at it until we get into the thing. With the duo, we definitely x-rayed it before we opened it because we had no idea. And with phones, in general, it's you go in from the front or the back. Right. And it is not like with the essential phone, it was not obvious. With the duo, it was not obvious. So the x-rays definitely help.

And we don't have an x-ray machine ourselves. So the logistics of actually getting the phone, which of course, every reviewer has to deal with those logistics to some extent. I feel like ours are a little bit more challenging. Like with the iPhone 12, we had, I think, eight or ten. iPhone 12s that we had here that we were disassembling. Wow. Because in order to do these parts compatibility swaps, we have a video team, we have another team, we have to have phones.

The X-ray machine is in San Diego. We're in San Luis Obispo, so we have to get phones to them. It's a logistics process. Well, part of your logistics is you always try to get these teardones up really, really quickly. And I'm really curious, I mean, one, like you famously like sometimes will fly to Australia so that you can be ahead of the date line to get them. I'm curious why it's so important you to do them so early in the release cycle and review cycle of these phones.

Well, part of it is because you already beat us because you had an embargoed device. You had a week with it. So in order to catch up with you on the news cycle, we're not getting review units. We never get review units. We have to go and buy it at retail at 8 a.m. like all the normal people. and then produce a conclusion in the time frame that matters. And in this case, the phone comes out Friday morning. If we don't put out our release until Sunday,

it's almost like people aren't paying attention anymore. Right. Oh, so you genuinely think of it as we need to get this thing up in the time frame where a lot of people are going to purchase it because we want to help inform that purchase decision. We want to inform the purchase decision. And we also want to be part of the reporting on the phone's release, right? If new iPhone is out, should you get one?

Everyone is going to, everyone in the population, is going to form their opinion on that in the first couple days based on the initial reviews, right? Should I buy a duo or not? Whatever reporting is happening now about whether you should buy a duo doesn't really matter. It's the conversation that happened when it came out. So the other interesting thing is that you always give your devices a repairability score. We also give scores at the verge. There's other sites that refuse to give scores to their reviews, and it's actually a really fraught kind of dynamic. And I have many, many opinions. about why we give a thing a score and what it means.

Can you talk a little bit about how you arrive at your score and how you think about that score? Yeah, so a device, we give a device a score based on zero to 10, based on its repairability, and we're really looking for how things can be repaired or refurbished in the field by consumers. So we pay particular attention to screens and batteries because those are the two most common repairs,

whether or not something uses proprietary tools for servicing, which I'm sure Kyle has lots to talk about, proprietary tools and software. And, you know, the types of fasteners and even screws. So Apple famously made their proprietary penelope screw that sits on the outside of the phone. And once you get inside the phone, you see no more penelopes. So those are the types of things that, you know, you might not have a penelope driver sitting in your kitchen drawer. And so you'll lose points for that. Well, I imagine not seeing a penelope driver or screw inside the phone is like a really clear indication that there's no actual technical reason for it.

They're like, oh, this is a better kind of screw to, like, not be stripped or whatever. It literally is just so that they can, like, limit access to getting inside. Absolutely. It's crystal clear that it's purely, they're the limit people. The original iPhones all the way up through the iPhone 4 had philip screws on the outside, and then they switched to pentelope. Right. So that shows that it's a service, profit-driven reason and not a technical reason.

So for us, our score is, it's really subjective. So we look at scores of other phones in the same category. We heavily change it based on price, actually. That actually factors in a big way. But what we don't have is like a rubric. We don't have, all right, battery life, over eight hours plus two points. Processor speed, you know, not quite at the fastest thing, minus 0.5 points or whatever. We really think of it as like an editorial statement about the device.

And it's sort of, it's subjective in the same way that like a headline is subjective. And so a lot of people expect that it's like the score that being a number means it this is an objective measure of a thing that we've come to by like running through a spreadsheet. Do you all do it the same way or do you do you actually like have a spreadsheet? Do you actually have a way like because it's a little bit more objective about whether or not a thing is repairable? So we started out doing it more like you're describing. And over time as it's become more influential in the design process and regulators are looking at using it, it's become much more objective, much more formulaic. France is rolling out a nationwide repairability scoring system for laptops and smartphones January 1st.

And they have an entire system. We've been working with them consulting on the design of the system. But it similarly is a 1 to 10 score. And on the shelf and you go to buy a laptop, it's going to say this is a 7 out of 10 on the index of repairability is what they're calling it. And there is a spreadsheet. And you go through and you fill out, it's a very detailed spreadsheet, but you fill out all the information, how much are parts going to cost, how long are parts available?

the consumers have service manuals, all those kind of factors weigh in and then give you a final score. Now, that said, even though it's a formula, it needs to evolve over time. And the conversation that we're having today is how much do software locks impact the score? Because traditionally, we have not factored that in. Right. So, I mean, this leads us right into the iPhone 12, doesn't it? So you did the tear down. Keket, you were doing a live stream of the tear down.

Can you talk a little bit about what the experience of tearing down a brand new thing, you're still figuring out how to do it, and what it's like to just, be live on the internet doing a review of a phone or a teardown of a phone. Because I don't go live on the internet on video very often and doing it in a context where I'm actually like judging a thing seems terrifying to me. Yeah, it actually is terrifying. The internet can be a scary place. So one of the reasons we started doing live streams on iPhone tear down day is because

we didn't travel to Australia this year. And we still wanted people to get a first look at what we were seeing. But a lot of people, you know, when they see I Fix It Tear Down, they expect to see the full analysis. And we don't have that yet. You're kind of, I wanted to brand it, I Fix It Uncasings to riff off of Unboggings, how cheeky of me. But it is terrifying, especially for Taylor-like or whoever's doing hands on the disassembly, you might not know what bits are in there. There was a standoff bit that we didn't know we were going to find. So we struggled a little bit to get the battery out.

And so I think it's fun for people to see it. but it's definitely a little nerve-wracking. Kelsey and I did a live stream, I think, of a Samsung device. And it took us 30 minutes to just open the phone. And I was just trying to fill space with 30 minutes. Which is not the most entertaining content. Yeah, I can't talk for that long. And especially in 2020, I don't have, like, go-to topics of, like, what movie did you go see?

Yeah. You're not seeing any movies. Cool. As we're recording this on Friday, this podcast is going on Tuesday, there's currently, like, two, I don't know, live grenades, live footballs with the iPhone 12 specifically. But before we quite get to those, during that initial tear-down, was there anything interesting or new that you learned about how this device is built or the repairability of it that was like the first thing you noticed when you, like,

got into this phone? Well, generally, they cram 3G in there. We all wish it was 3G. That would have been better. They cram 5G in there. And it's really shoved into all the nicks and crannies. They're paying their, pound of flesh to Broadcom for the expensive chipsets,

and the antennas are crammed in here all over the place. So they rolled back a number of innovations that we had seen in the iPhone 10 and 11 to make room for 5G. The battery isn't this super cool L-shaped battery that was probably a more expensive process. They went back to a smaller battery. So this feels like one step forwards, one step backwards in some respects in terms of the internal design. It is more complex.

I think the thing that surprised me the most was just the law. board, it grew in size by a lot. Like, Apple's thing has just been to miniaturize their logic board throughout the years. I think it was the iPhone 10 when Kyle was in Australia. Like, that was an engineering marvel to look at how they just shoved everything in there and stacked that logic board. And so to see just like a complete internal redesign of all the components to fit 5G, I don't know.

That was just weird. It's just like Kyle said, they totally went backwards on everything they usually do for Apple. The thing about iPhones in particular is there's specs that Apple wants to talk about and there's specs that they don't share that other phone manufacturers always do talk about. So for me, the big two are like the battery size and the RAM. And so one of the reasons I'm always excited to see your teardowns is it confirms things that I, you know, don't know if I can necessarily trust like, you know, various software diagnostic tools for those specs specifically. And actually, I'm sorry, I'm so obsessed with this. Can you, can we just talk a little bit about how we discuss battery sizes? the way manufacturers do it and the way that I tend to do it is to talk in terms of

millie amps because that's what people seem to understand. It's become the convention and it's easier for us to compare. But you all talk about batteries a little bit more like, I don't know, carefully, right? Well, you've got, you've got voltage, you've got watt hours and you've got, you've got millie amps. And, I mean, it was a straightforward formula for converting between them, but you need to know. And the voltage that the battery is running at matters. And in this case, we were actually anticipating a higher power density on the battery. A big part of it, you know, figuring out what the capacity they can get is looking at the actual volume, the amount of cubic area that the battery takes.

And the new iPhone is a lower power density than Samsung has on their new phones. So that goes to maybe some of the cost factors. Okay, so we should finally get to some of the drama around the iPhone 12. It's really fascinating that they had to step back in their logic board design for 5G. I think that's a really common thing with new radios. Anytime you have a new technology, it's going to increase complexity. It's going to increase the number of discrete chips on the board. It's going to take more space.

It's going to take more power. And then over time, they will miniaturize it. I think there's a combination on Apple's side, there's a combination of wanting to miniaturize it so that they can get a bigger battery, but also wanting to build their own so they don't have to pay Qualcomm exorbitant fee per phone. Right, which is coming because they bought Intel. But for now, they're still using Qualcomm's modems, yeah. So the two things that are sort of going on right now with the iPhone 12 is the first is there's apparently a new heated display removal fixture that Apple is distributing.

What is the story with this thing? Well, so Samsung distributes these to their service centers. And opening a Samsung is much harder. And so it's this heated suction cup fixture thing. And it's very expensive. And they only sell it to their authorized service network. So this is sort of an extension of something like a pentelope where you have a proper. priority tool that you need to work on the phone that the manufacturer doesn't make available.

What we do when we develop our repair manuals is try to find a way to fix the phone with more affordable tools so that it's accessible to you know, you and me because most people aren't out there, you know, buying some, you know, expensive fixture. What Apple has said, so in the, with the iPhone 12, in the information that they're providing to their independent authorized service network and the Apple stores is that you need a heated fixture that evenly apply heat all the way around. before you open it. And actually to reseal it is really where it's more important. We did not notice a substantial difference in the opening procedure when we opened it. So there's always kind of questions. When you're manufacturing a phone, you manufacture it to a

certain standard. When you're doing a repair, do you need to get back to exactly that standard? Or if you don't cure the adhesive for at the right temperature, how important is that in a repair where a phone is already older? Those are some of the debates that we have. Right. And one interesting thing about your audience, actually is you are producing content. There's a whole, if you aren't aware, IFIX it has a whole wiki section of like tear down instructions and repairability instructions for a whole bunch of stuff

because companies aren't making manuals. But you are addressing two audiences. There's the audience of me at home. I want to fix my iPhone myself, but there's also the audience of repair shops. And like that also gets really complicated because there's authorized repair shops and then there's just, you know, more independent,

you know, guys with a shop. Can you talk a little bit about how that's changed? They know Apple has been, they've had an evolving relationship, shall we say, with independent repair shops. They always have. Even within the authorized community, even within the Apple community, if you talk with an Apple genius and you say, do you use the internal information that Apple gives you or do you use I fix it? What they tell me is it's about half and half. They use I fix it some of the time. They use Apple some of the time.

Our goal is to be better than them. It's to be more comprehensive, more detailed, easier to follow, more precise. Sometimes when the product first comes out, there's things that we just don't know. But over time, ours gets better. There's tend to be frozen in time. They write it before the device comes out where ours, it's a wiki, it's constantly getting better. So our iPhone manual three years in should be dramatically better than it was on day one. And so, yeah, we train the independence.

We train Apple. We train consumers. Apple has been expanding, I mean, they've rolled out an option for independent shops to sign up to get access to their fancy proprietary tools and their part supply chain. That program is not very popular. And it's not very popular because their parts are kind of exorbitantly expensive and because Apple's requiring the repair shops to share all of their customer information, including customers after they terminate their relationship with Apple.

Interesting. And as a result of this very onerous contract in NDA, almost no repair shops are signing up for this that aren't so of the big franchises. Which means that when Apple says, you know, you need this fancy software or you need a special tool to work on it, that is basically excluding the entire repair market. Right. In that ecosystem, I fix it, and KK may be here as we speak to this. I fix it sits in a really interesting place because you are producing a bunch of, I don't

know, what I think was just like content, right? You've got the teardowns. You're making videos. You've got the wiki guides. You're also a store. You're doing a whole bunch of advocacy for right to repair. So how do you see I fix it as a company as an entity sitting in the middle of, you're middle of, you know, tech media websites like me and blogs and advocacy for legislation and also

you're a store. Like, it's a fascinating company. And I sort of, it's hard to wrap my head around, you know, what you're doing. Yeah, it's one of the reasons I don't choose a title because Kyle believes in hiring T-shaped people that can do everything. Like literally, when you work here, you have to build your desk. That's the first thing you do. You build your desk in your chair. if your computer breaks, there's no IT department. You fix your computer. But in one interview, Kyle said that we're the headquarter for the global repair movement. And I wrote that down because I think that really accurately describes what we're doing.

Because like you said, we do make all of the content and there's a heck ton of it. We have over 65,000 repair guides, which is insane. And we do the tear downs, the videos. But, you know, we fund all of that by manufacturing tools. And so to be able to do, to be able to keep all of our repair guides free, we make part and tools available. We're constantly trying to create relationships with manufacturers so we can have OEM parts for sale.

But, you know, we sell a lot of screwdrivers so we can be able to buy all that alcohol to bring you guys those tear downs that you love so much. All right. I've been putting this off a little bit because I was hoping that we might get some clarity while we were recording since we're recording this on Friday. But the other thing that's happening

with the iPhone 12 as a recording is it looks like Apple has done something to the camera module specifically, where it makes it harder to replace the camera module. Can you explain sort of what's going on with this camera module thing? Sure. Yeah, so when we do our first teardown,

we are on day one, this is on Friday. We open it up, we're looking at mechanically, how do we get in? And the rating that we provide is generally based on just like how easy is it to open, how can we get the components. We did some light compatibility testing where we took two different iPhones.

and we swapped the batteries between them to see if they'd work. We took a 12 battery and put it in an 11 to see if it would work, that kind of thing. Just to get a feeling of how they design the phone, what their supply chain is going to look like. But we don't extensively go and swap every single component. After we published our Teradata, Hugh Jeffries in Australia, popular YouTuber did some more extensive testing, and he started swapping more components, and he took the camera out of one iPhone 12, put it in another, and it didn't work. Or it worked, but in a very glitchy way.

That was sort of eye-opened to us, and then we got leaked a document from Apple's internal service saying that in order to repair the camera, the official way, you have to have Apple software to pair the camera to the phone. Interesting. So some part of the iPhone, maybe it's their secure enclave, maybe it's just like the logic board or something, needs to identify the specific camera part, and Apple needs to approve that pairing through some sort of cloud process in order for the camera to actually work. Is that right? It's possible. That's how it works. That's how the touch ID sensor works. It's also possible that there's just like a calibration procedure.

There may be like very precise signal timing. And you have to sort of put the phone into, you know, sort of like pairing mode and say, hey, listen to the signal timing and sort of sync up precisely with the camera. So it's the kind of thing that you do at the factory, right? You hook everything up the factory and then they've got tooling that. And this is how TrueTum works. So this has been a challenge. Like every LCD or LED that you make is going to have slightly different performance characteristics.

And so the way that Truetone works is at the factory, after they make every screen, they tune it a little bit for that specific phone and then they write that configuration to the phone and that way you get more consistent color. It's possible they're doing something like that with the camera. So there's nothing wrong with that kind of pairing procedure. The problem is when you have a process like that and then you don't make that tool available to the owner of the phone, now all of a sudden we're in a situation where I've got this iPhone 12, we swapped the camera. You can see

this one camera, it's working fine. And then if I go over into portrait mode, to switch to the other camera, it just crash the whole phone app. Yeah. Wow. Or a camera app. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, everybody, Dieter here. Obviously, I'm breaking in in the middle of this.

We recorded this episode on Friday. Today is Sunday. And right after we finished recording this episode, we got a statement from Apple when we asked about this camera swap issue. Now, this statement does not actually directly address the question that we asked. However, you might be able to read between the lines if you wanted to do so.

Here is Apple's comment just so that you've got it. Quote, we are committed to giving our customers more options and locations for safe and reliable repairs. Our new independent repair provider program is designed to give repair businesses of all sizes access to genuine parts, training, and tools needed to perform the most common iPhone repairs. These service providers have access to the same tools and repair manuals used by Apple and Apple authorized service providers, end quote. I'll note that you need to be an authorized service provider in order to get access to that information and tools, but I'm just going to note that. All right, back to the show. So one of the interesting things that happens with your teardowns and, like, my review of the thing,

is you start to see that these iPhones are just computers and the way the parts work. So one of the big features of the iPhone 12 camera is that they can do portrait mode, in the dark, they also, like, they're doing more of their sweater mode, their deep fusion stuff. And so the camera is taking more advantage of their new processor and more parts of their processor in a much more integrated way than it did before. So if you wanted to make a completely aboveboard explanation of why this camera swap doesn't work, that actually makes a lot of sense that it needs to calibrate. But to me, the problem is that we don't actually know, is it because it's an issue.

whether they need to calibrate it, is there some other good technical reason for it, or are they just trying to somehow limit repairability because they don't like the idea of these camera swaps happening? Right. And this is the question. People always ask me, well, is this planned obsolescence? And the answer is, I don't know because I wasn't in the room when they were deciding it. Right.

So if we were in the room and we knew why they were doing this and they said, oh, yeah, the reason is that we don't want people doing battery swaps or camera swaps. And so, you know, we anticipate that if a phone, like someone's using it on a motorcycle and it wears out the image stabilization, then that's the end of life for the phone. And that's our plan. And we want to do that so that people will buy more phones. Okay, that's planned obsolescence. But if it was a design accident or oversight, then, but the practical impact at the end of the day is premature obsolescence, whether it was planned or not. Right.

Yeah. I mean, this is, when people rail against big tech, I always find that. there's actually two conversations to have, and there's the actual impact of it, and then there's, is there a nefarious plan? And if you can find the nefarious plan, then great, you got them. But often there's just not a nefarious plan. There just ends up being nefarious effects from a bunch of decisions internally that are actually very reasonable, but the end result is that it's difficult. I think touch ID is actually an interesting example of this. So there's a pairing that has to happen there to their secure enclave in the way that they've built

the security model on the iPhone depends on that hardware trusting each other. And so replacing that module or face ID is a little bit more difficult, right? Yeah, but Apple stores do it, and we can get the parts. So it's, again, it's just there's a factory pairing process. Right. And I would say, just like Facebook that do something, it may be very well-intentioned, but as a consequence, they accidentally break democracy. What Apple is doing here is accidentally breaking the entire recycling stream

for our electronic products. If you look at the electronics recycling world, the recyclers all make money by reusing, reselling, repairing devices. They only make a very small amount of money from the copper and gold that they can get out. Like an iPhone, if I shred this and I melt it down, it's worth about 25 cents. It's very hard to pay someone to disassemble this safely and dispose of everything for 25 cents. So they make money off of, hey, let me harvest the cameras out of this one, and then I'll sell that as a repair part. It's also worth noting that recyclers have to get the battery out to be able to recycle this device properly. Kyle and I have spent a lot of time in recycling facilities.

And if you think about something like an AirPod, we had to literally tremble the battery out. And so what ends up happening is a lot of batteries end up in the shredder. And batteries are like the leading cause of fires in recycling facilities. And recyclers use, I fix it to be able to disassemble their devices so they can safely recycle things. So I don't think manufacturers are thinking about recyclers when they're designing their products. Speaking of batteries, whenever there's a new phone or a new thing for me to review,

I have emotions about certain components. So I have strong feelings about USBC. I have strong feelings about the headphone jack, although I've kind of lost that battle, unless, except for inexpensive phones for some reason. I've got my headphone jack here. I have equally strong feelings. I was going to say you can pry my pixel 4A out of my dead, cold dead hands. It is funny that the phone manufacturers have decided that low-cost phones get headphone jacks and more expensive phones don't. I imagine you all have many, many feelings and opinions about pull tabs on batteries. Just like pull tabs I have known. How have those evolved over time? Well, in general, pull tabs are better than the alternative, which is like the way that the MacBook Pro is designed,

where you've got five very flat battery cells that are glued down with excessive amounts of glue, and it's very challenging. You have to heat and pry and use solvents to remove it. So we prefer pull tabs over just straight-up adhesive. Now, there are, you know, there are some challenges around them. They age. Like, I mean, you need to replace the battery every, say, two years. You also need to replace those adhesive pull tabs every two years, or they get brittle and then they break. So there are two companies that make these things. We can get very nerdy. We spend time, like, we hang out with adhesive engineers. We have the TISA and the 3M sales reps here teaching us how they put these things together. And so the two companies make almost all the tape in the world.

And it's Tisa, German company, and 3M, of course, the American giant behind Post-Itts. And these adhesive strips on iPhone battery, if you haven't seen them, they're like a command strip that you can buy at Home Depot, where it's adhesive. You stick to the wall, and there's a little pole strip. You pull the pole strip. It comes off, and it doesn't leave any residue behind. It's pretty cool. Are there any other parts inside the phone that are like, oh, yes, I see a pull strip. You look inside like, oh, yes, I see a Phillips screw.

Is there anything that, like, oh, you're really happy to see it when you open one of these? things up. Yeah, I mean, we definitely like it when they don't use a billion different screws. I actually think finding the right bit is one of the hardest parts of repair. If you've never opened an iPhone before, the screws are teeny tiny and they're really hard to keep organized and you need really good light to be able to actually see what you're working on. So it's just hilarious that you can open an iPhone and they use like 17 different types of screw types. We already talked about the penelope. The penelope is actually an inferior screw. We got really nerdy and I made the team. write an entire series about the history of different bits.

And the penelope just isn't great. It's shallow. It drips easily. And so we definitely like seeing lots of the same screws. And whenever possible, less adhesive, I think we all missed the days where we could just pop the battery back out. But one thing we didn't mention, the stretch release adhesive, it doesn't leave the sticky residue.

So if that's great, I did a video on pulling out the battery in a MacBook retina pro. and that was like the most horrible experience. They left 200 swear words in there and they just bleep me out because it took me two hours and like all of my muscle to like literally pry it out as hard as I could. Repairing an iPad is the same. If you have an iPad with a cracked screen, you have to pry each little shattered piece of glass off of the adhesive and it can take an hour to very carefully remove the old adhesive so that you can then get ready to glue it on again.

Okay, one last thing before you take a break. You are evolving your teardowns all the time. always introducing new things. And please tell me about the oops machine. If people haven't seen this, they built a rig with a giant wheel that runs a phone through a series of challenges. It's amazing.

Like, how did you come up with this? What do you think it does? So, you know, tear downs, it's funny. We actually call tear downs are Super Bowl, which makes no sense because nobody here watches the sports ball. But we always try to do like some sort of fun thing on tear down day.

And this year, Apple had said that the phone was oops proof. So we wanted to just have a little fun with it. And actually two of our retired Tared-on engineers built that for us in their garage and brought it over. But we always try to do, like last year we had a beer tube because Apple said that they tested their IP rating in beer. And so literally one of our engineers was like, we should build a beer tube. And I said yes. And Kyle still pays me to work here for building oops machines in beer. beer tubes. And so we always just try to have a little fun with it. And I was actually really surprised.

So the phone went through the entire thing. We tested it with another phone that we didn't apply adhesive to and we sealed it back up and it did get water damage. So it definitely, you know, was effective at killing a phone. But the iPhone 12 did really well. It barely had any dents at the top of it once it went through all the sand and the hammers and the heat machine. I didn't get to light anything on fire. Unfortunately, I'm not supposed to put things on fire in the building, so that'll have to wait for next time. Well, this is a great place to take a break. We should do that and then come back and talk a little bit about right to repair.

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That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication. And when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can be getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write,

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In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. So we're back. One of the other things that I Fixit does a lot of is advocacy, and specifically for this right-to-repair movement. I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast, you kind of know vaguely what we're talking about. But what's happening now is there's a bunch of legislation happening in a bunch of different regions.

Kahn mentioned that there's some stuff going on in France that's actually getting enacted. But here in the U.S., it seems like right now the biggest fight is in Massachusetts. What's going on over there? Oh, Massachusetts is fascinating. This is about cars. So all the new cars have wireless transmission. They got cell networks. And the Tesla's get updated over the air.

Well, the next wave of this is the car is going to say, hey, I need an oil change, and it'll phone up the dealer and schedule an oil change for you and add it to your calendar. Well, the problem is that that cuts out your neighborhood mechanic. And so question one is a ballot initiative in Massachusetts that says, should the car owner have the right to be able to change who that wireless data goes to so that this information about maintaining your vehicle can go to your neighborhood mechanic and not just the Tesla dealership? Okay. That seems reasonable. What's the problem? The car manufacturers are not excited about this because it was an opportunity for them to monopolize service, right? And over time, as margins have been squeezed on new cars, they make more of the money off of service. So the big car manufacturers have spent over $25 million opposing this seemingly common sense ballot initiative. Yeah. I mean, in our world, we'll talk a lot about consumer tech, but right-to-repaire is actually a much bigger deal. It's coming for cars. It's been a huge problem. with farm equipment. Nilai is getting a generator installed in his house upstate, and, you know, it's part of propane.

It's huge. And it comes with a service contract and a mandatory internet connection so they could do stuff. How do you feel about this general trend? Because there are genuine benefits to having my big honkin machine connected to the internet because they can learn stuff about that. But it also can cause these lockdowns. You know, I started I fixed it five and a half years ago. And the narrative around right to repair has really changed.

there are a few things that I can kind of point to that really put it on the map. I mean, more and more, we're shoving a chip in anything that we can literally shove a chip into. But you had mentioned farmers, and I think they're super interesting because if you think about a farmer, farmers are very used to living off of the land, being independent, and now their tractors are run with all sorts of chips and sensors that they are not being allowed to fix themselves. So instead of a farmer being able to fix his tractor, they now have to call John Deere, and wait for a technician to come out to their farm and sometimes literally just reset a sensor.

And as you can imagine, like, we go, or we, not me, but people go to the Apple store and they drop off their phone and people hate being phoneless for a day. Imagine a farmer not being able to use this tractor for a couple of days. Like, that is absolutely unacceptable. That affects their bottom line and their livelihood. And so, yeah, right to repair is really far-reaching. And I am so happy to get the support of farmers

because, like, that was unanticipated, and they really, really helped to move this forward. And we keep learning. It impacts different industries. So fundamentally, the question is one of control and property rights. And that impacts every type of product out there. So whether it's a piece of farm equipment, an iPhone or a ventilator, the manufacturers want control. And with ventilators, they want to take control away from hospitals. Apple wants to take control away from you with your phone. John Deere wants to take control away from farmers. And so this really is the property rights battle of the 21st. century. Who is going to own our things a decade from now, two decades from now? That battle is being

fought right now. And we're really at like a sad, scary point. At the beginning of quarantine, Kyle pivoted my entire team for three months to build the world's largest medical repair database because, as you know, ventilators were in short supply and people couldn't fix them fast enough. Like there are not enough technicians in the world to be able to fix those ventilators at the demand that we needed it for. So we reversed engineered it and rode a bunch of repair guides. And we, you know, scoured the internet for repair guides and put it together for them because they absolutely needed that for saving lives. Are there other places where people might not think about this being such a hot issue? Like farmers, I think came as a surprise to a lot of people that aren't farmers, but it's a huge important problem.

Ventilators, of course. We mentioned cars. It seems like basically any product, any consumable product that has a microchip in it is running into this. As we expand the internet of things, it's going to be everything. So you've got a refrigerator with a touchscreen that Samsung makes refrigerators with touchscreens. They're basically ties and tablets integrated in there. Google rolls out a update to the Google Calendar API. Samsung fails to update the refrigerator.

And now if you want your events to work on your one-year-old smart Samsung refrigerator, you have to jailbreak the fridge in order to apply your own patch to update to Google's latest API. And then you get into it actually it wasn't legal to jailbreaker refrigerator until a few years ago when we got an exemption to the DMCA, Section 1201. And so as we have this sort of broader rights repair fight, it's being fought in over 20 U.S. States. It's being fought in Europe. Well, every three years the Copyright Office reviews what software changes it's legal to make to your product. And that's happening right now as well.

So, I don't know if this is a devil-added, good argument, but with my car in particular, I'm like, this is too complicated. It's gotten too complicated. I'm not going to try and fix it myself. It's one of the reasons I got into biking again during the pandemic is like, I can fix my bike and that makes me feel good. But in general, I could see a lot of people like looking at their phone, looking at their laptop or some other thing and just going, you know, I'm not up to this. But, KK., you've been doing this thing. I think it's called I Am a Genius, where you're like actually trying to encourage people to repair their own stuff because we actually are capable of dealing with this complexity?

Yes, I am that person that you described with your car. I don't think Kyle has ever been more disappointed in me as to when the one time I took my car to the dealer and got an oil change. I've worked with this man for five and a half years and he was so mad at me for just not coming to his house, but I don't want to change my oil. Like, I don't. I feel so much more comfortable under the hood of an iPhone than I do under the hood of a car. 10 out of 10 do a battery replacement versus like I think it's way.

more dangerous to replace the tire in my car. And so, you know, I'm a good example of, yes, you can learn to fix an iPhone. And I think, you know, if I wanted to dedicate the time, I could absolutely learn to fix my car and replace my tire. But that's just not really something I want to do. But for me, rate repair is about having options. I don't want to admit this in front of Kyle, but the dealer actually did over tighten my oil pan. And when I did bring it to a third party, they had me bring it back to the dealer because they wouldn't even touch the assembly on the car. And I was just like, Yeah, now I have publicly admitting this forever to live on air. Well, it's about choice, right?

Yes. Think about Home Depot. What portion, it's great that Home Depot is in our lives. What portion of the population of the United States goes to Home Depot on a regular basis to do repairs in their house? It's not, it's not 50 percent. It might be 10 or 20 percent of people or DIYers. The rest of folks, if they have a problem, they're going to call a plumber, right? That's fine.

That ecosystem, you need the DIYers to sort of create the ecosystem to make. sure that the home depots of the world are there and successful and thriving so that the one time you do need to go in and get something to fix a toilet flap yourself, it's available. Yeah, that's a really good pivot to talking about how industries are responding to a growing awareness that we should be able to repair our own stuff. So have you been seeing big trends in consumer electronics specifically toward they were getting worse, but now they're getting better? So we talked about pull tabs on batteries.

Are there any companies or are there any trends that you're seeing? We're like, oh, wait, no, they're figuring this out a little bit. It is definitely an awareness that's growing. I mean, just look at Apple's recent Environment Report. You wouldn't have seen them talking about the importance of repair even three years ago. And the Environment Report, they're bragging about how they found some iPhones and then redeployed used iPhones internally at Apple, and that's this wonderful environment-saving thing that they're doing. We're seeing it with product trends.

Look at the Microsoft Surface laptop. Yes. That product was the only laptop, I'm aware of ever, that had a battery that was not possible to replace in any way. No authorized service could do it. No one could do it. And so the battery was disposable after the first battery. And Microsoft realized that that was not a good strategy for a product.

And so the new Surface laptop, it went from a zero out of ten repair score to a five out of ten, just dramatic improvement. That was not an accident. The thing about that Microsoft example specifically is this is this is a number of a number, isn't just a bunch of, I don't know, we're not hippies, but a bunch of like rabble-rous right-to-repair, blah, blah. It's like, no, actually, like, big Fortune 500 companies are annoyed when they can't fix the stuff that they're deploying to their own employees, right?

And so it's not just a, like, a principal thing. It's an actual, it makes the economy, it makes companies run better thing when it's possible to fix this stuff. Absolutely. Especially now. Everyone has become their own IT department. And I can't tell you, like, my whole text message is from friends and family are just like, how do I fix this?

And there are a lot of common things that you can do. And the fact that repair manuals don't ship with our devices anymore, like people now more than ever don't know how things work. And to be able to just do basic troubleshooting, which is why I tell people just like, take a part of phone. Like, just try it. I know you have a phone in your kitchen drawer. You're at home.

You're doing nothing. You could just do it and see how it works. And just like, we need to normalize that there's just a battery, just like, there's a battery in your car, in your watch, and it's not as complicated as we think it is. The other thing, and maybe the surface is a good example of this, if we could bring it back to the iPhone, is there is this perception that there's a trade-off between good design of a nice object and the thing being repairable. So, like, we just reviewed the latest version of the fare phone, and it seems very nice,

but it also is, like, a phone that, like, I'm just, I'm never going to buy it. Do you think that trade-off is real, and how do you think that companies and even consumers should think about that. Well, so let's talk about earbuds. The AirPods, so you've been reviewing these things, what's your take on the quality of the Galaxy Buds compared to the AirPods? Honestly, I love the Galaxy Buds in particular. I prefer noise isolating.

Their Bluetooth is okay. Their battery life is great. So for me, it's like the AirPods have slightly better noise isolation. The pros at least do. But the buds have their own benefits, and I prefer their stack of tradeoffs to the AirPods. stack of tradeoffs, unless I'm, like, trapped in an iPhone ecosystem in which case, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. So this is a product that clearly it's at least at parity, right?

They are both fantastic products. Okay, the AirPods are disposable. They get a zero out of ten. The Galaxy buds are super repairable. They got an eight out of ten. You can swap the battery any time you want. Galaxy beans. And how does that, how does that work?

Like, why are the buds and the beans? I love calling them beans. Why are they so much repairable than the AirPods or the AirPods Pro? It's because Sampson used a gasket, which is how all to do waterproofing, which is how Rolex's work. It's how the Trident Tree technology. And Apple just glued them together. So it's just a radically better way of putting a product together. And so the argument there is like there are ways to design these things where every product has got tradeoffs.

There's always going to be, unless you were spending, I don't know, thousands upon thousands of dollars on something, you're always going to have some kind of tradeoff to it. And so the tradeoffs that you choose could include. being more repairable, and that doesn't actually necessarily, you know, doom the product to being a big, chunky thing. Exactly. And the Surface laptop is a great example of this. Microsoft did not change the exterior industrial design in any way. They didn't go thicker.

They didn't go heavier. And they went from a product that was basically disposable to a product that is moderately repairable, right? They got a five out of ten. And it takes innovation, right? But if you go to a product design and you say, can you make this more repairable? They'll say, absolutely. It just has to be a priority.

And it's got to be something that we as consumers are asking for because the manufacturers are responding to the signals and our reviews and in our purchasing habits. So actually, that's maybe a great place to end up. If I'm a regular consumer and I want to send a signal either, you know, social media or with my money, what are the best ways to send that signal? Do you think to, like, encourage more repairability? Is it that I just, I should never buy a device with a little repairability score, Like that seems like an option, but...

Yeah, we have an internal... So laptops, I will not buy laptops for the staff of I fix it that score lower than five out of ten. And that's just kind of our general rule. We won't buy wireless headsets that have batteries that are not replaceable. So before we go to buy a wireless headset, we just look and see, can we get a battery for it?

If so, great, it's approved. If not, we're not going to buy that. So they're very simple. And usually, if you search around for parts for something, if you can find parts for a product, then there's some way to install that, and that's a pretty good signal. You can also look on our repairability,

charts. I mean, the other thing that underlies this discussion is not just your purchasing decision, but how often you're making that purchasing decision. Because this whole repairability thing is you want to be able to keep your phone for more than a couple years because the best way to recycle phone is not to have to recycle it, right? It's to keep using the one that you currently have, right? Right. It's long-lasting. And there's a software component of that too, right? Apple does a better job of software updates than some other companies do. So that's definitely a factor. Availability, parts of the factor, availability of service information. of factors. So that's why we roll it all up into one score. But these are all things to think about.

Also, buying refurbished and used are really good options. It doesn't have to be a new phone. There are so many great options for buying refurbished and used. And I think you guys just put out an article about that. Yeah, no, we did. I love buying refurbished, actually. It's the first place I look when I need to get something. And then if I can't, I'll buy new. But usually I try to buy something refurbished. Well, where can folks find you to if they want to go look at the stuff you're making. Well, so we're, and I fix it over on Twitter, and you can, you know, hop on our RSS feed and be the hilarious to see any, any new teardons that come out or get on our email list. We're, and when we take apart all kinds of things, we took apart the new OralB,

like fancy toothbrush the other day. So we are interested in all of the gadgets in your lives, not just, not just the iPhone. All right, cool. Well, KK., Kyle, thank you so much for coming on the Vergecast and good luck with your next teardown. Thanks, thanks. My thanks to Kyle and KK. for coming on the show, and also my thanks to you for listening. This has been a really fun run of podcasts. And, you know, one of the key things that drives my writing at The Verge is that I think people are way more tech savvy than most people generally assume. When I hear that, quote, regular people don't care about this or that tech thing, I also remember that regular people are doing deeply technical things on a daily basis that would have blown our minds.

minds a decade ago. Making a TikTok is video production work. Understanding that 5G components are bigger now and that means less room for batteries is interesting on its own, but it's also really important information to know when you're trying to decide if you need to bring that battery pack. And I don't think that information is above anybody's head. Every reviewer and every outlet has a different approach to handling these technical topics. For me, I think the Verge reviews are best when they tell a story, when they help you put some new gadget in a cultural context in addition to just telling you if it's good or bad or whatever. The plot points might be components and design and the characters might be Epps and this metaphor is really corny. But the reality is

that these devices are part of our lives now and we should think of them in that way. It's more honest to think of them that way and it also helps make those buying decisions that you think reviews are for in the first place. Anyway, I know that's a lot, but what I've been going for here in this podcast run is to try and provide a window into how the people who make all of these reviews that you read at the verge and elsewhere, how we all think really deeply and care very much about what we're doing. Hearing people who are good at what they do, talk about how they make the things that they make and why it's important to them will never not be interesting. and I'm really grateful that you took the time to hang out with me to hear all these stories.

And starting next week, you're going to start hearing different kinds of stories about building things in this feed. That's because Nilai Patel is launching a very exciting new podcast called Decoder, where he will talk to the people who are building the products and software that I've been talking to other people about reviewing. And he'll be talking to people who are trying to build new laws for all that stuff, and we're trying to build new companies that will make things that we haven't even thought of yet. You're going to get a few of those Decoder episodes right here in this Vergecast feed, but really what you should do is subscribe to Decoder directly wherever you get your podcast. You know, you can just search for it.

Thank you so much for listening to this short run of director's cuts of reviews. And you know what? Maybe we will bring something like this back in the future, but I want to get some thought to the right structure for these kinds of shows. It would really be helpful if you let me know what worked for you or what didn't work for you My email is still Dieter at theverge.com. You can also just tweet at me at Backlon. Last but absolutely not least, I would like to give a huge thanks to my producer,

Sophie Erickson and Andrew Marino, without whom this show would never have happened. We'll be back Friday with the chat show. Rock and roll.