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Customer Rights

I had the misfortune of dealing with my internet provider recently after an outage at home. It took most of my work day to get some semblance of help from them and it was wasted time in the end. We were left to our own devices to solve the problem which we did. At some point one customer service rep recommended I go their official retailer and pick up new equipment that they can provision online. And so I did. Turns out the official retailer has exactly the same level of customer support as I do. Instead of me calling from home and wasting my day, I could sit across the desk from a guy wearing company tee-shirt doing exactly that with no guarantee of success. 

I was dumbfounded by such business model - there was no way for this shop to be successful given the conditions. Reading this Vice story about Apple making iPhones just about impossible for outside repair shops to fix broken screens reminded me of my nightmarish customer experience with the internet provider who I cannot dump because my only other option is significantly worse. 

The right-to-repair is more popular than ever. The FTC has adopted a right-to-repair platform, the Department of Commerce said we need fewer repair restrictions, and President Biden signed a sweeping executive order aimed at making it easier for people to fix their own stuff. Companies like Apple and John Deere don’t want people to fix their own stuff, they want to operate repair monopolies that make it expensive and difficult for people to fix their devices when they break. The iPhone 13 issue is just Apple’s latest attack in its long war with the right-to-repair.

I would never use face-id to begin with so if fixing a broken screen meant that it would never work again, that would be totally acceptable but people are different. For some that is exactly the feature they are paying for and if it no longer works they would rightfully be upset.

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