- iFixit and Samsung are ending their partnership on a direct-to-consumer phone repair program.
- iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens says “Samsung does not seem interested in enabling repair at scale” and that the deal is not working due to high parts prices and difficulty of repairs.
- Samsung only ships batteries pre-glued to the phone screen, forcing customers to pay over $160 even for just a battery replacement, unlike with other vendors.
- The contract also limited iFixit to selling no more than 7 parts per customer in a 3-month period, hampering their ability to support local repair shops.
- Additionally, Samsung required iFixit to share customer email addresses and purchase history, which iFixit does not do with other partners.
- iFixit says it will continue to stock aftermarket Samsung parts and publish repair guides, but will no longer work directly with Samsung on official repair manuals.
iFixit says:
We clearly didn’t learn our lesson the first time, and let them convince us they were serious about embracing repair.
We tried to make this work. Gosh, we tried. But with such divergent priorities, we’re no longer able to proceed.
Yeah there’s only one place to buy genuine apple parts, and when you get to that site, it feels sketchy, and I think that’s intentional
https://selfservicerepair.com/home
It feels like a pop up alibaba shop, but that is truly the only place to legally buy genuine Apple OEM parts
Yeah, this site is basically a way to remain compliant with right to repair laws. It’s not actually supposed to be a good experience.
I’d be shocked if any real UX designers even worked in that thing. It looks like it was designed by Lemmy’s creator.
It probably had real UX designers, but their goal was to make it bad enough that nobody wants to use it without actually breaking the site.