Apple’s Self Service Repair Now Available in the U.S. ⇥ apple.com
Apple today announced Self Service Repair is now available, providing repair manuals and genuine Apple parts and tools through the Apple Self Service Repair Store. Self Service Repair is available in the US and will expand to additional countries — beginning in Europe — later this year.
The store is, as internally acknowledged, operated by a third party, and it looks a little janky and pretty generic. Services are apparently being provided by a company formed in December called Service Parts or Tools, Inc., which shares its address with CTDI, a device refurbishing and repair logistics company. The site is built on a template that would normally use the system font, except its developers have overridden that so it uses Roboto instead. I wonder if that drives anyone at Apple nuts.
At the very least, it is about time we get access to official publicly available repair manuals for recent Apple products. And there are some surprises in those manuals. For example, each product’s manual has a different code you need to enter when ordering parts. Please, no brown M&Ms.
The separate website without “Apple” in the domain name, the cheap-looking presentation, and the specialized tools available to rent for a week at $49 all create enough hurdles so that only the most dedicated customers will attempt these repairs. I think this is an acceptable way of having people self-select whether they feel comfortable replacing parts.