Apple begins selling repair kits to consumers

DIY apple repair?

Apple today announced it has launched its self-service repair program for the iPhone. Announced late last year, the program will

let iPhone 12, iPhone 13, and third-generation iPhone SE users conduct certain repairs at home in the United States, with plans to launch in Europe later this year.

Apple says that genuine repair manuals and Apple parts and tools will be available in a new Self Service Repair Store. In the store, customers will have access to over 200 individual parts and tools. At first, the store will include tools only for the ‌iPhone 12‌ and ‌iPhone 13‌ lineups and the third-generation ‌iPhone SE‌. Apple says it plans to expand the store with tools, manuals, and parts for Macs with Apple silicon chips later this year.

The repair guides are just long PDFs for each device that Apple presumably distributes to its technicians, rather than interactive manuals or videos. This is basically what people have been asking for for years, though—the right to repair movement has simply asked to be provided with the same guides that Apple gives its own employees. We haven’t had time yet to compare these directly to the third-party guides put together by iFixit, but surely DIY repair geeks will spend the next few days looking for differences between Apple’s “official” method and the ways the broader repair community has already learned to fix iPhones. 

It’s not all great news, however. As we’ve pointed out before, these corporate-led repair initiatives are not a replacement for right to repair legislation. Apple is voluntarily offering this program and is still setting the terms for which repairs it is willing to sanction and which parts it is willing to sell. It is still “pairing” parts to devices, as iFixit points out in its own blog. This means that consumers need to input their phone’s IMEI number at checkout, and need to use an over-the-air software authentication to validate the part after they’ve done a repair before it will actually work with their phone.